We shouldn't have made it this far...

Straight up - I didn't think I was gonna do it until we did it. About halfway up I still didn't think I was gonna do it. But we did it! We summited Mt Vesuvius from sea level!

Not too many photos from me on the way up because I was focusing on not dying but enjoy a selection from the top 200m.

We were nearly thwarted so many times as they really don't expect anyone to hike up.
We set off to hike up under the impression that we could buy a ticket from the gate at the National park as we could not find the legit website (just a million third party ones). Got to the first gate (5km in from getting off our 7am train) and the lady informed us that the mountain was sold out for today. We felt a bit silly and took some time to decide that we would hike as far up as we could without a ticket and then walk around to the busses to come down. However after some broken Italian she let us know we could do most of the mountain for free just not the monetised tourist bit where they bus you in and we made peace with that. So she let us through! After another 3 or so hours we came to another gate and it turns out the lady had led us astray. We found ourselves at another gate with a man saying we needed tickets to get across the top and to the busses 😰. Luckily he took pity on us and radioed his friend to see if anyone hadn't rocked up for their allocated tickets and after a few minutes we had a success! Up to the crater !! The last gate before the crater an old lady made a point of telling us we were "very late for our allocated timeslot" on our tickets and she "really shouldn't let us in" but no one had it in their hearts to turn us away at this point (about 4 hours and 16km of climbing later) and we made it to the crater !! My inner geology student was so so stoked about it and somewhere 15 years ago, 8 year old Alfred is rejoicing. Some dicey bus logistics later we made it home and cooked the largest dinner and had some icy cold showers to recover. A HUGE day.Read more