Pompeii and Vesuvius
Brindisi (I)
My camera stayed stowed for the overnight boat trip from Patras to Brindisi. We slept on the deck outside. Italy seemed so much tidier and lush compared to the parched Peloponnese. Brindisi even had palm trees, our first on this trip.
We next pitched tent outside Pompeii and explored the ruins, very hot. But we were now on a schedule to get back to London for work. Sleeping on the train was cheaper than camping and saved a day so we took overnight trains from Napoli (Naples) to Milano (Milan) and slept on the luggage racks in the corridor, then an early morning train to Brig in Switzerland and pitched tent in a comparatively luxurious campsite that I’d used before in Brig.
Fründenhorn and Oeshinsee (CH)
Fründenhorn glacier
Bern-Lötschberg-Simplon-Bahn loco
We took a train excursion from Brig to Kandersteg so we could hike up the side of the Fründenhorn above the Oeshinsee to visit the glaciers. A hike memorable not only for its Alpine clear air but one of the few places where I’ve dropped and seriously damaged a camera. Chris is wearing the t-shirt he got at the Bruce Springsteen concert we’d enjoyed at Wembley, a couple of weeks before setting off. The Swiss rack-railway trains fascinated me but we picked up our packs and moved on.
Pompidou Centre, Paris (F)
Another overnight train to Paris and leaving our packs at the railway left-luggage office, gave us a morning around Notre-Dame before the Boat-Train to Newhaven and Blighty.
- Athens - Olympia - Kalavita. Inter Rail 81 pt 2
- Kôln - Koblenz - Firenze - Pisa - Sienna - Venezia. Inter-Rail 81 pt 1
- Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band, Wembley Arena - 5th June 1981
RIP Chris C (1959-2018)
I was carrying my Pentax MX 35mm single lens reflex camera with Pentax lenses: a 50mm f.1.4 standard lens, a 28mm f 2.8 wide and my 200mm f4 telephoto. Manual exposure and manual focus. The negative film is KodaColor II, 100 ASA, type 5035, it was the leading brand at the time for tourists. I bought the first ten rolls in London and then purchased locally.
Our naive travel adventure shines through although some negatives are rather the worse for wear despite my protecting the films from the heat. This applies particularly to where I posted the exposed films back to the UK for processing by my usual professional lab, this was to save carrying weight and also get them developed promptly. It seems it would have been better to continue to carry them myself. The developed negatives have been stored since in a domestic environment in Paterson negative files.