When in Rome....

....hold your nose to block out the smell of urine. Well, we had some interesting times in Rome. We ended up staying here a bit longer than we originally planned as we decided to skip Ancona which is basically a grimy port town and what a wise move it was as we discovered when we drove through.

We found Rome to be a pretty crazy and very dirty place - perhaps it;s doing it;s best impression of a Roman ruin? It;s quite funny how lots of people drive around in flash cars wearing the lastest fashion but the city is disgusting and run down. I;m not sure what they do with all the tourist dollars but it;s certainly not used to clean the city and make life easy for tourists.

On our first full day we took the bus from the campsite to near the Vatican. I was surprised where we stopped, thinking to myself what a bad neighbourhood the Vatican is in! We started exploring with a walk down the river - and had to make our way over terrible footpaths covered in plenty of urine, crap and rubbish while enjoying the view of all the graffiti and a river no one seems to care about. It seems a real shame as the river seems to have the same potential as Paris and could be quite beautiful but has basically been ignored.

Anyway, we looked around the main monuments which are quite spectacular if you can see them past the other tourists and ignore the people trying to sell you handbags. We had a mad dash back across town to catch the right bus back to our campsite where we enjoyed some local wine from our yoghurt pottles - we had no cups and it was a little better than drinking it out of the bottle, right?

To cut a long story short we didn,t particularly enjoy Rome, we had a few mishaps - including thinking the ATM had kept our 250 euro but charged our account and having to deal with Italian bank staff "come back later" - "come back tomorrow" - Ahhh!

But Rome has some truly amazing history and some beautiful monuments, St Peters and the Sistine Chapel etc are really fantastic. Maybe we;ll tell you about them sometime when we;ve blocked out all the bad memories!