This is truly a case of “Do As The Romans” because we’ve found ourselves in a little town where there is little to zero English spoken. So we are just following along as best we can. We might actually be in Rome, but nowhere near the tourist areas. We’re out at the beach, in a little small municipal area called Ostia. It’s where the Romans go to cool off in the heat of the summer. We’ve been here two days, and have heard only one other English speaking group, and they were Australians at a table near us at dinner last night.
Why two days in Rome? And why a suburb and not downtown where the Italians speak English for the tourists? Well first of all we wanted to break up the trip from Seattle to our first safari stop in Botswana. And second, I wanted to use some of the 400,000+ miles we had accumulated during covid (and fly business class). There was a nice overnight into Dublin on Aer Lingus, and from there a morning hop into Rome.
Ostia is a little beach town south of the airport, and we found a nice little B&B with a very lovely hostess, who, BTW, spoke not a work of English. This is a time when our Google Translate on the phone really came in handy. She helped us get out to the ruins this morning and figure out how to arrange a taxi for a ride back to the airport this afternoon. We spent some time sleeping and trying to stay cool and acclimate to the time zone change and significant temperature increase from the cool Pacific NW. We considered a trip on the train into Rome, but honestly have seen all the sights there before. And one word from our hostess that we did not need a translation for was her description of Rome: Inferno. We have a nice cool sea breeze out here, and in Rome it’s just sweltering.
We checked out life at the beach, but chose not to join the masses (although the Med did look very cool and refreshing). We ate some nice tapas and pizza and had gelato, all good necessities for a first stop in Europe in many years.
This morning we made it out to Ostia Antica, which is a well preserved site from Roman days past. This was the major port for the Roman empire at the end of the Tiber River, and a large thriving city. It was eventually abandoned at the end of the empire and covered in silt from the river, which left the ruins fairly well intact. It’s been dug out and and some parts reconstructed quite nicely. It was a hot walking tour this morning, but we saw most of the site in enough time to use our train ticket back to Ostia Centro before the 100 minutes expired. Now we’re cooling off, packing up, and catching an evening flight into Cairo. We’ll switch to an overnight flight, wake up in Johannesburg, and catch a South African Airlink flight into Kasane. We have three days at a small lodge there to chill out, and start our first real safari on Thursday. Hopefully we’ll see aa few interesting sights in Kasane and get more pictures uploaded.
Pictures Here:
