Travellers’ guide Getting there: a flight to Launceston via Singapore and Melbourne on British Airways/Qantas in October will

Travellers’ guide Getting there: a flight to Launceston via Singapore and Melbourne on British Airways/Qantas in October will cost around £930 through discount agents; it may well prove cheaper to get a flight to Melbourne on, for example, Emirates, and book a separate flight to Tasmania on Virgin Blue ( .au). The agent that sells the ticket to Australia will supply an electronic visa.Where to stay: The four-day/three-night Bay of Fires walk is offered from October to early June each year, and costs £470. The price includes transport from Launceston at the start of the walk and back to Launceston afterwards; a backpack and waterproof jacket if you don’t have your own; overnight accommodation at the beach camp and two nights at the Bay of Fires Lodge, including all meals, park entrance fees and kayak hire Wine and beer are extra. Book on 00 61 3 6331 2006 or visit .au. The website has more information on Tasmania.Tony Wheeler is the founder of Lonely Planet travel guides, and co-author of ‘Walking in Australia’ (£13.99)..

In AD79, little Herculaneum was a pretty coastal resort, overlooking the Gulf of Naples. Unlike the nearby commercial centre of Pompeii – an urban spread covering an area some three times larger – it was a friendly, laid-back kind of place. Home to fishermen and craftspeople, it was also where wealthy Romans had their holiday homes: elegant villas with shady courtyards, fine frescoes and panoramic views out to sea or over the lush vineyards that covered the lower slopes of Mount Vesuvius. About 5,000 people lived there, quietly going about their business. In the space of a few hours, Pompeii had been engulfed in a torrent of lava, ash and white-hot rock. The accompanying stream of toxic gases killed everyone remaining in the town.

Moments later, Herculaneum, too, was destroyed, submerged by a river of boiling mud. In the terrible aftermath of these events, Pliny the Younger – the author of the only eye-witness account of the disaster – described how an eerie darkness descended, “not like that of a moonless or cloudy night, but of a room when it is shut up and the lamp put out”.When daylight finally returned and the sun reappeared, it was “lurid as when an eclipse is in progress. Every object that presented itself to our yet affrighted gaze was changed, covered over with a drift of ashes, as with snow”. For the inhabitants of both places, the outcome was the same Life simply stopped, as though at the stroke of a clock. Parents, children, animals – a whole society was arrested mid-motion in an inanimate frieze of runners who would never reach their place of safety. Inside packed churches, upraised hands stayed locked in prayer as roofs crumpled like eggshells above the heads of the supplicants.Yet, for visitors coming nowadays to the two excavation sites – Herculaneum was first rediscovered around 1710, and Pompeii a few decades later – the stories told by their ruins could hardly be more different. Pompeii seems solemn, white-stoned and (despite the swarms of tourists) somehow vacant.