Our second day of touring Rome was set aside for visiting the Vatican. We would have been grateful for yesterday's scary bus driver but instead we spent nearly half an hour, counting cars, waiting for someone to show up on our 15-minutely route. Never mind, the metro trip was better as being a Saturday, it was less packed and Rebecca was a little less nervous than the day before.

We had decided to take our own route today, but the hundred or so tour guides tried very hard to sell us their tickets to "beat the queue" which was 2 hours long according to them and yet 20 minutes in reality. The queue was very long but it moved quickly, which was good as I was roasting in my jeans worn to meet the strict dress code to enter St Peter's basilica. The square was very clean and surrounded by lots of statues of saints (we think).

Once inside the basilica we collected our jaws from the floor and proceeded to marvel at all the marble and gold which decorates the entire church. We've never seen so many statues in a church and the roof paintings were very ornate. There were a couple of glass coffins with wax models of the deceased popes which creeped us out a bit.

We passed through the grottoes on the way outside and saw a lot more monumental coffins of past popes which were also very elaborate. The advice on the entrance was to sing softly so as not to disturb others - little did they know that even my soft singing is disturbing!

On the way to the entrance to the Vatican museum, we passed some of the famous Swiss guards in their ridiculous outfits / pyjamas. I took the opportunity to get a burning question answered, which has been asked of me several times but I've never been able to give the correct answer. "Is the Pope catholic?" was met with a less than polite reply that I cannot reproduce in written form. Rude Swiss.

Much to our surprise, we had no queue for the Vatican museum which was great as we were expecting a long wait. We hired an audio guide to partly fill the vast gaps in our knowledge. We were amazed at the huge number of statues, paintings and artefacts and how big some of them were. My favourite were the enormous tapestries depicting scenes from the Bible and Rebecca's was the Sistine Chapel but we enjoyed most of the other things too.

The Sistine Chapel holds a special place in the Vatican museum, with no photos allowed inside and clear instructions to be quiet and respectful. By the time we left, we both had the giggles at the chaos inside. The room was packed with people generating a constant buzz punctuated every three minutes with a staff member yelling, "Shhhhhh! No photos!" as people were brazenly snapping away. We may or may not have got a few photos ourselves ;)

We finished up the day with, you guessed it, some gelato, and then went back to our swanky hotel. We then cooked ourselves sausages for dinner huddled between two cars in the car park. I guess you can take the campers out of the bush, but you can't take the bush out of the campers :)

- Brett