Cinque Terre

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So Cinque Terre is amazing. It’s required that if you go to Italy, you go here. ‘nuff said.

But, if you want to know more for some reason…  Got here (Riomaggiore) on the 27th t about 6PM or so. The town is only accessible via a long painted tunnel from the train station, and basically consists of one street going pretty much straight up the mountain with a lot of extremely vertical houses built alongside it. These houses are accessed both by the street and by a complex hodgepodge of stars that wind up through the buildings from the street. The architecture is most likely the most organic I’ve ever seen.

The walk up to my hostel was brutal (or so I thought that day), as these towns are built on literal cliffs with streets so steep I doubt a car could even try to use them. I decided to take a quick trip down to the “beach” for this town, which was basically a relatively flat rocky area, and took a swim. Which ended up being more of a “sit down and let the waves throw me around into rocks for a while”. It was still fun though, and now I can say I’ve officially swum in the Mediterranean as opposed to that dip I did back in Greece. I had dinner at a place by the beach, making sure to do the seafood thing to stay in theme (although the salad was the best). I then headed back to the hostel, where I ended up petting this cat that was on our doorstep for quite a while  I met up with a couple of my roommates afterwards-- Chris from Pennsylvania and his friends and a girl named Marianna from Britain-- and went down to the dock for a couple drinks before playing cards back at the dorm when it started raining.

After a night of not-so-great-sleep (I swear the town was acoustically designed so that every noise echoed straight into our room), I headed out with another roommate, Candice from Canada (ha, get it), to do the supposedly 5-hour hike along the shoreline between the five towns. This includes Riomaggiore, Manorola, Corniglia, Vernazza and finally Monterosso. The first leg of the hike (to Manorola) was cake, being short and well-paved and -railed. Manorola was similar to Riomaggiore, but seemed more of a fishing town with more boats, fishers and a market, as well as easier road access (ie less-steep hills). There was a long tunnel here with very nice graffiti (or hired art as it may be since it mostly depicted the towns) that ran right along the train tunnel (as the train lines between these towns are entirely in tunnels in the side of the cliff). The tunnel also sported something I’ve seen a couple of times so far this trip—a lot of padlocks hitched to a railing. I assume this means something, but I don’t know what and I can’t look it up right now as I write this in Cinque Terre with no internet access 

The walk from Manorola to Corniglia was also easy, with more flowers and cacti (which showed up in huge amounts later). Except for the end, which had a punishing set of winding stairs to access the town. Corniglia was really charming, with a dense collection of shops and cafés that didn’t seem too touristy (yet). There was one store that had an impressive array of dictator(?) beers. The picture explains it better than I could. This is where the large number of stray cats started to again become obvious (just like in Greece). They were all very nice cats though, which pleasantly surprised me  Candance didn’t like cats though  so I headed on. We walked down to the mrina in Corniglia, which was pretty but entirely unpeopled, so we had a light lunch (just a ham sandwich on awesome bread and a coffee thingy for me) and headed on. Note that this is where the terrace gardens this place is supposed to be famous for really start showing themselves—literally the entire coast-mountainside is covered with them. It’s a really cool effect.

Then the hike started becoming difficult. The hike to Vernazza never got terribly steep, but it was LONG. I’m not sure what the spread was, but I drank at least 9 x .75 liters on the hike. And every bit of it was turned into sweat. If I don’t gain weight this trip, I blame gelato (the last town had a place with torrone gelato by the way, which is exciting, but I’m getting ahead of myself). And of course this is right after noon, when it started to get appreciably hot. They (“they”) were even nice enough to start putting a bunch of cacti on the way through, to remind us how hot it was. Vernazza, however, was worth the trip. It’s definitely the most awe-inspiring from above, as once you round the corner and it comes in view, you see where all of those postcards come from  as you can see, I took a long series of photos approaching the town because the view just kept getting better. Vernazza itself is definitely the best town to stay in, as it keeps the Cliffside charm of all of the others except Monterosso while still staying flat and having a good deal of shops and restaurants. So yeah, if you do Cinque Terre, stay in Vernazza. I also headed up to the castle here to check it out, which wasn’t great, but was a fun detour. The beach here was so full as to be unusable, so after an hour or so of rest we continued on to Monterosso.

If you ever do Cinque Terre, do Not start the hike between Vernazza and Monterosso unless you are Darn sure you can take it. It’s most likely the hardest hike I’ve ever done, and I like to think I’ve done quite a few. The first hour is all uphill. And when I say uphill, I mean DARN WELL UP. You’ll notice I didn’t take ma any pictures here because I was too concentrated on not dying. Once the pure uphill stops, you start onto parts of the path that are so narrow you have to walk sideways. And most of these don’t have guardrails. What was amazing is that, even up this hour-long uphill climb (which would be repeated quite similarly on the other side by the way), there was a cat. The cat had what looked like his own campground, as someone had set up a picnic table and kitty tent with food and water and everything for this cat. Somebody had to have been going up there every day to get the cat food and water. A pretty amazing way to motivate yourself. What was kind of funny is that at the relatively flat middle part, there was usually two branching choices to take for the path—one being about a man’s height higher that the other (I called the higher one the “EXTREEEME” choice). On the steep set of million stairs down, I had been joking about how an enterprising kid could set up a lemonade stand on the trail (because I was still parched at this point after more about 2 gallons of water). Then, only a few minutes later, Candice found one! Some guy who owned a terrace of lemon trees next to the path actually set up a small shanty from which he sold fresh-squeezed lemonade and limoncello (a VERY strong lemon liquor, which I tried and liked but would never have in quantities larger than one shot). And he only charged 2 euro, which is at most half of what I would charge being a greedy capitalist. The guy took video of us, saying that he was trying to document everyone who came through to show the diversity of people who visit the place. He was also a big fan of the US (having something American on every piece of clothing he wore) which was entertaining.

Seeing Monterosso finally was like seeing the light at the end of a tunnel GOING FREAKING UP THAT YOU HAD TO CLIMB, since it wasn’t visible for most of the hike. Finally reaching there was such a relief and feeling of accomplishment. I took off my shoes, rolled up my pantlegs and let the water and sand (yes, sand, not rocks stupid Riomaggiore beach) massage my feet like epsom salts until I felt capable of continuing. I wish I had bought/brought real swimming clothes. I should buy a wetsuit. Anyways, we ate at some cheap but not very good restaurant (the salmon gnocchi was terribad), I had an AWESOME torrone gelato, and then we headed back to Riomaggiore by train. Candace and I met up with a young married couple doing what may has well have been my trip in reverse, which gave me a load of advice to use (like, for instance, probably cutting out Madrid to instead do Toledo, Scilla and Grenada), and a torrent of lightning and rain followed us back to the hostel. And that catches me up to now. Hopefully I can post this entry tomorrow night in Venice 

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