Advertisement
Published: August 26th 2011
Edit Blog Post
Another travel day… Needed a cappacino badly once we got to Ventimiglia, Italy, which is a town just over the border. Ordering was quite difficuly because we know absolutely no Italian. We got on the train to Genova and shared a cabin with 4 Italian guys about our age who were heading home to Milan after a 1 month backpacking/camping tour of Europe. They were quite animated and talked very fast, which started to make me nervous about being in a country where I don’t know the language.
They told us a funny story from their trip: in Barcelona, they were camping and had put their shoes just outside the tent. In the middle of the night, 2 of the guys woke up individually and put their shoes back on so they wouldn’t get stolen, purely on a hunch. In the morning, the third pair of shoes were missing! How much does that suck?
On the train to La Spezia, we arrived at our seats to find them already filled and reserved. How is this possible to have 2 pepole reserve that same seats?! We then realized that we had made reservations for the day earlier! So we had to stand
the 1.25 hours to La Spezia. We met some Canadians on our way to Riomaggiore, Cinque Terre, who gave me the idea to look into universities in Montreal for graduate programs.
Mary’s Italian guide book had mentioned to stay way from tunnels in Cinque Terre because they can be a bit sketchy. Ironically, the only way to reach Riomaggiore is to walk through a long tunnel from the station into town.
Riomaggiore is the most southern village in Cinque Terre, and in my opinion, the cutest. It consists of one street which climbs at a 35% grade with many side winding alleys and stairways. We walked up the street, its really hot of course, and arrived at our hostel office. We immediately met 2 girls from Chicago, 2 guys from Atlanta and 2 Aussies. Instant friends. Awesome. The guy lead us down winding stairways and a tunnel, which was actually pretty comical for all of us because we had no idea where we were going, it was so hot and we all had so much stuff.
Our little room was right by the water with 6 beds: 2 more Aussies and 2 Canandians. Only one working electrical outlet, 1 small
fan, and a window that barely cracks. I’m making it sound worse that it really is because we probably spent 10 minutes (besides sleeping) in that room total during out 2.5 day stay. We met up with everyone else for a late lunch/dinner. Mary and I got the same thing (typical): Pesto, my favorite.
We went straight to the water after that. Hung out on the rocks for a while. Crazy things happened during this time though… there were 2 helicopters that came in and left, I suspect life flights but we never actually found out if they transported anyone. It was only after we were done swimming that we walked over the beach for a fresh water shower and saw a body bag with feet/sandals poking out. It was crazy. Apparently, it was an old man who had just died in his sleep on the beach. Heck, if I’m going to die, let’s do it on the beaches of Cinque Terre, Italy. Still it made us think twice about the cliff jumping we had just been doing around the corner. I was so proud of us… probably a 20 foot jump.
We got out, watched the sunset, bought some
Victor, Tommy, Daniel
the crazy aussies and tommy wine and beer and headed up to the other girl’s place up a bit higher on the hill. Since there were a lot of us, we found benches next to “the cross” nearby. We joyfully drank our beverages and enjoyed the cooler temperatures. The Aussies taught us a bunch of songs, including the one that you sing when you want someone to finish their drink. It goes like this:
Here’s to Mary, she’s a true blue
She’s a piss pot, through and through
She’s a bastard so they say,
She tried to go to heaven but she went the other way… she went DOWN, DOWN, DOWN…
And she has to chug the rest of her drunk.
We introduced passa boula, got more tipsy than expected and then fell asleep in just my bathing suit because our room was so hot. These people were so fun. Not to mention that the only reason we were hanging out with them was because we all happen to arrive at the same time. Mary and I have started to believe in fate a little bit.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.056s; Tpl: 0.019s; cc: 7; qc: 24; dbt: 0.0269s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1mb