Euro Day 13 - Cinque Terre

Saturday, 6 July 2019

Sometimes when you have been looking forward to something for ages, you run the risk that the reality doesn't quite live up to your expectations.  This was not the case ast all with our visit to the Cinque Terre - the five towns perched on the edge of impossibly steep hillsides and cliffs on the Amalfi Coast of Italy.

We started our Cinque Terre day pretty early and after parking close to La Spezia station we were on the train to the first town at 7:55.  We had purchased Cinque Terre 'passes' which gave us unlimited train travel, free access the  public toilets (instead of 1 euro), and most importantly, access to the trails in between the towns. When we arrived a few minutes later we checked out the town of Riomaggiore. As it was early the tiny streets were full of delivery people wheeling supplies to the zillions of small shops tthat lined the alleys. There were already people swimming in the tiny harbour and it was really tempting to join them but we had a big day ahead so we had to save swimming for later. 

The path between Riomaggiore and its next door neighbour Manarola fell into the sea a few years ago and hasn't been restored, so we jumped back on the train for a 3 minute tunnel journey to Manarola.  After checking out the streets and laneways we started our hike, one of the attractons for me was that you could walk between the towns.  There used to be a flattish walk between Manarola and Corniglia but it too was destroyed a few years ago so we took the alternative 'high' route which went straight up and up and up through terraced vine yards and vegetable patches, then contoured around the hillsides through even smaller townships before descending straight down again into Corniglia. The 5.5km walk took us about 2 hours minutes and was hot, dusty and hard hiking.  We passed a few people coming the other way out of Corniglia who really didn't look like they were going to make it - there were parts of the walk which were steeper and rougher than sections of the TMB we'd done.

 Down in Corniglia it was getting on to 11:30 so after looking around the town we got some gelato fron one of the zillion gelato sellers and ate it in the shade before setting off to town number four, Venazza.  This was the town that we'd actually done a jigsaw puzzle of last year, so we already knew that it wss beautiful.  The journey between these towns was a bit shorter and a lot easier and much much busier. 

It was interesting that on the TMB the most common non-french-or-italian nationality was Australian, followed maybe by British.  While in the Cinque Terre area the place was absolutely heaving with Americans and Scandinavians.  By the time we reached Vernazia (after an extra stop to deal with one of Zali's quite commen heat-related bleeding noses) it was about 1pm and it was really really busy - the tiny laneways filled with people chosing a place to eat and the little beaches and areas of water access were filling up as well. 

I regret we didn't spend longer there but we did spend long enough to get some lunch and cool our feet in the sea.  We were pretty worn out and dusty and the kids were keen to get to the alleged best town for swimming - Monterosso - as Zali had researched that it was possible to hire paddle boats from there. So we took the train rather than hike the final 3.5k section of the path.

In Monterosso the first thing we noticed that the 'beach' was of course pebbles, and the 2nd was that it was the sort of place that you were expected to pay for a deckchair and umbrella which were laid out in rows over 75% of the beach space, or squish into the free area, which was much more colourful. 

We decided to walk 10 minutes through a pedestrian tunnel and around the corner to the next section of beach and we were rewarded by finding the place which hired out the paddle boats with water slides.  We wasted no time heading to sea to cool ourselves down and we spent the next few hours floating around and sliding into the water. It was fantastic.

After our rental finished we had another gelato (they are really small here - really!) and jumped aboard the ferry heading back to La Spezia, so we could see the towns from the sea.  It was a pretty long trip (1hr45) but it was really lovely and we got to see another famous town Portovenera on the way back which had a castle and really narrow (sometimes just 1 window wide) houses lining the waterfront. 

Back in La Spezia we had about a 30 minute walk back to the car and we stopped at our first large italian supermarket on the way to get supplies for dinner.  I bought the most delicious gnocchi and pesto sauce - it was so good!

We then spent a late night trying to get through all our sweaty dirty washing (With a washing machine that took about 3 hours per cycle!) and planning our next few days of camping as we head to Florence, then on to Venice.