Cinque Terre
When we first starting playing with the idea of going on a jaunt around Europe I posted on the Feeder Street Team message board for tips on where to visit. I asked that board in particular because a lot of the (active) members live somewhere in mainland Europe. My friend Elisa suggested we try to visit a place called Cinque Terre if we were going to Italy. Naturally, being the well informed person I am, I had never heard of it. But after some amazing photos and hearing great things from a couple of people, we (I) added it to the itinerary. Cinque Terre means 'five hills' (I continually thought of it as 'five lands' - thanks French lessons!) and is basically five small villages set along the Ligurian coast line - Monterosso, Vernazza, Corniglia, Manarola and Riomaggiore.
Getting there from Geneva involved three changes and probably the longest train journey we had to do consciously in the whole holiday. The longest leg of the journey was from Geneva to Milan, but I can't really remember anything interesting happening then. We changed at Milan for a train to Monterosso, and let me just say this: THE HEAT. When we'd left Geneva it was sunny and warm, but Italy was sizzling. Also, the station at Milan was absolute chaos - people everywhere, hot, stuffy. We made our train, got our seats... and were then joined in our compartment by four girls all with huge instruments. It was cramped to say the least! They were friendly enough though. At Monterosso we made our final change for the train to Manarola, and since it was only going to be a couple of minutes we just stood up for the journey.
From my extensive research on all the usual hostelling websites, I'd discovered that there was only information about one hostel in the whole of Cinque Terre. I reserved beds in this hostel but carried on trying to figure out if there were any hotels or y'know... anything. I could only find one other hotel online and it was a bit vague as to whether it was actually in one of the five villages or not... hrm! I don't know why I had such trouble finding anywhere - I just this minute googled "Cinque Terre" and came up with a website that links to all the hotels in the area. Alas, this resource I did not have twelve months ago. Am possibly stupid. Anyway, the reason I wasn't so thrilled about this hostel we were booked in for? Well, there were several actually:
1) All private rooms too expensive, which leaves us with dorms. Only single sex dorms. Which meant that Pete and I would be in separate rooms, possibly on separate floors, for two nights. MEH.
2) Time limits on showers. Yep, that's right. I'd read the reviews on the hostelling websites and almost all of them mentioned this - you get a token for each night you stay and this allows you five minutes in the shower. Five minutes! Eek.
3) Lock outs. Nobody allowed in the hostel between the hours of ten and five, every day.
4) Curfew. You must be back by (I think it was) half past midnight.
So I wasn't too enthusiastic about this place. It turned out to be a great little place to stay, and I would definitely recommend it. The whole dorm issue was the worst, and really wasn't that bad at all. Given the lock outs we were only in the dorms to sleep and get dressed. They were big spacious rooms, and the girls who I was sharing with were all perfectly fine. The shower issue was really not a problem whatsoever. Turns out I can fit all of my shower routine into five minutes, with time to spare! You can also buy another token for another five minutes of shower time for just fifty cents, but we found we didn't need to do this. The reason for the time limits? Apparently the village of Manarola only has a limited water supply! Lock outs - really a non-issue. We were nowhere near the hostel during the day. The curfew was also a non-issue given that we had been fast asleep by half past midnight every night of the holiday so far (rock and roll, baby)! So yes, great little place. The two guys who ran it were really friendly, and the place is very environmentally friendly. The only drawback to the hostel is it's location: at the top of a hill. A very very big hill. That we had to walk up with all our bags. Ouch... it was hard going. Still the view at the top was great.
See the vineyards?
We checked in and stashed our stuff in our rooms before heading back out again. We decided to explore Manarola and find somewhere to get some dinner at the same time. There is basically only one main route through Manarola, it goes down from the church next to the hostel, runnning through a sort of square at the bottom of the hill, then carrying on downhill some more towards the sea front. We got to the path at the edge of the cliff, overlooking the sea, just as the sun was setting. It was gorgeous, although I don't think either of our cameras managed to do it justice!
It was definitely more impressive than this.
We just settled for a meal in some random restaurant - no restaurant guides for somewhere this small! For my starter I had a plate big enough for a main, full of assorted seafood treats.
Including... octopus!
It was actually octopus and potato salad, and it was probably the nicest part of the starter! The rest of the meal was fine as far as I can remember, although I'm not sure what either of us had! We were pretty tired, so just headed up to the hostel afterwards and hit the sack.
The hostel is on the same square as a church, and the church has a clock tower...
...which is right outside the windows of the dorms!
Luckily it doesn't strike through the night, but the first hour it rings in is seven o'clock in the morning! I had an alarm set for just before then anyway, so it didn't wake me up... thankfully. Pete and I had agreed to meet on the landing area of our floor at eight o'clock so I stumbled into the bathroom to test out these here shower limits. I was expecting to have to wait for a shower, because there were only two (in the girls' bathroom)... however hardly anyone seemed to be awake at that point! As I mentioned above, the shower time limits were absolutely fine. So I was washed and dressed and waiting by eight o'clock. Pete, however, somehow managed to sleep through the church bell and his alarm and therefore woke up and stumbled out to me unwashed and wearing his clothes from yesterday! We headed down for some breakfast (good) and then I hung around for a bit whilst Pete had a wash and put some fresh clothes on.
Then we were off! I mentioned there are five villages (some might call them towns, but really only one is big enough for that noun), what I didn't mention was that there were paths connecting all five villages... so you could walk between them all, should you so wish. We wished and so we set off northwards, for the first village in that direction - Corniglia. The route took us all along the cliff edge on the coast. It wasn't too bad - flat and pretty easygoing to be honest. The only thing that made us a bit antsy was the fact that certain stretches of the path had no barrier at the edge, so it was literally just a sheer drop down. Eek. But honestly, the chances of us falling down there? Slim. The path was flat! Sorry, but this is important because later we will see that at this point? We were worrying about nothing. NOTHING.
I was vaguely concerned about it collapsing. I mean, I've seen the Indiana Jones films!
I had been trying to get a lizard photo for ages before this chap decided to cooperate.
Nifty little buggers they are.
When we finally reached the end of the path we discovered that we had to climb about a billion steps to actually get to the village... joy! Just what we wanted in that heat. We took breaks. Several.
I've realised that I haven't really described Manarola yet.
Well the pictures speak louder than words.
Basically just full of higgeldy-piggeldy buildings, all different colours, heights and shapes. The backdrop was the cliffs - residents of the town have created vineyards from the soils on the cliffs, which you can sort of see in some of the pictures. Corniglia, Vernazza and Riomaggiore were pretty much the same as this... basically just gorgeous.
Corniglia from the path to Vernazza.
We spent a while exploring Corniglia and admiring the view... but it's not that big so we only spent about half an hour there! We also debated whether or not we should do the next walk to Vernazza or just catch the train. See, the walks were rated by difficulty - the one we'd just done was rated "easy", the one from Corniglia to Vernazza was rated something like "fair". It was also approaching midday, and with the heat of that sun the sensible decision would probably have been to just get the damn train. We are not sensible. Crazy? Yes. Clearly. Because we decided to walk. Actually, we spent ages faffing around trying to figure out where exactly the trail started up again... first we headed up the main road, then decided that didn't look right so headed back again. Then we just loitered at the end of the road, debating and watching to see if anyone came down from the road we'd just decided against. They did, so eventually we headed back up there and carried on a bit further... aaand we found the entrance to the path, woo!
I don't know how to adequately describe the route from Corniglia to Vernazza. It was hard going. We were basically just climbing up for the first forty five minutes of the walk hike. Sometimes there was just a sloping path, other times there were just rocks to scramble up and over - quite often rocks that had been worn into the shape steps by numerous feet. It was hot and sweaty and really tough. Especially considering we weren't really dressed for hiking - Pete had sandals on, I had flip flops on. FLIP FLOPS! Most of the pathways on this route had no sort of barrier between them and the sheer drops down to the sea... and they were MUCH narrower paths than on the Manarola to Corniglia route. MUCH MUCH NARROWER. There was actually a point where there were huge rocks along the (barrier-less) path, so you had to climb over them and, hey! Try not to slip and fall off the side of the cliff when you do! Flip flops + smooth rocks = slippy slippy! Heart. In. Mouth. There was also the moment we were climbing over rocks and a low hanging tree knocked the water bottle out of Pete's bag... Pete froze to try and catch it, I nearly went into him as well as trying to catch... we both could have gone tumbling at that point! I still don't feel like I'm doing this trek justice... it was really that bad!
Smiling through the pain. You can see the path without barriers winding into the distance
but I think that was one of the easier stretches.
It made me feel ridiculously unfit, particularly when a very heavily pregnant woman breezed past us when we were taking one of our breaks. (Although I did think to myself, I can't imagine ever feeling brave enough to do this whilst pregnant. We were freaked out enough by the drops, and we weren't even brewing a babba!). The last part of the route we ended up climbing down... after all that climbing up! Ugh. Again, it was down rocks that had been worn into the shape of vague steps. Vague, rocky steps.
Destination finally in sight.
Eventually we stumbled our way into Vernazza, vowing that there was no way we could walk any further. We were covered in dust and dirt and sweat... and starving hungry as well! We found a little cafe bar and just collapsed at a table. Had a couple of salads for lunch as well as drinks. Sweet sweet liquid. Needless to say, by the time we'd finished eating we had pretty much recovered. We set off down the main street to explore, and found ourselves on a little beach type area! The actual sandy area was tiny... but there were loads of people in the sea, and also lots of people sunbathing on the rocks (big, smooth rocks like giant pebbles). We stopped for a paddle but nothing more, even though all along the walk between Corniglia and Vernazza we'd talked about how good it would be to finally get into the nice cool sea.
It looked so so good.
It was too crowded and we knew that there were much bigger beach areas in Monterosso!
The beach wasn't much more than what you can see here.
We caught the train to Monterosse, which took all of about two minutes... imagining how it would be had we carried on walking (rating for the Vernazza to Monterosse walk? Difficult) and how we probably would never have got back to the hostel, what with the having collapsed and fallen into the sea somewhere anonymous along the hike. Death by flip flops. But as I said, we arrived in Monterosso a mere two minutes later and found ourselves immediately on the sea front. Unlike the other towns which seemed to run down to the sea, Monterosso seemingly ran alongside the sea. So we wandered along the main seafront road for a bit, trying to decide where to park ourselves so we could finally, finally get our dirty, sweaty bodies into that water. There were stretches of beach where you had to pay to go onto, but with that you got your own deckchair... you could also get your own little hut for a bit more.
Deckchairs, wheeee. This looks like it should be in a holiday brochure.
Given that we were just two and the fact that it would be pretty miserable to not be able to go in the sea together, we decided to get a hut. It didn't cost much and there wasn't a time limit or anything... and the clincher: it was lockable so we could leave our cameras and money in there. And so we went striding into the sea. Actually, there was an initial attempt that was aborted because the sand turns into these rocky pebbly things and it HURTS when you walk on them. So we ran back to get flip flops (finally a reason to be grateful I'd put them on that morning)... but once we were in the sea, they were really unnecessary given that the sea bed was made of big smooth pebbles you could totally balance on. Anyway, the sea. Oh man, the sea was good. Icy cold, refreshing, FUN. We messed about and swam for a while before heading to our chairs to just soak up some of the late afternoon sunshine. It was good to just be doing nothing, not worrying about seeing the sights, cramming everything in...
In the big version of this photo you can see how far we walked. Instead just pretend
you understand what I mean when I say: from the second to last sticky outy bit to the
one closest to the foreground.
After another dip in the sea, we decided to get changed and maybe look for somewhere to eat. This actually meant we got to explore the town a bit more, which is by far the biggest of the five and therefore worthy of the title 'town'. We walked right to one end, where there didn't seem to be anything except a few houses and a road which... well, which went up a hill therefore was not somewhere we wanted to go!
We spotted this too. "Do you think that's natural?" Durrr. Sometimes I wonder
why I don't fall over more.
Then we went to the other end, then we headed away from the sea... eventually we just settled on some random restaurant which turned out to be a great choice. I had THE nicest pasta ever. It was in a creamy walnut sauce, which was just to die for. Ahh, my mouth is watering just thinking about it!
Once we'd finished eating, we took a stroll back to the train station, buying some postcards on the way (we never did send them) and admiring the moon over the sea. We got to the train station about quarter of an hour before a train was due... so we sat in the waiting room. Then the train got delayed a bit. Then a bit more. And a bit more. It was crazy, the train ended up being over an hour late, which meant that the train that was due after that one actually arrived before it! So we waited for about an hour and a quarter for a train that would take us approximately six minutes down the coast. Had we been anywhere else, we absolutely would have just walked it... but hello? We knew what part of that walk was like. IN THE DAYLIGHT. I can only imagine where we would have ended up in the dark. So we just sat it out. In the waiting room. With ridiculously annoying Americans.
Still, we got on a train in the end. Bitched for a while (about the stupid Americans) and then we were back in Manarola, woo! Then of course there was the whole climbing the hill of doom business, but hey. We were kind of worried we weren't going to get showers the next day, because you're supposed to pick up your tokens before 10pm... which we totally could have done, had the trains been working properly. However, it turned out we had no need to worry because the nice chap on reception had saved us one each and gave them to us when we arrived back at the hostel. Aww.
Next morning Pete successfully managed to get up on time (hehe) and we got some breakfast before packing up and checking out. We left our bags under the watchful eye of the hostel guys and set off to do the final walk. This time we were due south, towards the last town Riomaggiore. The path between Manarola and Riomaggiore is called Via Dell'Amore - or in English: Lovers Way - and thankfully paved and flat. You have to pay a toll to walk it, but I believe the money has something to do with the fact that the route is paved and easygoing.
Some seat we found. Probably called Lovers Seat. Or something.
It was a really easy walk and I think we were quite smart saving it for our final morning! We got to Riomaggiore and had a bit of an explore... poked around in a few shops and ended up buying some hand-carved wooden ornaments. Ornaments! Does this mean we're old? Well, that's what Pete kept asking anyway. The one that Pete picked out was two dolphins, the one I picked was a ridiculously cute turtle. I would take photos but... ugh, effort.
Instead, here's Riomaggiore.
We headed back to the hostel around midday to pick up our bags (yes there is a lock out, but you're allowed to pick up bags thankfully!) and then it was time to hit the road (well rails I guess) for Florence!
Cinque Terre was probably one of my favourite stops on the whole trip. Despite the unexpected hiking and climbing we ended up doing, I just loved the whole place. It's beautiful - the sea, the cliffs, the colourful, rambling, mismatched buildings, the vineyards. It's just great. And of course that walnut sauce! Honestly, you should go there. All of you. It's just amazing. I realise I said that just four sentences ago, but I don't know how else to make you understand. If you're looking for constant activity maybe this isn't the best place, and in all honesty I don't think I would spend more than a few days there in one go... but still: great little place. I'm not sure whether I would recommend doing the walks though. I mean, aside from the Via Dell'Amore. We thought that doing them would be a good way to enjoy the scenery, but we didn't get much chance to do that actually. We were too engrossd in not falling to our deaths, y'know? I'm just so thankful that Elisa told us about it, otherwise I think I would still be completely ignorant of the place!