5 minutes in Cinque Terre

Fri and Sat, Sept 19 & 20, 2014

View of Manarola from Corniglia

"They say it's going to take 5 hours to hike from Manarola to Monterossa?  That's crazy!  Look how close it is!  It must mean for people who are out of shape."

After an hour of hiking uphill, with no end in sight, I was recalling my smug words of not long ago as I was making my way from Manarola to Corniglia, the next town over, and still not there.  Huh.  Maybe this will take a long time!

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We got to Manarola via 3 trains on Friday from Lucca amidst a growing rain storm that erupted in a downpour at La Spezia station where everyone retreated to the tunnels for cover.

If this is what the weather is going to be like at my little slice of beach vacation, I'm so not happy.

Me and Marcella

When we got to Manarola, we had to walk up the hill a ways, each of us carrying about 30 pounds on our backs, which felt like 50 pounds after a few minutes, and 75 pounds wondering how high we have to climb.  Because the towns are built into the side of hills, there is a LOT of walking up and down.  Fortunately, we didn't have to go far, and we met our landlady, Marcella.  think she said.  Or she could have been telling us to avoid these places, and put a pox on their houses.  Not really sure.

What a sweetie!  She hardly knew a lick of English, but she was so nice and helpful.  And always waved to us and chatted with us (in Italian) whenever she saw us in the village.  She even gave us restaurant recommendations and said to mention her name to get treated right.  I mean, that's what I

View from our room

We're only here for a day and a half, so we immediately went to explore the town.  10 minutes later, we said "ok, you want something to eat?"  The town is pretty small, but really the thing to do is hike between the towns and see the differences.  I've heard that each of the 5 towns even has their own dialect of Italian.  Not that I can tell the difference.

I wanted to see a map and also find out what time the trains were leaving on Sunday since we had to be back in La Spezia at a certain time to pick up all the trains to Nice.  Oh yeah, not sure I mentioned, but we decided that we're spending a week in Nice to see Fathi before we head to Paris.
At the train station we learned that on Sunday, there will be a train strike in Italy.  That means, the biggest day of train travel for us this whole vacation, the day with the most train connections, is in major jeopardy.  So.  We head back to our room, which by the way has no internet connection because I thought we'd be fine disconnecting for 1.5 days, to figure out what we need to do to get to Nice by Sunday night.

Long, long story short, after going over many different scenarios, texting back and forth with Fathi,

Terraces cut into side of hill are everywhere

and drinking lots of Limoncello, we came up with a tentative plan that we would get as far as we could on the trains (since many of them had already been cancelled with more to come) and then Fathi would drive to Italy and pick us up.  Yeah.  Wow.  What an offer!

So now we could try to relax and enjoy what little time we had in Cinque Terre!

On Saturday we got up, had breakfast, then headed toward the high trail to hike between Manarola and the next town, Corniglia.  I truly thought it was going to be more of a walk and not hiking.  I don't know why.  But the views were stunning, the lungs were heaving, and the glutes were burning.

Pathway going UP

The trail reminded me of hiking in Nepal - lots of lots of up!  But what differed from Nepal is that we finally got a path going across (Nepal was just up and down...not much across).  And then finally down, 2 hours after starting.  It was cloudy when we began, which actually was nice because it would have been too hot with the sun beating down on us.  By the time we got to Corniglia the sun was out and showing how blue the water was.

Path going across

We stopped for lunch at a restaurant Fathi had eaten at when he was in Corniglia with his wife, and we ended up eating with another American couple sitting next to us.  Joe tried to convince the woman to try Grappa, but when she heard how high in alcohol it is, she refused (plus I think it tastes like jet fuel).  After lunch we made our way down to the marina, where a few people were swimming in the cove.  By now it was getting hot, I was sweaty from the hike, but I didn't bring my bathing suit.  Wait, this is Europe, they don't care about stuff like this!  So I whipped off my clothes and swam in my underwear!  No one batted an eye and I had the extreme privilege of swimming in the Mediterranean!