Walking the Cinque Terre (Five Worlds)
Sunday, August 14, 2005
After a late night, we all found it a little difficult to get up the next morning. I have never experienced this in a camp sight before (and of course I do soooo much camping) as usually they get very noisy from 7am. This one was practically silent! Anyway, after a hearty breakfast of toast, we headed off to the Cinque Terre… we decided to walk from Vernazza (the fourth town) to Corniglia (the third), and possibly then to the second (Manarola). After looking around Vernazza (man it is stunning… the Mediterranean is beautiful and the way these towns are just perched up in the rocks is incredible) we started climbing the steps to the beginning of the walking track. At least that’s what I thought we were doing! Fifteen minutes later I realised that we were well on our way and still going up! With very little shade, it was a hot walk but looking toward the water was (almost) all the reward you needed! With Maarty and Jakub powering ahead, Candace and I slowed our pace a little and let our hearts slow down. The walk took a total of about an hour, and the second half was very pleasant as we were mainly walking on a flat track. In Corniglia we headed down to the water for a swim… I was a little dubious about coming back up the 200 or so steps we had to go down to get there though! We got down to the bottom and it was packed! Trust us to pick a public holiday to go to one of Italy’s hot spots!! Anyway, Jakub and I headed down to the water, leaving Candace and Maarty with the bags and he dove straight in. It’s not quite your average beach… it’s made up of huge rocks that the waves pound against. Every time I tried to get in a big wave came and I chickened out, preferring to just sit on some of the rocks and have the water crash up against rocks behind me. I still got just as wet as if I had gone in the water properly though!! We stayed here for an hour or so before beginning the daunting task of heading back up, but it wasn’t too bad as there was a fountain at the top that we all cooled off under. I didn’t feel like doing another huge walk so we got the train to Manarola and had a look around before heading back to the Palace. We had heard there were going to be fireworks in Monterosso (the 5th town) at 11pm, so wanted to have dinner and a rest before that. After pasta again, we headed to Monterosso, only to find that the fireworks had been cancelled due to excessive wind… clearly they’ve never been to Wellington, as far as we were concerned there wasn’t even a breath of wind! We jumped back on to the same train and headed on to La Spezia instead, thinking there might be some action up there, as it was the public holiday… but it was pretty dead so we wandered down to the waterfront before going back to the campsite for the night.
posted by Maarty @ 12:00 pm,
