Cinque Terre, Italian Coast

After our road trip we stayed in La Spezia for one night before getting up nice and early to head to the Cinque Terre just a short train ride away. This is a UNESCO site and is made up of 5 villages all on the coast. We stayed at the village called Riomaggoire which is the first village of the 5. There is not really much to each village as they are really quite small but are absolutely adorable. On our first afternoon here we checked out our little village which took all of 10 minutes and then headed to the beach. Well cobble stones which we found so bizarre! And so uncomfortable to lye on after you have been swimming! The water however was beautiful. It was this dark blue colour but really clear. Bit cold at first but after you swam around a fair bit you got kind of warm! We also made some rock castles….not as much fun as sand castles and less satisfying to destroy! We finished our day by finding a lookout and settling in the watch the sunset. Absolutely beautiful.
Our second day we got up nice and early as we had already pre-planned to do the 9km walk that starts in the first town and ends in the second town. We set off at 9am in Riomaggoire walked the nice boardwalk and ended up in Manarola 20 minutes later. The next section of the walk was also fairly easy and took us probably half an hour to get to the steps that led to Corniglia but 15 minutes to get up them! Corniglia is set on top of a rather high cliff so hence the thousands of steps to get to it. We felt quite puffed after this and hungry as we hadn’t had much breakfast, so we stopped here to have a panni and coffee and ended up speaking to 2 Australian women who were on holidays for 6 weeks and were also doing the 9km walk. We had heard through the grapevine that the next 2 sections of the walk were quite hard but we had no idea it would be this hard! It seemed that we would climb one hill then much to our disappointment we would walk down which only meant that we would have to eventually go up again. This next section took us the rest of the day. We stopped in Vernazza for half hour to soak our feet in the cool water and then headed on to the last walk to Monterosso. By the time we got to the village our legs were shaking so much we had to sit down! Although the walk was quite hard, the views and scenery was well worth it. Sometimes we would be walking on the edge of the cliffs over looking the sea feeling nice and cool and then others we would be amongst vineyards dying of heat! Pretty amazing though.

When we stopped in Monterosso, we changed into our togs, jumped in the ocean and pretty much jumped straight out again! Because although we were really hot the water was quite cool as it was 3:30pm by the time we got there. We quickly changed and headed off to find some food and it was here. On our last evening in Italy that we finally came across some great pizza.