Category Archives: Travel

Day 4 – Playing Tourist in Sestri Levante

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Wednesday 17 June 2026 – One day of our week in Liguria was designated a non-hiking day. There were many options open to us, not the least of which would have been well-earned sloth. One of our group actually headed off to get to Genoa, about an hour and a half away if you catch the right train, but a world of pain if you don’t. We were not so interested in art galleries and museums, which are definitely Genoa’s strengths, and instead Tomaso had strongly recommended Sestri Levante as a place to visit.

The name’s something to conjure with. People are familiar with “The Levant” as meaning the Middle East, based on the meaning of “levante” as “rising”. The sun rises in the east, hence The Levant. However, Sestri Levante is on the west coast of Italy and emphatically not in the East. Unless, that is, you are of a Genoese persuasion; in that region, “Riviera di Levante” means the eastern riviera, with “Riviera di Ponente” meaning the western riviera, all defined in relation to Genoa. So Sestri Levante means, by implication, Sestri in the eastern riviera, as opposed to Sestri Ponente which is, you guessed it, to the west of Genoa, albeit only just. “Sestri” in this context might means “sixth”, which I can’t find a credible reason to explain, or it might mean “a quiet place”. Depends on which AI you ask. In any case neither I nor any AI that have consulted on the matter understand whether all this has any bearing on the name of Bonassola’s neighbour, Levanto,

Anyhoo…

Sestri Levante is a half-hour train ride north-west from Bonassola, so seemed a good option and six of us decided to head there so that we could go for a walk around it. Obviously.

There are ticket machines at each station, but Trainline works well and obviates the risk of falling foul of Italian engineering*, so, tickets in our Google Wallets, we headed for the station and caught a 10.30 train heading north. This meant that we would arrive at 11am which (Tomaso jokingly told us as a matter of Italian law) is the very latest time you are legally allowed a cappuccino. So we left the station

and headed into town;

Jane had identified the Caffè Centrale as a promising destination, and so it proved, serving decent coffee that was almost hot. The heat of the day hadn’t fully developed and so we were able to sit outside as we supped, and opposite us was a wonderful, if somewhat bonkers, piece of architecture.

It is the Palazzo Fascie Rossi, and houses the city’s archaeological museum, library and historical archives. The “Rossi” means “red”, which is pretty self-explanatory just from looking at the colour of the building; and it’s named for one Vicenze Fascie, (interestingly described on the website as a “Cavalier”, whatever that means – maybe a cowboy builder?) whose legacy funded its construction in the early 1900s. The tower is distinctive, both in shape and, frankly, its jarring architectural discontinuity from the rest of the building. On its four corners are braziers which can hold beacons to be lit on festival days. Looking at it from a different angle

one can see the spiral staircase that enables access to the roof for placing and lighting of beacons. Over the main door is a decoration celebrating love, work and hope.

To my complete lack of surprise, Jane had spent some time investigating the possibilities of the town, and everyone in the group seemed entirely happy to follow her suggested peregrination. Thus, coffee over, we wandered off towards the seafront.

There is some very fine trompe l’oeil on view decorating the buildings,

so convincing that I had to go and brush the surface to assure myself that it was painted. Some of it was very ornate.

Tomaso had mentioned a specific patisserie that was worth a look in, so we found it and, erm, looked in.

It’s a wonderful interior, and, even more wonderfully, the lady behind the counter was entirely unruffled at a bunch of tourists leaning in, taking photos and departing without buying anything.

As you head for the seaside, there are some ritzy buildings, not the least of which is a very fancy-looking four-star hotel, the Grand Hotel Villa Balbi,

which does it best to be difficult to photograph by hiding bashfully behind a bunch of trees. (The Cross of St. George atop the place is nothing to do with England – St George is one of the principal patron saints of Genoa.) A neighbouring building has on its walls a colourful tribute to the maritime nature of the place,

not dissimilar in style to a boat on the beach nearby,

though, this being the med, if they’re waiting for the tide to come in so they can float it, they’re going to be there a while.

As far as seaside is concerned, the town has a distinctive and unusual shape,

which gives it two seasides (the boat in the photo above is not far from the capital S in Sestri). The bay to the north is called the “Bay of Fables”, in honour of Hans Christian Andersen, who lived here at one point, and so I wandered out to see if it was pretty.

Not really, is my verdict, although overlooking it are some very fine houses on the lumpy bit that stick out from the mainland.

I found the juxtaposition of crowded beach umbrellas and fine mansions rather amusing. Some of those villas on the headland are very handsome.

At the neck of the headland is a church, the Basilica of Santa Maria of Nazareth,

which, like so many others in the area, has a sumptuous interior.

with beautifully painted surfaces all over.

Having looked around the church, we headed for the southern bay, the Bay of Silence, which was altogether a more attractive proposition.

All beach life was here, with kids and adults equally splashing around and generally not being silent at all.  In the water was a sculpture of a fisherman

and among the folks cavorting on the beach (or, frankly, slumped in the heat) moved a hopeful entrepreneur.

We didn’t see her successfully sell anything, and she must have been rather warm, but one infers (and certainly hopes) that she must make enough to be able to stay in business.

Apart from anything else, the bay had a perfectly decent café/restaurant which offered some nice focaccia and many varieties of cold beverage,

so we refreshed ourselves and then split up. Some of our group wanted to do some shopping, but Jane had identified a punto panoramico on the opposite shore, so we went to take a look. It was worth the slog in increasing temperatures.

You can clearly see the headland and the neck that divides the two bays. in order to reach the viewpoint, we passed the Convento Frati Cappuccini, which incorporates the church of Santa Maria Immacolata,

and was open (albeit not selling any coffee) so we went in. It was rather lovely, with some striking painted decoration,

and wonderful mosaics on the floor.

The choral music of (we think) Palestrina was gently playing in the background as we walked in, which made for a very calming interlude.

We walked back through the very elegant old town towards the station,

and discovered that we had time for another coffee at Caffè Centrale before hitting the station. An uneventful rail journey had us back in Bonassola in time for the evening drinkies and briefing – and even the lady who’d been to Genoa managed to make it back in time for that.

During the rest of our time here we had two more walks to do, and neither of them were in the actual Cinque Terre park, as we’d covered that on walks two and three, as far as one can given that the path from Manarola to Corniglia is closed. The next day’s walks were south of the park, in the area of Porto Venere, with the return to Bonassola involving a scenic boat ride. The walk could potentially involve a hideous amount of steep and tricky downhill walking, we heard.

Stay tuned to find out if we managed to engineer a way around that ghastly prospect.

 

* I’m probably not being fair, here. In many cases, the Italian train network is more joined-up that ours in the UK. For example, when you buy a ticket at a machine in Italy, assuming your train is in transit at the time, the ticket machine will tell you whether it is on time, or by how much delayed, which would be helpful in the UK. Roll on nationalisation of the UK rail network, anyone?

 

Day 3 – The Way Of Love – and more hot stuff

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Tuesday 16 June 2026 – Did you guess that we would be doing the shorter of today’s walks? I’d say well done, but frankly it wasn’t difficult to work that one out.  The main meat of both of the hikes on offer today was to walk between Vernazza and Monterosso; the options were the coastal path or one which went considerably higher and passed by a couple of monasteries. Given that the forecast temperatures were over 30°C, minimising the inevitable uphill work seemed the only logical choice. Of course, our well ‘ard duo opted for the more challenging course, so the team for our walk was the same as yesterday, except that we would be led by Rebecca instead of Tomaso.

We had a bonus, too: the Via dell’Amore, the Way of Love, a short and mercifully level walk between the furthest village, Riomaggiore, and its neighbour, Manarola, had very recently been re-opened. A landslide had closed it in 2012, and it took until 2024 for the repair work to be completed. Riomaggiore, therefore, would be our first destination as we once again hit the 0849 Cinque Terre Express southwards from Bonassola.

On the way to the station, as usual, we passed the town’s church, Chiesa di Santa Caterina d’Alessandria, which is quite an imposing, if not over-ornate building.

Tomaso had told us that it was now the repository for some religious artefacts that had once been in various other churches in the mountains which were now closed.  We had actually been in for a look around the previous evening, and the inside is a great deal more sumptuous than the outside.

Among the items from other churches are a couple of processional crosses, which require a tag  team of fit young men to carry them on festival days, as they are not insubstantial.

The base is paddle-shaped and fits into a pouch slung over the necks of the carriers, who sway the cross a little from side to side as they go, to make sure that they retain control over its balance. I can imagine one of those crosses would do a lot of damage to someone in the crowd by the procession if they lost control….

The church has a very lavishly decorated and ornamented interior, with some fine stained glass work.

There is some decent trompe l’oeil on view in Bonassola on the walk to the station.

The walls really are only painted, but the illusion of depth is compelling. And there are a couple of nice quirky touches, too.

The train was pretty busy, but we all managed to find seats for the six stops to Riomaggiore, and it was clear at the far end that crowds would be a feature of the day.

We fought our way through the crowded town to the start of the Via dell’Amore, which is a level pathway created along the cliffs to Manarola.

Along the way, there are plaques in the wall.

These are just a few of the many we passed. Our group amused ourselves as we walked along by trying to work out what the link was. There was a strong Graeco-Roman mythology theme – Nereids, Helen of Troy, Cupid, Telemachus and so on. The one that took us longest to work out was this:

Partenope seems to have been the subject of operas by Handel and, amazingly, Ennio Morricone, inter alia. The Handel offering seems to be par for the course for opera, involving unrequited love, love triangles and transvestitism. Various other operas involving Partenope have also been written, but we decided that the important thing was that Partenope was a mermaid siren, whose singing failed to tempt Odysseus, so she cast herself into the sea where the waves carried her body to the bay of Naples; the original Greek settlement there was called Partenope before the Romans renamed it. So the theme linking the plaques was Love. Who’d’a thunk it, eh? The theme was carried on by one of those tiresome love padlock walls towards the end

but at least we had a decent view at this point of the back end of Manarola.

To get to the start of our walk, we had to catch a train to Vernazza, and this was a reasonably fraught process, because the station was rammed. Rebecca had to urge us on to the train very volubly, as the train guards, in an attempt to stop the train falling even further behind time, have a habit of shutting the doors even as people are still trying to get on and off. Anyway, we all managed to get on, for an uncomfortable few minutes up the line to Vernazza.

The crowds were so bad that it took us a while even to get out of the station, and I pitied this poor tour guide.

I think there were about 50 people in her group and she was trying to marshal them and get them out of the station amid all the crowds. We did get out eventually, and the streets were exactly as crowded as one might have expected.

The well ‘ard mob got themselves some lunch, because they would be out all the day

and we pressed on

to the start of our walk.

The “official” time for the walk, therefore is two hours.  Hold that thought. Off we went, at first through the narrow back streets of Vernazza

but eventually emerging on to a path that led – imagine my surprise! – uphill. We got some wonderful views of Vernazza as we toiled our way along.

but the way was emphatically upwards.

You reach a spot where there’s an iconic view of the town

but it took me a while to get that shot because of all the fuckwits who wanted to make sure that the view included themselves.

And still upwards we went.

on a path that was really quite crowded, with people going in each direction.

As we reached the highest point of the path, we passed through a farm where disused terraces had been brought back into operation.

With the terrain as steep as it is in the Cinque Terre region, terracing is really the only way to farm the land – vines, olives, fruit trees. The whole region was once a vibrant agricultural region and a noted wine producer, ever since Roman times. The steep paths leading to and from the terraces were the only way to get between the villages on land, and the journey by sea was often the prime way of getting around.  The railway that opened around 1870 and connected the villages, ironically, was the knell of doom for the area, as it actually made it easy for people to move away, and so the drystone walls retaining the terraces fell into disrepair. Consequences of this were made most tragically clear in 2011 when a series of massive storms hit Europe, including Cyclone Meeno and Tropical Storm Rolf. Some 22 inches of rain fell in the region in four hours, and Monterosso and Vernazza were particularly hard hit when hundreds of tons of mud and debris were washed down through the town. There are some extraordinary pictures to be seen of the devastation and the comparison to the miraculous restoration over a period of just two years. Even now, there are warnings about the risk to this increasingly fragile environment.

The permits we bought, therefore, are an important part of maintaining the region’s infrastructure, and knowing about the floods and landslides goes a long way to explaining why the paths are as they are – with rustic steps that have been added and maintained over the years, as well as tricky passages of rough terrain which demand care to get over.

Another thing we learnt on this walk was the richness of the environment. I had thought that the Cinque Terre was just a set of pretty fishing villages, but actually, according to an info board we passed, “The vegetation of the Cinque Terre is very rich, in fact the list of the superior plants living there counts almost one thousand species, that is about 1/6 of the whole national flora and 1/3 of the regional one.” Agriculture, and particularly viticulture, was the hallmark of the area – the fishing villages schtick was a 19th-century piece of marketing to get more tourists to the region. The vibrant colours of the houses date more from this era than from olden times.

So, that farm represents a significant piece of progress in a hard-hit area.

Rebecca then sprang a surprise on us – a most welcome one – in the form of a rest stop.

The speciality of the place was freshly squeezed fruit juice, as could be seen from the entry

(though it sold beer, which I wish I’d known before I ordered juice) and was the scene of a very strange conversational passage. I was chatting to one of our group when the lass next to me on the other side chipped in on our conversation. Her name was Rachel, she was from Australia but had lived in the UK for a while. So the three of us chatted until the lady from our group went off to find the loo. To keep the conversation going, I fell back on the first rule of small talk, which is “talk about your companion’s favourite topic – themselves”. She was still of working age, so I thought I’d find out what her job was. Rather than just boringly ask “so what do you do, then?”, I asked her what she did to cover the bills. Her reply was “I don’t really want to talk about that”, which rather stumped me. She made her excuses and moved on soon after, leaving me wondering if I’d unwittingly committed some major social faux pas. The rest of our group took the piss out of me something shocking, and Rebecca particularly so, joking that Rachel clearly was on the game and that we’d made an appointment for an assignation later on.

Anyhoo….

It had taken us nearly two hours to reach the rest stop, despite the official hour and a half time on this sign. This was partly due to needing to rest, but also, I think, because progress was slow at times because of the crowds, which really put a brake on progress. (And, yes, gave us a chance to rest.) It then took us a little over half an hour to get down to Monterosso, which we caught sight of soon after the rest stop.

On the left above is the new town, which we’d seen on the first day’s hike, and on the right is the somewhat separated old town, which we headed to down, you guessed it, a steep path.

In several places we passed what Rebecca called a monorail

and that’s what it really is – a transport mechanism for the buckets full of grapes that had been hand picked, that being the only way to harvest in these steep terraces. We soon reached the checkpoint at the Monterosso end of the walk

and headed into the old town for a glass of something cold and some lunch, which included farinata, the Italian chickpea pancake, on offer in this place coming with pesto spread on it. I contented myself with a ham and cheese focaccia.

Rebecca then led us on a brief tour of the old town. Which was

fairly crowded, though not as rammed as the other, more accessible villages in the region. There are a fair few buildings of a religious persuasion dotted around the old town.  Firstly, we passed the main church, the Chiesa di San Giovanni Battista,

with its unusual 18-point rose window, and took a look inside.

It is very ornate, and has an amazing altar.

Next to it is the Oratorio Mortis et Orationis (Death and Prayer) – Confraternita dei Neri (Brotherhood of the Blacks).

The people who worked here wore black robes and provided burial services for the less fortunate and prayed for the souls of the dead.

There’s also the Oratorio di Santa Croce o dei Bianchi, another building very much in the Florentine style,

and also very ornate inside.

Until the 17th century, this was the HQ of the Confraternity of the Bianchi (“Whites”), so called because of the colour of the robes they wore during processions. Their task was to manage the hospital and care for the sick. I am guessing that the model ship hanging from the ceiling is the same as those we saw on the Camino, placed there by grateful sailors who have successfully returned from voyages. Although not entirely rammed, there were still tour groups moving through to add to the general throng.

There were some shops on the main street that offered some attractive retail therapy for some of our group, so while they shopped, I headed back for another coffee and then we walked through the 1870s-era tunnel that led through to the new town in order to catch the train home. In a side niche in the tunnel, Jane spotted this unusual installation.

In the new town, we bade farewell to the beaches

and if you look carefully, in the distance you can see Vernazza, our starting point for this walk. We were headed north out of the region, so our platform was reasonably clear, but the one for the other direction was crowded with tour groups

not all of whom were dressed in the most decorous fashion.

Whatever….

We were soon back at the hotel, and after the obligatory shower and change, back on the terrace for pre-dinner drinks. There was no official hike arranged for the next day; we had a day at our own leisure. I suppose we could have spent it lazing round at the hotel or on the beach, but we didn’t. Acting on a tip from Tomaso, we went for a walk. Obviously. To find out where we went, stay tuned!

 

 

 

 

Day 2 – Corniglia to Vernazza – It ain’t Easy

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Monday 15 June 2025* – I expect you’re on tent hooks, waiting to hear whether we took the easy way today or not. I’m hoping the ambiguity of the headline will pique your curiosity for a little longer.

In the interim, I thought I might expand a little upon the group, as the eight of us, plus Rebecca, Tomaso and Trevor, were beginning to get to know each other better. The most important thing is that the group is one of great affability, possibly because all of us punters are pretty much of the same (“a certain”) age, at least as far as inference will take us, since perish the thought that one should actually ask how old someone is. Jane and I are the only couple among the group; everyone else is a solo traveller, though not necessarily (again, one doesn’t ask) single; and I am not the token male, since there’s one other chap in the group. A couple of them are really well ‘ard and always up for the longer, more challenging of the two walks on offer; among the rest, the exercise preference varies from low to medium. After yesterday’s expedition, Jane and I have decided that we belong in this latter group. A few have some previous with HF Holidays, which makes the fact that they have come on another one a source of comfort to us newbies. Fundamentally we all get on really well, which is lovely.

Our guides are Rebecca,

a Yorkshire lass who married a local (who used to own the hotel we’re staying in, by the way) and who exudes laughter, energy and positivity, and Tomaso,

who is astonishingly knowledgeable about all sorts of things to do with the region and the country, being a qualified guide for no fewer than half of the twenty regions of Italy.

All we had to do was to decide whether to take the longer or shorter walk today. The choice was between an 8km or a 12km walk. In the UK, the longer distance is something we would undertake without pause for thought – on our Camino and Francigena walks, our daily average was 20km. But then again, there was yesterday’s lesson about Cinque Terre walking – the choice is not between “easy” and “hard”, but between “shorter” and longer”.

Reader, we chose the shorter one, from Corniglia, the middle of the five Cinque Terre villages, to Vernazza, its next door neighbour to the north west. And it was still hard. And it taught us some more lessons about walking in the Cinque Terre region. Since we’d started in Monterosso and gone northwards, yesterday’s walk had not actually been in the official Cinque Terre region, a national park which extends south-east from Monterosso down to Riomaggiore. So, today’s walk was our first walk actually in the Cinque Terre National Park.

I had had a sort of hazy mental picture of our week spent on reasonably gentle strolls between neighbouring villages which were only a few kilometres apart. After all, if you go on to Garmin Connect and request a hiking route across all five villages, you get this:

Admittedly there’s a lumpy bit in the middle (the coastal path is closed at the moment due to landslides, so you have to go into the hills), but the whole thing is 15km and involves less than a kilometre’s ascent. It’s just a stiff day’s walk, surely? What could possibly go wrong?

Quite a lot, as it turns out. For example, you need a permit. Who knew? Rebecca had given us a slip of paper on yesterday evening’s briefing which she said was absolutely necessary to be able to do today’s walk, and that we absolutely must not lose it and absolutely must have it with us at all times. (It’s still wedged in my phone case, a week later; I must get round to digging it out at some stage.) It was a dual-purpose pass, allowing us unlimited rail travel between the villages as well as entry to the Cinque Terre, which, as I’ve said earlier, is a National Park. I just hadn’t realised that its National Park status meant that access could be restricted.  The paper that Rebecca handed out was a two-day permit for the park plus a two-day rail pass for the area. A fairly important piece of paper, then.

As well as the pass, we were given a warning about pickpockets, who can be active around the stations. The advice was not to wear the backpack, as things could be taken, literally, behind your back.

Tomaso was our guide for the day, and one of the first things he told us was some background about getting between the villages. Initially, the only way had been by sea, until Victorian times, when railway tunnels were bludgeoned through the hills that separate them. (This sounds like a good idea but, ironically, wasn’t, as I’ll explain in a later post, if I remember.) Today’s railway doesn’t follow the original rail route, but the principle is the same; the railway is the best way to get between the villages and the journey from one end to the other takes just a few minutes. By road, it would take ages, on roads so rudimentary that Google Maps won’t actually suggest them as a driving route. On foot, as we discovered yesterday, it’s hard work involving walking up at least one steep hill and then down again.

Most of the villages are coastal villages, which stretch along river valleys perpendicular to the coastline back towards the hills. Our starting point today was Corniglia, which is the exception, because the lowest point of the village is about 90m above sea level – it’s perched on a hillside. Its train station, however, is at the same level as all the other stations – near sea level. So, having taken the 0849 “Cinque Terre Express” train from Bonassola to Corniglia, which was busy but not ridiculously so, the first thing we had to do was to get from the station to the village. This involves walking to the end of the platform

and then up some steps.

Let me just emphasise the steps for you.

Those are the visible ones, but, like Groucho Marx’s principles, there are others, and these can’t easily be seen. I believe that there is a bus service, but our hardy group of five decided that we should walk up. I counted the steps, mainly to distract myself from the rigours of the task at hand, or rather at foot.  At exactly 100 steps, there’s a bench, but it was occupied by a chap who was selling tat, or who would have been had he not been busy talking on his phone. At about 150 steps, one gets this view back, showing that there are still vine terraces in operation today.

At about 250 steps, there’s another bench

and it marks about two-thirds of the way up. From here, you can see the back end of the next Cinque Terre village to the south east, Manarola.

I counted 380 steps, which agrees approximately with one of the official versions of how many steps there actually are. A sod of a lot of ’em, that’s for sure.

We took a short stroll round Corniglia, stopping outside its church, Chiesa Di San Pietro.

From the outside, we could see stained glass

so we looked in.

The Cinque Terre villages are in the Liguria region of Italy, and one of the architectural characteristics of the region is a widespread use of trompe l’oeil to decorate the buildings. There really is very high quality work on display.

The shutters are real, but the brickwork is painted.

Being so high up, there are some nice little vignettes on offer to the alert photographer, such as this one,

whose colours and composition particularly appealed to me. The town itself is picturesque

with some original shopfronts still visible,

and it soon becomes clear what local produce the town is proud of.

The town has a pretty central square

with a First World War Memorial statue at its centre which has a rather haunting visage.

We stopped for coffee at a recently-opened, modern coffee shop

which provided coffee Italian-style, meaning very tasty but not hot enough. I think Italians view coffee as something you neck in passing rather than a treat to be savoured (there was nowhere to sit in this place), so no matter how often one asks for it “molto calda”, it comes only lukewarm, which is a shame.  It’s also about time that the flat white was accepted among Italian coffee shops, as this is easier to ask for than a latte macchiato con doppio espresso.

We continued through the picturesque corners of this pretty town

getting occasional views along the coast back towards Monterosso

and up the hills to the village that has grown up around the Church of the Madonna of San Bernadino.

before embarking on the real meat of the day’s walk, meaning some serious uphill work. Tomaso helpfully explained the scope of what we had to achieve, which was to get up to and past that blue house.

Yes, that one, there.

Hard work in prospect, therefore, but it did mean that we got a good view back down to Corniglia.

It also meant that we formally entered the National Park, so we had to show our passes at a checkpoint

where the strictures placed upon us were laid out,

including being abjured to wear suitable footwear.  We were all in proper walking shoes, but apparently there have been cases of people in flip-flops actually being fined! I had considered walking in Teva sandals, but was (correctly) persuaded that this was not a good idea.

Off we went, then, on a well-marked path,

which shows that the entry fee does go towards maintenance and other support infrastructure.

The path was initially some reasonably gentle steps,

but which soon became less well-structured

and considerably steeper, leading both up and down.

But mainly up.

The ascent worked us hard on a hot day (temperatures approaching 30°C) but at least gave us striking views back to Corniglia as we moved along the coast.

We were by no means the only people walking on the track,

but as it turned out, this was, relatively speaking, an uncrowded day.  We were on the sentiero azzuro, the blue path, which is probably the most popular walking route between the villages. Tomaso told us that it can get very crowded, to the point where, on some days, the authorities only allow walking in one direction. So we were lucky – just enough people to allow our “good manners” to enable a bit of a rest now and then to let others by.

We passed an installation called the “Third Paradise”

which was a rather pretentious tribute to the intersection between the natural and human worlds or some such tosh. Colourful stick, though.

We’d done the uphill work by then, so when we came to this,

“Il Gabbiano”, The Seagull, which markets itself as the half way point, the natural thing would have been to declare some kind of a rest stop. Sadly, Tomaso seems immune to these sorts of blandishments, and so we carried on, starting our descent past a (closed) tourist information office,

another possible rest stop

where we could even have had a game of darts had we so wished,

or joined a teddy bears’ picnic

but we soldiered on regardless. Again, we got a good view of Monterosso further up the coast

and then embarked on quite a steep descent.

If you look carefully. you can see people on that path down there. Yes, you can.

Down and down we went.

envying the people having a nice cool swim in the cove below us,

but our flagging spirits were revived with our first sighting of our destination, Vernazza.

It’s a very attractive scene. At one point, looking across, we could see that there were people on top of the watch tower.

Soon thereafter we passed the exit checkpoint for the trail

and arrived in the town

the main streets of which were rammed.

At this point, a comment by a Swedish friend of ours suddenly made sense.  When she noted we were headed here, her comment was, “Ah, yes – the touristy Cinque Terre”. The advice we’d been given about pickpockets also began to resonate, too.

At this point we gained some benefit from not having stopped at Il Gabbiano, as we had over an hour in which to take some lunch in Vernazza. Looking around, it seemed that there were precious few restaurants which could fit us in, but Jane had spotted a small, shady terrace outside a place called the Lunch Box

where there was room for us to partake of a focaccia, a glass of something cold

and a visit to the facilities (well, facility, singular), the entry to which was engagingly disguised.

As well as today’s walk, we were scheduled to visit one of the other Cinque Terre towns, Manarola, a couple of stops down the track, so we cast ourselves back into the melee

and headed for the station, where it really did make sense to take one’s backpack off to be sure it wasn’t rifled. What with a really crowded platform, delayed trains and the importance of getting on a train before they shut the doors, Tomaso managed to get us onto the wrong train and so we got an impromptu tour of La Spezia station before heading back to Manarola. Just outside its station is a very striking mosaic,

round the outside of which are painted a variety of species of fish.

The town itself was pretty

and, yes, crowded.  A theme begins to emerge, here.

Tomaso led us on a quick walk around the town, past the harbour where lads were showing off by jumping off a rock,

to a wonderful view back across the town.

From this point, looking the other way, up the coast, we could see our original departure point for the morning’s walk, Corniglia, and get a further sense of the walk up from the station to the town,

enjoying the schadenfreude of seeing lots of others toiling up the steps where this morning we had suffered. Finally, we walked past a status of Our Lady Of The Grapes

and, stopping only for a Basil Gelato, caught the train back to Bonassola. We were pretty tired when we got back to the hotel, so a rest and a mug of Twinings finest Earl Grey were very welcome.

So, Rule 1 of the Cinque Terre held fast – the walk might have been only 5.5km, but it was hot and hard work; and during the day we were introduced to Rule 2: it’s crowded.

At the pre-prandial drinks briefing, we were offered a choice for the next day’s hiking – a long walk between Vernazza and Monterosso or a short one (Rule 1 told us that neither would in any sense be easy). It will not be difficult for you to guess which one we opted for, but you’ll have to read the next post to confirm your theory. See you there!

 

 

*  Look, I know that today’s date is 22nd June, a full week later than the walk described above. I apologise for the lacuna, but the days between then and now have been so full-on that I haven’t had time or energy to do my usual daily write-ups. I hope that your being able to chuckle at our discomfort at slogging up and down steep hills in indescribable heat makes up for my dilatoriness.