Category Archives: Walking

Day 6 – The Most Expensive G&T In The World?

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Friday 19 June 2026 – At yesterday’s briefing, we had been, as usual, presented with a choice between two walks. The main difference would be pace, with a well ‘ard group simply walking a little faster and doing a couple of extra kilometres before being set free to get some refreshment. I actually put my name down for that, because it didn’t seem, on the basis of the information to hand, to be too arduous, just slightly longer. However, on the day, given that the forecast was for temperatures in the 30s (yes! almost as hot as the UK where I write this one week later!) I chickened out and joined the shorter walk. Which turned out not to be shorter at all. Or even much slower. But it was still chickening out.

Anyhoo, for both groups the end point would be the same: the jewel of the Italian Riviera – Portofino.

Our start point was a place called Camogli, which would be a boarding point for a boat ride and which Tomaso said was-a nice-a place, so I expected another charming fishing village. Wrongly, as it turned out. Camogli is 38km as the crow flies from Bonassola, but as the bus drives it’s over double that distance and takes an hour and a half. The bus we were in was the same (horrible, noisy, cramped, uncomfortable) bus that had brought us in from the airport the previous weekend. And it dropped us in the middle, it seemed, of a city. Which is fair enough, what with Camogli being a city an’ all, just not what I’d expected. It didn’t seem like-a nice-a place at all, particularly since the bus had to drop us off some distance from where we had to board the boat. There seemed to be other tourist groups as well, as we trooped off to find our quay.

We passed a point where we could look further along the coast, and could actually make out the city of Genoa in the distance.

Then abruptly we turned right down some steps, and we could see why Tomaso liked the town.

There were lots of steps down through some typically Italian narrow streets, and some very fine trompe l’oeil on the buildings.

The harbour itself is very attractive,

and the structure of the town is unusual, as can be seen from a map.

You can see that  there is a peninsula jutting out from the mainland; originally this was an island (hence being called L’isola) reached by a bridge, and this was the original old town. We went for a look round, but only after having bought our lunch, at a focaccieria specifically recommended by Tomaso.

The main component of l’isola is a church, the Basilica di Santa Maria Assunta.

To get to it requires climbing steps which then gives one a decent view back over the harbour,

and, looking the other way, the town beach.

Outside the church is a lovely tiled description of L’isola

above a patterned courtyard.

The church itself is, once again, sumptuously appointed, with some gorgeous painted illustrations and decoration

and some colourful stained glass.

We had a few moments before our boat departed, so I wandered round taking some more photos of the harbour.

The rather colourful boat shown above is “U Dragun“, a symbol of Camogli, a hybrid sail- and rowing boat, known for its traditional design and used in historic re-enactments and festivals.

As we boarded our boat, we noted that someone, sadly, had lost their hat,

but there were lots of places that would have sold a replacement, so probably not a tragedy. Soon, we were off and could see the slightly surreal frontage of the city – all those uniform buildings with their uniform dark windows staring at the world.  Attractive, but slightly unsettling at the same time.

It was a short trip, just round the headland to a place called San Fruttuoso. The reason we were going by boat is that it can only be accessed on foot or by sea. It’s well-known for its abbey,

a Benedictine monastery dating back to the year 1000. It’s also a miniature beach resort, of course,

and, unusually, something of a centre for scuba diving. In the abbey is a statue called “Christ of the Abyss”.

which is a replica of a statue which has been placed in the waters of the bay in memory of Dario Gonzatti, the first Italian to use scuba gear in his dives, who tragically died near this spot in 1947. It’s at a depth of about 17 metres, and is garlanded with flowers every July by scuba divers in memoriam.

We had to walk around the back of the abbey to get to the start of our trail, and this gave us some more views of the village.

We passed an old lavatoio,

which would once have been where the public could wash their clothes, and walked between a restaurant and its terrace,

which looked like a wonderful place to have said “sod it, it’s too hot, let’s have lunch”, but we pressed on. The sea was a wonderful colour. It would have been a lovely lunchtime view on that terrace. Sigh.

It almost immediately became obvious that my hopes for a gentle uphill gradient for our walk were completely misplaced.

Bugger. That lunch-on-the-terrace idea was an increasingly attractive proposition at this point. But we soldiered on. To give you some idea of the climb, here’s a view of a Saracen watchtower taken early on.

And here’s the view of the same watchtower taken some 37 minutes later.

Between these two shots, this is the terrain we had to deal with.

We got a final view of San Fruttuoso

before – finally! – making it to our lunch spot,

where, amusingly, the well ‘ard set were still having lunch. We shooed them off so we could have ours, and then pressed on. The views continued to be lovely

but the trend, annoyingly, continued to be upwards,

albeit past some lovely views.

I see some cypresses have escaped from Tuscany

I discovered this boat is called Sea Cloud II, operated by Sea Cloud Cruises

The path levelled out a fraction and we came across, of all things, a lamppost! With a light bulb still in it!

Then there were more, and it became clear that we’d reached an outpost of civilisation, a small hamlet called Prato, where there was a water point.

Rebecca invited us to refill our water bottles, but we didn’t, because we still had plenty left. The general manic focus on water and hydration was a bit puzzling to Jane and me. We were enjoined to take litres and litres of the stuff with us, and each of us had a couple of water bottles in our backpacks; hers were 800ml and mine were 500. In all the walking in all the heat, we never needed to broach mine – I simply carried the same water up and down all the hills we’d covered. And yet we didn’t go thirsty at any point. Sure, the beers at the end of the walks were very welcome, but I found the dichotomy of what we were told we needed and what we actually drank a bit of a mystery.

Anyhow, the route to Portofino was all downhill from here, which at first seemed like a good idea,

leading us past a fantastic view of the town of Portofino,

but the path soon degenerated into steps.

Lots of the fuckers.

I had been perfectly all right going down steep slopes for the past few days, but for my right knee, these steps were the last straw. By the time I walked into Portofino, it was clear that All Was Not Well. I wasn’t crippled; walking straight and level was OK, but anything other needed care, concentration and, preferably a handrail. Didn’t stop me from joining the others at the Dolce & Gabbana bar for a glass (or, in my case, two) of something cold, though. We were joined there by the well ‘ard set, who were supposed to have done extra kilometrage out to the Portofino lighthouse and back, but it was too hot, poor dears.  Actually, in their defence, I think they took a longer route from the top down to Portofino which involved a more gentle descent – longer and hotter, maybe, but their knees were still working when they got down.

I was expecting Portofino to be (a) larger and (b) more impressive than it actually is. It’s by no means unattractive

but nothing outstandingly different from the sort of places we’d seen over the last days. It is, though, at the heart of the Italian Riviera and has a reputation of being very up-market. Well, anywhere that’s got a Dolce & Gabbana shop that doubles as a bar is likely to be on the posh side. So I was not particularly surprised to see the bar bill.

I had the gin and “Portofinese Gold” (perfectly nice beer in a very fancy bottle), and Jane had the spremuta – freshly squeezed OJ. Naif that I am, I don’t think I’ve ever paid over £20 for a G&T before. I’m not complaining, by the way – I knew it was going to be expensive. But I thought the prices worth commenting on, you understand. Actually the chap at the till was all over the place and initially wanted to charge me €90, but I’d only had a couple of drinks, so I was wise to his game.

We had to make a reasonably swift departure to catch the boat for a further short cruise round the Portofino headland. Out we went,

past the Splendido Hotel, which is a Belmond gaff, and thus thoroughly in line with the up-market values espoused by the Portofino set,

and the Portofino lighthouse that the well ‘ard set had so signally failed to get to.

The destination for our short ferry ride was the next town along the headland, Santa Margherita Ligure. It has the same slightly unsettling uniformity of architecture in the houses along the sea front, so it’s obviously A Thing in these parts.

It’s a very fine town,

with the usual crop of top-notch trompe l’oeil décor

but we had no time to stop and stare, as our bus was waiting for us so we could bump and grind our way back to Bonassola in time for a slightly delayed evening briefing and drinkies before dinner. Today was our last walk, and we had to return home on the morrow, so the briefing was kind of important in order that we understood the timings for the day. My knee being in the state it was, I was rather grateful that the hotel had a lift to get me to the fourth floor terrace for that…

Our official flight time home the next seemed quite reasonable, but because of the potential for cock-ups courtesy of the EES, we had to make an early start. The day turned out not to be entirely uneventful and I will detail it in the next post, which will be the valedictory entry for what has been an excellent, if quite sweaty, week.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Day 5 – Campiglia to (almost) Porto Venere and That Boat Ride Back

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Thursday 18 June 2026 – As was usual, we were offered two walks. The end point would be Porto Venere, a town at the southern end of a finger of land beside the major port of La Spezia, which itself lies south of the Cinque Terre National Park. This would be the departure point for a boat ride back along the coast. And, as usual, we opted for the shorter one, as (a) it started with a taxi ride up into the hills which obviated the need for the steep uphill climb on offer with the other walk in the (b) forecast temperatures of over 30°C. I therefore had the hope that our route would be largely level with only a bit (or possibly a massive amount, stay tuned) of downhill.

Some hope.

Anyway, Rebecca, Tomaso and all of we punters took the train to Riomaggiore, the furthest of the Cinque Terre villages. Rebecca took off up into the hills with the usual well ‘ard team, and the rest of us followed Tomaso. There was a nice echo of the Castellaners of Catalunya as we exited the station,

and I managed to get a shot which combined two elements of our Italian exerience:

Tomaso’s unwavering focus on being a guide; and a taxi rank that featured three taxis but no driver.  Eventually, a driver did turn up, clutching a focaccia or some such, and we all climbed on board so we could be taken up to Campiglia, a tiny village in the hills. The taxi dropped us off by a terrace of shaded tables which looked like it was made for sitting and drinking coffee at, and which offered a decent view over the surroundings. This, by the way, is the spot where the well ‘ard team would be walking up to and taking their lunch. This would be an ascent of some 500m over 6.5km, so now you know why we opted out.

Across the street from the terrace was Erbo Gianco, a place that outwardly seemed a rather unpromising grocery store

but which was actually a tiny miracle perpetrated in this hamlet in the middle of nowhere.

Luca, its owner, deftly prepared us focaccie for our lunches and coffee to help us on our way.

The shop is the single alimentaria for all of Campiglia, and, as well as supplying the villagers, is a popular place for hikers and other passers-by to stop for a break.

Coffee quaffed, we set off. We had a way to go, with the intriguing possibilities offered by the “Green Caravan”, a place where we could take our lunch and which might even be open to sell us something cold and refreshing.

On the outskirts of the village (i.e. in about 20 yards) we came across the local parish church, Chiesa Cattolica Parrocchiale di Santa Caterina.

It was open, so we looked in.

It had another of those processional crosses that we first saw in Bonassola.

If I understood it correctly, it’s not an active church, but is a popular venue for weddings.

The path led in a satisfactorily level kind of way

past the remains of an old windmill

and rather pleasingly downhill through woodland,

before reaching a fork, where we turned left on the Alta Via del Golfo (AVG). (AV5T is the Alta Via del Cinque Terre, the High Path that started way over in Levanto.)

Much of the path was OK,

except for the odd tricky bit.

Sadly, the basically level nature of the path was a temporary phenomenon. As usual, when you get to a decision point on these kind of hiking holidays, to quote Yazz and the Plastic Population, “The Only Way Is Up”.

We had, indeed, come down a fair way, as was shown by the view we got back towards Campiglia

which was revealed to be a bit larger than I had expected from the part we saw. We headed along a military road, through a quarry

where the local “marble” had been taken. It’s not real marble, meaning sedimentary limestone, but it’s a stone that polishes to a fine shine – dark with white veins through it. The rock we saw didn’t look that dark, and, although he hadn’t got his polishing machinery with him, Tomaso demonstrated  what he meant by wetting a small chunk,

which gives an idea of what the finished article might look like. In some cases, the veins are of a golden colour.

We were heading steadily and occasionally steeply uphill, and arrived at the high point, where I thought that, even though I didn’t have the drone with me, I’d indulge in a bit of aerial photography,

and we finally reached a view of La Spezia that had been threatening to become visible for the last few hundred metres of upward trail. And it really was quite a view.

The naval military area of La Spezia is huge;

everything to the left of and below the harbour bar in the photo above is the La Spezia arsenal – a town within a town. As well as the city, we could see across to the Carrara mountains.

The white areas are (real) marble, the posh Carrara marble that can be seen in posh places, such as the Sheik Zayed Mosque in Abu Dhabi, which must singlehandedly have consumed a mountain or two from the range.

The path then became a pleasantly downhill dirt road,

suitable for vehicular access to the quarries we’d passed, and indeed we weren’t alone on the track.

We pottered along past a viewpoint which showed us that there was an island, Palmaria, at the very tip of the finger, and gave us a sight of the castle and church at the extreme edge of Porto Venere,

and, at closer range, a Scarce Swallowtail Butterfly.

It wasn’t that scarce, actually. There were at least three of ’em, and I was glad to get this shot when one perched, un-butterfly-like, for a few instants.

Continuing downhill, we came at last to the Green Caravan, which

was closed. A sign told us that it would open in a few days’ time, which was a fat lot of good. But we found some shady patches and ate our lunches there anyway.

The walking route from the Green Caravan, which is formally identified on Google Maps as “Gitana on the road“, to Porto Venere has an exceedingly steep downhill end section. Rebecca had mentioned that there were some 2,000 steps to go down and as far as I can tell, these took one down 250m vertical in one kilometre – that’s one in four. We said “bollocks” to that, and  Tomaso organised a cab to take us the rest of the way down. Thus it was that we arrived on the outskirts of Porto Venere.

Entry to the town is through a medieval gate.

Beside the gate are some mystery objects.

These are actually measures – standard Genoese units at the time – which were used to enforce fair trading.  If I remember correctly, on the left is one for wine, in the middle for olive oil, and on the right, one for grain. On the other side of the gate is a frescoed arch

and the town is – would you believe it? – very attractive,

though some sartorial choices on view  were less aesthetically pleasing. The town was also, delightfully, relatively uncrowded.

We had the chance to visit the church-and-castle that we’d seen from up in the hills.

The church is the Chiesa di San Pietro. We looked inside, of course. Entry is through a couple of magnificent doors.

and the inside is wonderfully calming. Remarkably there were very few people to intrude.

We walked back to the town,

which led past an intriguing tinkly shop.

and headed for the quay to board the ferry that would take us back towards home along the coast. This give us some decent departing views of Porto Venere and the castle

and then we had the chance – and the light – to take some photos of Riomaggiore, Manarola and Corniglia from the water, with the sun behind us. Forgive me here for a plethora of photos, but this was seeing the villages from a fantastic viewpoint.

Riomaggiore – New town to the left, old town to the right

Riomaggiore old town

Riomaggiore new town

Manarola

Corniglia

Corniglia

It made me think that we could have foregone all that bloody trekking up and down hills for days on end, and just taken the ferry.

Well, not quite, I suppose.

Anyway, we had to disembark at Vernazza in order to get back to the hotel in any kind of decent time, so we had another of those train journeys,

but got back to Bonassola with the feeling of great satisfaction about the day. Yes, it was hot and occasionally sweaty, but we’d seen some fantastic views and visited a couple of lovely places.

We had one more day’s walking as part of this trip, and it would be nowhere near the Cinque Terre, but much further to the north.  Perhaps it wouldn’t feature the sweaty toiling up and down hills that are such a hallmark of the Cinque Terre? Keep watching these pages to find out!

 

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!