Backpacking in Cinque Terre, part 1

I know this is taking me a long time to post all of this trip but the last part of our European adventure was the best.  A friend told us of an amazing national park called Cinque Terre “5 lands” so we looked into it.  turns out it’s a place where no cars are allowed and the only way to get from city to city is by bus or by ferry.  We knew it was our kind of place when we found a hiking trail spanning about 10 kilometers which went through all 5 of the coastal villages in Cinque Terre. 

From Venice we took an all day train to La Spezia which is on the south side of Cinque Terre.  That night we were delighted to have a jazz festival right outside of our hostel.  We hung out at the city just long enough to find dinner and take a ferry in the morning into Cinque Terre.

The ferry dropped us off in Riomagiorre which was the first of the five towns that we would be hiking through.

The first part of the hike was called Via dell’Amore which means The Lovers Walk.  It was tradition for tourists I guess to come and hook up a lock to the fence or the gates to prove you love is eternal.  Tamanna and I forgot our lock but we did carve out names into the rock and we figured that was good enough.  We didn’t spend too much time in the first city since we were continuing to hike all day.  the second city was Manarola.

We stopped and had lunch here in Manarola, the Bruschetta and pizza was delicious.  We wanted to hike between all of the towns but we were informed that we had to take a train to the next town due to a land landslide on the trail.  So we hopped a train and headed to Corniglia.  The train ride was no longer than 2 minutes which made us think maybe we should just keep taking the trains between cities but something about hiking along the coast just seemed to enjoyable to pass up.  Corniglia is the only city that doesn’t have a beach front location due to the position it is at on top of a cliff.  We had to walk up 382 stairs from the train station to get to it.

The pictures are not doing justice for this trip and neither is this post but these days in Cinque Terre were awesome.  We walked right through this town and headed to the next called Vernazza.  By this time it was mid day, and the sun was shining in full force.  We weren’t quite sure what we were getting into by hiking from town to town but this leg of the hike from Corniglia to Vernazza was an eye opener.  It was steep and hot, but not just hot it was really hot.  Tamanna and I felt a little overdressed compared to the people we were seeing on the trail.  We had t-shirts, shorts and two big backpacks plus our camera bags.  everyone had shorts  or bikinis and maybe sports bras.  We were in the Italian Riviera during the hottest season and we were feeling it.

Vernazza had a beautiful beach and it was tempting.  Everyone was swimming and we really were sweaty so a little dip in the Mediterranean sounded good to us.  In fact every town had wonderful swimming available.  We figured that we would come back to Vernazza the next day so we spent some time just chilling and finding some cool things to do but we continued onto our last destination of the day, Monterosso.

Monterosso was a beautiful town to walk into.  We weren’t quite sure if we would make it, we were very tired at the end of the day and as soon as we arrived we called up our contact for our accommodation and he took us up to our house.  We got luck in Monterosso because instead of a hostel we had a house for two nights which was out of town and actually the picture above is taken from outside on our porch.  It was situated in lemon and olive orchard and it smelled great and everything about it was great.

That night we slept well and long.  Hiking all day had worn us out and doing all this travelling in a different time zone was starting to get to us…(read part 2 for what happened the next day)