Cinque Terre

After living on a backpack's worth of stuff for the night, Kevin and I checked out of our hostel tent and jumped on the train with that backpack to the northernmost town of Cinque Terre, Monterosso. It was a gorgeous day.


As mentioned before, Cinque Terre is a mountainous area made up of five little villages. Each of these villages is right on the West coast of Italy, overlooking the Mediterranean Sea. They are all very similar in appearance, full of little shops, public squares, and swimming areas. They are connected by a series of trails and visitors will commonly start at one and hike to the others in a day. They are also connected by a train that runs along the coast and stops at each of them. We took the hike.

Like I said, the weather that day was extremely beautiful. The sun was out, the sky was clear, and the water looked amazing. Of course, with the hot climate we had been experiencing in Italy and the fact that we were hiking for hours right in the middle of the day meant that we ended up totally dripping with sweat and worn out by the end of the day. We drank a lot of water that day. Now you know why the pictures you'll see here (with the exception of that one at the top that we took before the hike) are all of the fantastic views we saw and not of us; we looked gross.

Along the way we saw lots of people going both directions. Cinque Terre is clearly a popular destination for all kinds of people, especially on days like the one we had I'm sure. The greetings, excusings, and thankings given throughout the day were done in all kinds of languages. It was really quite amusing as we walked along to say and hear "Ciao. Hi! Bonjour! Excuse me. Gratze. Bye! Hallo. Thank you. Tschuss! Hello."

At the end of the hike, in the village of Riomaggiore, we were really tempted to go for a swim. We decided against it though, because we didn't really have the means to dry off and we didn't want to be wet on the train. We had to settle for some Gellato. I got one scoop of strawberry and one bannana. Kevin asked what would go well with the flavor he wanted (literally "what marries well" in Italian) and then when he got his cone the guy serving it said "just married" in English.

After a tiring afternoon of hiking we took a train back to the place where our stuff was stored, retrieved the bags, and got on another train to Florence.