Day 27
Day 27
Friday, September 8, 2006
Monterosso, Italy
Another day in paradise started out just like all of the others, with a trip to Bar Davi, a small café halfway between our hotel room and the beach. We learned over the course of our day that depending on the service of the sole waitress/proprietor? Breakfast could take anywhere between 20 min and an hour. After, our breakfast of cereal, yogurt, and cappuccino we headed back to the hotel to prepare for the days hike. We got our eurails, plenty of sunscreen, and swimsuits and set of for the train station. We took the train for the short trip down to the other end of Cinque Terra, a town called Riomaggio.
We located the trail head and after some confusion over paying for a hiking pass we set off on a flat, paved path with railings that with the exception of a few stairs would have been wheelchair accessible. We crawled along the way to the next town trapped amidst a hoard of tour bus patrons, passing snack stands and at one point walking through a covered colonnaded walkway filled with “street” musicians. We weren’t expecting this kind of thing in a national park. Fortunately it turned out that it was just this short 1 km path to the next town, Manarola, which was know as the lover’s walk and filled with the less adventuresome type of tourists. From then on the path went up, got steep and rocky and there were definitely no more handrails. In the third town, after ascending a huge ziz-zag staircase up to Corniglia, we found ourselves hundreds of feet above the ocean in a tiny town that huddled onto the cliffs, all around the town were vineyards with a system of rollercoaster like carts for transporting the grapes back up the steep terraces to the town. We stopped for a pizza lunch in the fourth town, Vernaza, and afterwards we went swimming in the harbor, which was much saltier and therefore more buoyant than the beach in Monterosso.
We finished our hike back over to Monterosso and took a brief rest at the hotel before heading back out to the beach to go swimming for a while. We set out for dinner kind of late and all of the restaurants seemed to be full, we ended up eating at a small little outdoor café in the plaza next to the elevated train tracks. Right as we were paying for dinner, we heard fireworks going off on the other side of Monterosso, but by the time we made it over there they were pretty much done. There were however a bunch of floating candles in the water and it was a very beautiful scene, even if we had no idea what the celebration was about. We listened to a violinist for a little while before heading back to the hotel for the night.
Friday, September 8, 2006
Monterosso, Italy
Another day in paradise started out just like all of the others, with a trip to Bar Davi, a small café halfway between our hotel room and the beach. We learned over the course of our day that depending on the service of the sole waitress/proprietor? Breakfast could take anywhere between 20 min and an hour. After, our breakfast of cereal, yogurt, and cappuccino we headed back to the hotel to prepare for the days hike. We got our eurails, plenty of sunscreen, and swimsuits and set of for the train station. We took the train for the short trip down to the other end of Cinque Terra, a town called Riomaggio.
We located the trail head and after some confusion over paying for a hiking pass we set off on a flat, paved path with railings that with the exception of a few stairs would have been wheelchair accessible. We crawled along the way to the next town trapped amidst a hoard of tour bus patrons, passing snack stands and at one point walking through a covered colonnaded walkway filled with “street” musicians. We weren’t expecting this kind of thing in a national park. Fortunately it turned out that it was just this short 1 km path to the next town, Manarola, which was know as the lover’s walk and filled with the less adventuresome type of tourists. From then on the path went up, got steep and rocky and there were definitely no more handrails. In the third town, after ascending a huge ziz-zag staircase up to Corniglia, we found ourselves hundreds of feet above the ocean in a tiny town that huddled onto the cliffs, all around the town were vineyards with a system of rollercoaster like carts for transporting the grapes back up the steep terraces to the town. We stopped for a pizza lunch in the fourth town, Vernaza, and afterwards we went swimming in the harbor, which was much saltier and therefore more buoyant than the beach in Monterosso.
We finished our hike back over to Monterosso and took a brief rest at the hotel before heading back out to the beach to go swimming for a while. We set out for dinner kind of late and all of the restaurants seemed to be full, we ended up eating at a small little outdoor café in the plaza next to the elevated train tracks. Right as we were paying for dinner, we heard fireworks going off on the other side of Monterosso, but by the time we made it over there they were pretty much done. There were however a bunch of floating candles in the water and it was a very beautiful scene, even if we had no idea what the celebration was about. We listened to a violinist for a little while before heading back to the hotel for the night.
posted by idiovoyager at 12:49 AM
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