My feet doth protest too much, but they protest for good reason. Yesterday, in light that it was one of the few remaining Saturdays I have left in Italy, I decided to do something. And do something I did. By word of mouth it was made known to me that Cinque Terre was one of the most beautiful and worthwhile places to see whilest in Italy. I said, okay, so my good friend Jenna accompanied me to this lands of five.
I discovered while attempting to find cheap train rides last minute, as I do, that Cinque Terre is not actually a town but the area in which these five towns reside: Monterosso, Vernazza, Corniglia, Manarola, and Riomaggiore. Travel between these towns for tourists consists of two main ways: train or walking. Now the term walking here doesn't apply to the casual strolling about or even power walking with weights. No, no, here, it means hiking crazy earth and rock paths that zig zag their ways with and through the natural and agricultural elements that dress these costal hills.
We had heard that the difficulty levels of each of the paths varied but that the path from Monterosso to Vernazza was the most difficult and took two hours. Our logic went accordingly: if we start with the hardest first, then the other ones will seem to grow gradually easier. That seems like sound logic, right? As flawless as we thought it to be it still didn't change the fact that the path was still miserable. Twisting and turning. Going up and up and up, down a little, and then up some more, fighting gravity on the way up and fighting gravity on the way down. Sometimes the path would lose a few sizes around the waist line and become wide enough for one barely one person. But as horrible as we make the path of death sound, I never will regret a single step or sweat drop. The view from the top was truly astounding, standing facing the sea that stretched to the far horizon line where it finally kissed the sky, it felt as though the whole world was at your feet. And looking out at the stretch of watery blue with no traces of end you could understand the fear of the first travelers had and you become overwhelmed by the amount of courage it would have taken to dare venture to something you couldn't see.
Also, another cool thing about that particular trail was we met the U.S. Ambassador of Geneva who was on a weekend holiday and talked to her for the last hour of the hike from Monterosso to Vernazza.
When we finished, we celebrated our accomplishment with a high five and never has a high five ever felt more worth it. After relaxing in Vernazza for two hours and getting a bandage from a waitress to cover a scrape I got from a fall (surprise, surprise), we hiked from Vernazza to Corniglia.
Now I would like say that the rest of the paths were closed and that's why we didn't hike them, but that would be lying. And you know what my mother says about lying: save it for special occasions. (just kidding, Margaret Dix is a saint and would have never taugh me something so scrupleless). However, a concession I will make on our behalf is that if we did hike them all, not only would our legs have fallen off but we wouldn't have made our train ride back home. So instead of hiking we took the train and stopped at each of the city, ate some food, but spent most of the time just sitting on the rocks beside the sea, watching overcast light gently caress the waves and the ocean pounding its fists against the rocky coast line, pushing all its weight into each shove yet yielding little gain.
Then, after close calls on missing our two trains back to Florence and being lucky enough to not get fined for not having stamped our ticket with the time validation thing, we returned home. Exhausted, but changed.
Until Next Time!
Ciao!
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