The Wonderful Adventures in Cinque Terre

The pressure of adequately conveying my experience in Cinque Terre is making me stall on this blog. I sat here, in our um, quaint hotel lobby for a while trying to think of the best way to write how breathtaking, beautiful, fun, difficult, relaxing, energizing, exciting, amazing, and totally epic our adventure in that place was. I guess I’ll just write down what happened and hope that the perfection of the trip comes through on its own. (See handy dandy map again for reference.)

Twelve of us woke up early Friday morning to catch the 7:00 am train from Florence to Pisa to La Spezia to Corniglia, the “middle” town of the five towns. (Sarah Hanson took a different train with a friend, but she planned to meet us there.) The plan was to start the hike in Corniglia, hike to the next two towns, Vernazza and Monterosso al Mare, take a train to our hostel in Levanto, get to our hostel, then hike the next day to as many towns as we could before catching a train back to Florence. The train station in Florence is a couple minutes away from our hotel, so we easily got to the train station on time. Some people grabbed some good ol’ train station food, and we headed to our platform. (Let me pause here to say that everything about train stations and platforms reminds me of Harry Potter and old black and white films...aka, awesome.) Suddenly, everyone became a little flustered because there was some confusion about where our train was. There was one that said it left at 6:53...was that ours? We decided it was, and the second we ran on the train it began moving. Whew! First experience catching a train in Europe, done! We had to change trains in Pisa and then in La Spezia, but we made both of those. As we sat in the final train that was headed toward Corniglia, we suddenly stopped in the middle of a tunnel. We weren’t sure exactly how far from Corniglia we were, and thus how far from the ocean we were. As we stared at the blackness outside the windows, we began moving again. Darkness, darkness, darkness, then suddenly, OCEAN! Beautiful blue ocean all around us and below us! We had been going through a mountain along the coastline, and when the tunnel ended, we were at the sea! I screamed of course.

Corniglia was beautiful. We got off the train at around 10:30 to warm, sunny, and breezy weather, and I was ready to hike! We first tried to start on the trail near the station, but a woman in a booth-like structure told us we weren’t allowed to go because of the rockslides. We saw people walking toward Corniglia on the trail, so we asked her why they could walk it. “They live here,” she curtly said, and that was that. So we took the road for a while, but then found an opening to trail number seven about forty-five minutes into the hike, so we took the trail the rest of the way to Vernazza. The trail was the most beautiful I have ever seen. It hugged the side of the mountain with the view of the sea to our right almost the entire way.

Vernazza was...yep...beautiful. A teeny town built right between the sea and the mountains, the ocean water hit the rocks a couple feet from the front doors of the shops. We wandered around a bit finding sandwiches and small pizzas at different cafes and then ate our lunch by the water and talked about how we’re all actually coming HERE for our honeymoon (as opposed to Assisi and everywhere else we swore we were coming to on our honeymoon.) We didn’t want to stay too long, though. We still had to hike to the next town north, Monterosso, before then heading to Levanto to get to our hostel by 7:00 pm. On our way to Monterosso we ran into a ton of Americans, some from California, some from Mississippi, some from other places. It was so nice to stop for a while and talk to them and feel like we were back at home for a couple minutes.

When we arrived at Monterosso, all we could think about was getting to the water! We found the beach and ran to take off our shoes and dunk our feet in the freezing ocean water. It was one of the most beautiful days I have ever seen when being on a beach.

After staying on the beach for a while it was time to head to Levanto! Four people in our group weren’t going to spend the night, so we all went to Monterosso’s train station to buy their tickets back home and buy ours to Levanto (we didn’t hike to Levanto because it technically isn’t part of Cinque Terre, and it was a bit too far to make it by seven.) Everyone bought their tickets, said goodbye to the four people going back to Florence, and then we caught our train to Levanto. Once in Levanto, we found our amazing hostel pretty quickly. This was my first time in a hostel ever, and it was such a good first experience! Sarah and her friend met up with us, so there were...nine of us in one room, all to ourselves. After speed showers, wine purchases, and a wonderful dinner at a local restaurant, we drank our wine, met some other American kids at the hostel, and sat on the beach. A wonderful ending to a wonderful day.

The next morning we woke up (all feeling a little sore from the hike before), ate breakfast at the hostel, and were out of the room by 10. We spent some more time walking around on the beach for a while, and figured out that it was actually full of beautiful sea glass! The sight of all of us digging in the sand for the glass was pretty funny, but so worth it.

After a quick stop to the fresh produce market for some hiking fuel, I was back to the trails! We decided to first hike back to Monterosso to spend more time there, and then hike to the bottom two towns if we could. I was really sore from the day before, and was having a hard time at first climbing up the steep trail. I couldn’t believe the amount of compassion and unselfishness our group had developed for each other after Mattie immediately offered me her Motrin and someone else (I forgot who!) offered me their banana, which helps with tight muscles. I felt so much better soon after that. Ahhh...sometimes too much love is overwhelming. We reached Monterosso in about two hours, and as soon as we got to town, it started raining. The timing could not have been more perfect! But because of the rain and thunder, we decided against trying to reach the bottom two towns. It was getting too stormy and too late. So we headed to the train station, and off we went back to Florence!

Without a doubt, this small excursion away from the city has been my most precious memory from the trip so far. I am definitely coming back to Cinque Terre someday to see the bottom two towns we missed...anyone want to come with me?? Oh, and little side note: On our way back to Florence, my new wonderful friend Shealy introduced me to an amazing up-and-coming band, The Heart and the Head. This song is a little sad, but for some reason, I have not gotten it out of my head since I heard it. Enjoy! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e2J-0EtsCpo

Much love!