Spectacular, but exhausting: Cinque Terre

Today was our first, and it turns out, only, day in Cinque Terre! We were determined to make the most of it, having found out that two out of the four coastal trails were open, not just one as we originally thought.

Cinque Terre photos on Flickr:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/81692166@N05/sets/72157645364177188/

Turns out that there is WiFi access in the park as well - well, only at the train stations of the five towns plus La Spezia - and you get free access to it if you buy a day pass to the park. So that turned out to be of some use.

We crammed ourselves onto the train along with bucketloads of other tourists. We already knew sort of what to expect, having already been to see the Calanques National Park. That means that we sat there and watched while all the other tourists gasped and gawked as we got our first glimpse of the aqua water.

After arriving in Monterosso, the northern most of the five towns, we hung around for a while applying sunscreen before setting off along the coastal trail towards Vernazza. Of the four sections of trail, this was the second-longest, but it also hugged the coastline for the most part, with a little bit of a stretch inland.

Mum was originally planning on walking parts of the Cinque Terre trail - we came to the concensus that she might struggle! There were many, many steps up and down, and rather treacherous portions of trail with narrow dirt paths. According to Wikivoyage it has over 750 steps!

After walking the second part of the coastal trail, from Vernazza to Corniglia, it began to feel like the hikes were simply means to an end. The scenery was clearly the best on the first part of the trail, after that it began to drag out longer.

Here's my favourites from the first part of the trail:

The highlights from the coastal trail

The path from Corniglia to Manarola was always going to be the most difficult. Because the coastal trail was closed, and there was no clear alternative, we basically traversed up the entire height of the hills above Corniglia, and took multiple different paths in order to get there.

There were a couple of people selling wares and performing along the trail, but someone had set up a lemonade stall on the inland trail just before Manarola. It was self-service and 'pay as much as you want' - so when I dropped some coin into the box it sounded very, very hollow, given that the jug was almost empty. It wasn't bad lemonade either.

We decided to skip going into Manarola proper and headed to the last part of the trail from Manarola to Riomaggiore. The route path looked fairly benign, but I could see that it was proposing one hour to walk 1.25 kilometres. And it proved to be true - of all the four paths we took, this was clearly the steepest, as we had to basically go straight up the hill then all the way back down.

By the time we got to Riomaggiore, we were well and truly buggered. We decided to skip Riomaggiore as well and get the train straight back to La Spezia. In true Italian style, we just missed an on-time train, then proceeded to wait 45 minutes for two cancelled trains before one showed up. Yay.

Here are my favourite photos from the rest of the day:

The highlights from the rest of Cinque Terre

Turns out that, according to my GPS logging app, we walked 23.64 kilometres today, with a total climb of 1,971 metres and total calories burned of 2,981. When we got back we got stuck into some homemade pasta before calling it a night.

Doesn't feel like we'll want to do anything tomorrow, we had originally planned to walk north of Monterosso into the other part of the park, I doubt that's going to happen!