Cinque Terre

As we awoke this morning, the skies were clearing after a major storm event in Italy, the full import of which we would discover later. We discovered a tree off our balcony with this fruit on it - no idea what it is.

Our drive wasn't very far today and yet the road was once again riddled with tunnels - enough with the tunnels. It is, however, a testimonial to the rugged landscape through which we have been journeying. As we made our way towards our destination for today, we passed through the port town of La Spezia, with its compliment of warships.

It was a short jump from here to the large UNESCO designated park, featuring the five principle villages of Cinque Terre - pronounced Chink-wa Tear -a. Since I made bookings for our hotel here ages ago, I didn't know that I had plunked us in the most southerly and probably major village of the five, Riomaggiore. This is a good thing. Our hotel is small - 6 rooms - but it should prove to be a great jumping off spot for exploration of the Cinque Terre.

We quickly met Francesca, owner of the hotel Arcobeleno (rainbow), who in delightful English welcomed us. We had had some communications via e-mail regarding parking. They have a garage with two spots, but she was worried that our car would not fit. Parking in this part of the world is a HUGE DEAL, because everything is terraced and hanging off the edge of a cliff. Once I told her we were in a Renault Kangoo, she Googled whether or not the car would fit, but before we got her reply, we discovered on our own that indeed our car would make it into the garage. Gotta love her initiative! We also discovered that the weather event of yesterday had closed the schools here and essentially crippled this area. As a result, today the walking trails, for which everyone flocks to Cinque Terre, were closed. There was no major damage from the storm, but they are especially wary after 2011 when two of the towns got serious damage from flash flooding during a storm. More about that later.

Since we still had lunch items from France, we quickly opened the wine and had a lunch on the terrace that we share with Tony and Jackie's room. The car was not moving for two days.

Then it was off to explore. Our hotel was at the top of the town, which means everything was downhill - and steeply so - from here and therefore this was also a slope we would have to reclimb to return to our hotel. It was one of those walks that you constantly had to put the brakes on the legs, but became more and more picturesque as we proceeded.

We decided that we would take the train to the most distant of the five towns from us, Monterosso. This meant walking through a long tunnel - another one - at the bottom of town to the train station.

The trains on this route go anywhere along the Mediterranean, so we had to pick the right train.

From the minimal amount of time that we had explored Riomaggiore, we found this northerly most village a disappointment and quickly headed back to the next train south. We're talking minutes between stations here.

Our next village was Vernazza. Now this was an impressive village, more so because this was one of the two villages badly damaged in 2011 by flash flooding. Remember the slopes are extreme here with multi terraces. This poster told some of the story of the mud and debris that came down on the village.

I'll let the rest of the photos do the talking about today's Vernazza.

Near the end of our exploring here, Tony and I opted to head for higher ground to take pics while the girls settled in a bar and sampled wine, thus the picture above. It was late enough in the day now that we decided our exploring was over and we should head back to Riomaggiore. For the first time, we headed down to the waterfront of Riomaggiore, for some of the best views and quickly decided that this was our favourite village in the Cinque Terre. How fortuitous that this was also our home base.

Although it was still a little early for dinner, we chose a restaurant half way up the hill to our hotel for dinner. We were really pleased with our choice, spaghetti for most and fried fish (?) for me. The only fried fish in my meal were tiny anchovies, while the rest was fried squid, octopus and shrimp. Anybody impressed?

The bonus at this restaurant was that we had good English servers and we sampled the best wine coming from Riomaggiore. This white wine, produced on difficult, steep terraces of the five villages, was actually made here in Riomaggiore. Although not cheap (20E), it was a very pleasant minerally white.

By twilight, we were back at Arcobeleno for a final drink on the terrace before some light rain set in sending everyone to their rooms.