End of Week 1 – Cinque Terre – Sunday July 4

Today got off to a fairly inauspicious start at 6:30am. I was in the shower and the shower cubicles in this campground are just a big cubicle, which means that although there are plenty of hooks to hang your things on, there is no dry area that stays dry for you to step onto to get dressed when you've finished your shower. Now this mightn't sound a problem, but when you're a person with my level of flexibility, it does pose some logistical problems. Anyway, this morning I had dried myself except for my feet and was performing the delicate task of getting my wet feet into and through my dry underpants, without the result of ending up with both wet feet and wet underpants.

To perform this task involves balancing on one foot (here's where I start getting into difficulty) on a slippery tiled floor, while stretching the opposing leg of ones boxers in order to create a hole large enough to insert ones wet foot without at any time touching the dry underpants. I was right in the middle of performing this delicate task, which for me is the equivalent of key hole surgery, when from the far end of the men's came the sound of the most enormous fart, followed by complete and total silence. I am ashamed to say that this perfectly normal human function caused my to get the giggles. I'm not sure if in all human history, holding your breath has ever succeeded as a cure for the giggles, but it was the only option I had, which only served to make matters worse, because as soon as I ran out of breath, I had to breath, which then caused me to laugh uncontrollably. This breath holding, laughing uncontrollably continued for the 2-3 minutes it took me to get myself dressed, collect up all my stuff and get out of the bathroom.

Things didn't improve much when I got outside, because by the time I got back to the tent, I was still unable to speak, so Anne was looking at me saying “are you ok?, are you crying?, are you laughing?” at which all I could do was make hand signals to indicate that I was ok, but had for some unknown reason, completely lost the plot.

Things improved significantly after that, because at this campground you can order croisants and pastries the day before, which are delivered at 7:30 in the morning. They are completely civilised and will even do a cappucino first thing in the morning. Anne and I had ordered a chocolate croisant each and to our delight found that they were filled with a chocolate moose mixture, which made for a wonderfully delicious start to the day.

Today we are off to the Cinque Terre, the 5 fishing villages on the Italian Riviera that are built on cliffs. This is one of Italy's famous tourist attractions, but one that we haven't managed to get to on previous visits. Levanto is at one end of the Cinque Terre and there is a train that links all 5 villages. There are cliff side tracks which let you walk between all 5 villages and it is possible to do the whole thing in a day. The Cinque Terre has now been designated a national park, so the train ticket that we bought was actually a day pass to the national park which lets us walk on any of the tracks and have an all day pass for the train. Because it's 30 degrees everyday at the moment and because some of the cliff side trails are very narrow, have horrendous drop-offs and I'm a big chicken when it comes to hights, we decided to only walk between a couple of the villages and catch the train the rest.

We caught the train to Riomaggiore, which is at the far (southern most) end of the Cinque Terre. Riomaggiore is aparently the least pretty of the 5 towns, but we found it quite pretty with an attractive little harbour. The walk from Riomaggiore to Manarola is along the Via Dell-Amore – The Path of Love. The path is completely flat, paved all the way and has good hand rails, so even the vertical drop-offs aren't too daunting. It is called the Path of Love because of the spectacular views and somebody sometime ago put a padlock on one of the wire fences to signify the love that he felt for his partner, so now everybody is doing it. We didn't know about it, so we didn't do it, and even if we had known about it, I have better uses for a good padlock – bah humbug.
Manarola was a very pretty little town, with a main street that led down the narrow gully to the boat harbour. The street was only a couple of hundred metres long, with lots of restaurants and coffee shops lining either side and there were even some wooden fishing boats on the street from when the town made it's living from fishing rather than tourists. I don't know if the boats move from their positions very much these days, but it did give the town more of an air of authenticity.

The next walk was more challenging from Manarola to Corniglia. The first bit was particularly spectacular as it initially gave awesome views back towards Manarola and then skirted round sheer cliff faces. The walk took about an hour and was finished with a climb of 382 steps to the town of Corniglia which unlike the other Cinque Terre towns is on the top of a cliff, rather than being at sea level. At the bottom of the 382 steps was the train station, so after our visit to Corniglia, we had to descend the 382 steps to catch the train to Vernazza, where we were going to have lunch. We had a very pleasant lunch in the square, which is right on the wharf, sharing a seafood salad and a seafood pasta.

By the time lunch was over (about 3pm ish), the temperature was well into the 30's, the sun was sufficiently high that there was no protection on the tracks and as I mentioned, they only got steeper, narrower and scarier from then on, so we caught the train back to Levanto to retire to the campground to relax before heading out to dinner at the same little taverna we'd been to the night before.