Cinque Terre

So this weekend I went to Cinque Terre national park (five lands) which is a beautiful area consisting of 5 coastal towns on the western coast of Italy.  Nisha and I took a train on Friday night, arriving in La Spezia, a nearby larger town outside the park at exactly 7am.  We dropped our stuff off at the hostel which was also outside the park and decided to walk to Riomaggiore, the first of the five towns since the busses run infrequently.  We followed the directions that the hostel manager gave us, but somewhere we took a wrong turn and ended up 1.5 hrs in the wrong direction. I really thought we were going the right way… after all we were on the right trail-But I guess the unkempt condition of the path and the constant prickling of my leg by thorns suggested otherwise.  We ended up in a town called Campligia.  An old man helped us find the right way towards Riomaggiore, after questioning if I was serious that I wanted to go there.  After buying a better map, we journeyed back in the correct direction and finally made it to the town of Riomaggiore.  I had a yummy lunch of a half pesto and half seafood pizza. 

Our original plan was to walk the trail that runs from Riomaggiore to Manarola to Corniglia to Vernazza to Monterosso which provides breataking viws of the coast and towns. 

But because of our detour we decided instead to take a train to Monterosso and chill out on the beach there.  We swam in the water which was a perfect warm temperature and laid out of beach chairs for a few hours.  We then headed back to the hostel to check-in and take a shower so we could go out later.  Unfortunately due to the location of our hostel it was not really possible to go back to the 5 towns without putting down a lot of money. So we wandered around the quiet town where our hostel was and found this restaurant packed with locals.  We ate this dish that I can't remember the name of but was surprisingly good.  It consisted of three large flat pasta-potato like things, one with a chestnutty mushroom sauce, one with pesto, and one with cheese.  It was strange but good.  With our tummies satisfied we went back to the hostel for a night of sleep.   

The next day we woke up early, determined to actually hike between the 5 towns.  We walked through each, enjoying the food of the region and each town's respective quaintness and personality.  I ate focaccia and more pesto.  The sky and sea were very blue, so much in fact that you couldn't really tell where the sky and sea ended. It just looked like a massive blue background, kind of cool!  After our hike, which wasn't too difficult we stopped in Vernazza, and played around in the water at the beach there and laid out in the sun for 5 hours.  Finally, we ate dinner at this restaurant high up on a hill overlooking the water and enjoyed seafood as well as another regional dish, Troffie, a kind of pasta made from chestnut and wheat flour with pesto. We also decided to try wine from the region since it's  really good. 

 

At the end of dinner I asked where the bathroom was, but was very unsuccessful in finding it.  To get to this restaurant, you had to walk up a set of stairs where you reached the layer with the kitchen on the left, then you walked up another short set of stairs where there were some more tables and also a path into a neighborhood, and then to get where we sat you walked up another flight of stairs to a patio.  The guy said the bathroom was down the steps and past the 2 arches.  So at first I walked down too far, and I asked someone else where the bathroom was and he said that it was upstairs, so I went back up.  It looked like there was an archway towards the neighborhood path so I walked in that direction.  I passed several arches but no bathroom, just more and more cats and old women walking around.  By this point in time I felt very lost, and just wanted to sit down and start sleeping, but I made my way back to our restaurant table somehow and then the waiter showed me where the bathroom was.  It was so much closer by than I thought, and not in the direction I went at all!

Anyways I really enjoyed the weekend because it was overflowing with one of my favorite things: quaint small townness.  Everyone was really nice in all of the towns, and there weren't that many American tourists!