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Friday morning Brian and I grabbed a quick breakfast at our hotel in Milian and hailed a taxi to the train station. The 3-hour train ride to Cinque Terre went fast (mainly because Brian had the forethought to rent a movie on his iPad—we watched City of God—I highly recommend it).
The long journey to Cinque Terre (a flight to Milan then three hour train ride to the coast) and the high cost of the bed and breakfast we stayed at made me question if it was really worth the time and expense to take the trip. However, as soon as I stepped out of the train station, I was glad we added Cinque Terre to our itinerary. Before me was an aqua and teal ocean surrounded by a few beaches, stunning cliffs with rocks jutting out of the sea and a quaint beach town full of brightly colored stucco buildings with clay tile roofs.
Cinque Terre (which translates to “five lands”) is made up of 5 villages along the Italian Riveria. We stayed in the first (or last, depending on how you look at it--nevertheless, the most northern): Monterosso. You can get to the other villages by hiking tiny trails through the mountains or by train (it’s about 4 minutes by train to each village). Monterosso and the village directly south, Vernazza, were hit by flash floods last October. Canals run under the streets of Monterosso, and the flood overflowed the canals, turning the streets into a raging river. The towns were filled with mud, several people died, and the flooding caused over $100 million in damage. There were pictures in our bed and breakfast and throughout the village showing the devastation. The current condition of the towns says something about the tenacity of the people of Cinque Terre—the only signs of the floods I saw were streets made of new wooden slats that replaced the streets that were wiped away by the flood.
We stayed in a small bed and breakfast that had only 6 rooms. It was really charming and had a sun porch with lime green and pink clothed tables and chairs where you could have breakfast (or, in our case, a bottle of wine). Our room was a dual level, with the bed up the stairs to a loft area. The vaulted ceiling was painted with a mural of angels (or at least I think they were supposed to be angels). The Sistine Chapel it was not, but for some reason the painting didn’t seem out of place.
Friday was absolutely beautiful, but a little too warm for our taste for hiking, so we decided to get up early on Saturday morning to hike the path to Vernazza. We needn’t have worried about the heat, because Saturday was overcast with menacing clouds for the majority of the day. I was disappointed; the whole reason I wanted to hike was to get good pictures from the mountains. It turned out to be a good thing though, because the hike took us over two hours and I think we would have been hurting if it hadn’t been for the wind. We had read that the hike was “treacherous”, so I was a bit intimidated. I’m not exactly an experienced hiker, and the last hike I went on was up a mountain in Haiti that made me feel like my lungs would literally explode. While this hike was challenging due to the steep climbs, it had nothing on my hike in Haiti. There, spots on the trail were almost vertical and I had to use my hands to grip rock and pull myself along. In Cinque Terre, there are beautiful rock steps carved into the path and no fear of the earth crumbling beneath you.
In the end, even though my pictures aren’t great, we were definitely glad we took the hike. We stayed in Vernazza for lunch and then took the train back to Monterosso (amazing how much easier and shorter our trip back was). By the time we got back to the B&B, it was late in the afternoon so we just walked around the village before going to dinner.
Saturday night we had dinner outside at a restaurant overlooking the ocean. Throughout our meal, the sky and sea put on a show for us and gradually changed color as the sunset. We watched the water crash into the rocks underneath us and the tiny sailboats bob in the ocean.
Sunday morning we took the 6:55 am train back to Milan, and I regretfully said "ciao" to Cinque Terre.
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