Riomaggiore to Montorosso, Thursday 1 October
Trying to ensure we were walking in the coolest part of the day, four of us set of at 8.30am. The walk between Riomaggiore and Manarola we had done in moonlight the night before, it was a very pleasant 10 minute stroll passing gates and fences with padlocks and ribbons attached celebrating love. Very picturesque. Tick. One part of the walk completed.
Manarola was very pretty. Instead of cars parked in the tiny main street of the village there were boats. Brightly painted wooden row boats right out of a children’s picture book. These are pulled up each afternoon from the little harbour and stored in the street overnight. This added further colour to the area already made vibrant by sun umbrellas and the wares from the little shops on display in the street. It is certainly fair to say that the locals have grasped the concept of tourism, around every corner is a little shop of something; it is just that very often that something is not something we would want. After a coffee fix at Manarola we walked the second section to Corniglia. This was pretty straight forward and took around an hour. You probably won’t be surprised to learn that I twisted my ankle at this point. Thankfully not serious enough to interrupt the walk (I had Buck Shelford in mind anyway) but enough to cause some discomfort and to be irritating sill today (that now done I look forward to an injury free rest of the trip).
Corniglia, unlike the other sea front villages is entirely on top of a cliff and has no marina. To get to the village and the next part of the walk meant climbing 377 steps. As it turned out this was a good warm-up and enabled us to meander around Corniglia which is probably the least visited of the villages because it can’t be reached by sea. It can be reached by road but I suspect that most of its visitors are from the walkway. It was here I saw my first caper bush. I never really thought about where capers came from. The lovely specimen we saw…in someone’s garden…would be very at home along the fence in McKinley Cres…I may have to investigate further. It was getting hot but was still over overcast and was the best day of the week for walking by a country mile because it was still the coolest day yet. Onward we ventured further to Vernazza where we were meeting the others for lunch…they were pulling out all stops and arriving elegantly by train.
This part of the walk was far more challenging, I can easily compare it with the devils staircase on the Tongariro Crossing – it was however much shorter. There were only two types of terrain - up and down. We stepped up and up and up and up over well worn rocks and paths with little respite, taking in olive groves, prickly pears, little red berries growing up other trees (juniper berries?) and the spectacular views (when we stole our eyes away from the looking at the rocky old steps we were climbing). After about 45 minutes we descended and just went down and down and down and down, finally coming over a little ridge to an awesome view of the Vernazza Castle on the point of a small peninsula and the lovely little town itself. It was hard work and a little incongruous wandering the very busy tourist shops in ringing wet clothes...and in my case a wet afro, but of course we did.
We had taken just under three hours walking to get to Vernazza (felt about 86km) having very relaxed stops in each town added another hour. It was by now on our mind to complete the last leg from Vernazza to Montorosso which we had not been aiming to do when we set off as we had been told that that the last leg was the worst by far - the guides suggested 2 hours was needed for the 3km walk because it was so arduous! We decided to consider over lunch. After another gorgeous seafood salad, pasta and a Peroni, the good life got the better of us. We trained to Montorosso to explore the last little town, very cute as well and then trained home.
Pic is our first sighting of Corniglia from the Cinque Terre walk way.
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