Cinque Terre

Thursday, August 26, 2010
Got up nice and early this morning! We headed for our croissant and cappuccino and headed to the train station. We grabbed some lunch to go from the supermarket and were on the train by 930 headed to Cinque Terre. It was a cabin train and we had reserved our seats ahead of time. When we boarded the train there were 3 guys in the compartment and sitting in our seats but we just put our bags away and sat in the empty seats. The guys took down their suitcases from the racks after we had put ours up and put them into the hallway. We were quite confused as to why they would take them down but we didn’t really concern ourselves with it and sat in our seats. Then after awhile they put them back up and took their seats. As the train was due to leave, this woman came with 6 or 7 suitcases with her two daughters and were telling the men that the seats were theirs. So the men obviously didn’t have reservations and was probably the reason they had taken their suitcases out in the first place. But then this woman arrives late and kicks them all out. On top of that, she had these massive suitcases that she couldn’t lift above her head to put on the storage racks so the one man had to lift them all up. We had to move all of our bags and rearrange everything so this lady could get her bags sorted. It was kind of ridiculous actually and there wasn’t enough room for them all. She had to put them in the racks in the hall, which she wasn’t pleased about. I am not even sure how the 3 of them carried all of these bags. Just a nightmare! Heather and I just sat there and watched it all go down, mind boggled! Anyhow, they ended up being quite nice and offered us drinks and food and were really nice. They also revealed a secret trick about the train seats that we didn’t know. The cabin seats actually recline down and you can lay across the two seats. So we can in the future recline the seats and sleep more comfortably on the train. Perfect! Anyhow, off to Cinque Terre which is a national park about an hour north of Pisa and consists of 5 villages (Cinque Terre in Italian). We had booked a hostel in Manarola, the second of 5 villages. So we took a few trains to get to the village, had to buy a park pass and headed to find our hostel. It is such a small village that it is definitely easy to navigate. The only problem was, that our hostel was at the very top of this monstrous hill and it was still really, really hot out. So we trekked on up this massive hill, were sweating profusely and arrived to a closed hostel. We were not really impressed but the hostel is closed from 1pm to 4pm. So we waited on the stairs for 30 minutes for it to open...still sweating. Once it was finally opened, we were greeted by a not so friendly Italian man who showed us to reception. The man working the desk was much nicer and was quite pleasant. We checked in, and headed to our rooms. The rooms were quite nice and modern but there was a few things that we didn’t like...there was a curfew of 1 am, internet you had to pay for, the showers were coin operated so you only had a few minutes and only one shower allowed, and in the end made us miss our train (we will get to that later though). So we made the best of it and looked at the trail maps and decided to head up to the far town which had the only sandy beach in Cinque Terre to catch some rays before sunset. We grabbed the train and arrived at the beach, had a little snack and cervesa on the beach. It was really busy when we arrived and cleared out quite quickly between 6 and 8pm. It was still nice and warm out and the waves were nice to watch/listen to so we stayed until after 8. Then we decided to grab a little dinner and walk about the village. We wondered through the village and it was really cute and what I had originally pictured Italy to look like with narrow streets and little shops lining the streets. Very nice! We dined on the waterfront and had a bottle of wine and it was really nice! We also watched some guy night fish, who was not having any luck I should add. We had to catch the last train back to Manarola and be in the hostel before curfew so that’s what we did and headed to bed to rest up for our adventure day.