Cinque Terre

 Dear Gentle Readers

Today we ventured out to Cinque Terre from our little villa in Massa north of Pisa. Fabrizio, our host, has given us two nights accommodation here for the ridiculously low price of €60 and he has been very helpful explaining things about Italy. Victoria found him through her Affordable Travel Club. When I say little, I mean it has two bedrooms, bathroom, living room, kitchen and a huge backyard. I had to sleep in the second bedroom last night to avoid Victoria's coughing all night.

Anyway, I digress. The road into the first town of Cinque Terre is reminiscent of the Amalfi Coast road I told you about last week. Fortunately it was not as bad, though still challenging with hairpin bends, winding roads and steep dropoffs, but the road was generally wider which made for easier negotiation when passing oncoming traffic.

We arrived at Monterosso al Mare, the first town and found plenty of parking so that was no issue.

This is Monterosso. As you can see when you enlarge the picture, there are a lot of tourists. This was the case in every town we visited.

Monterosso had the best beach BUT you had to pay to use it. The sand is also grey, Italians need to come to WA to see our white sand beaches, which are free to use too!

This is the train line that runs between all five towns. Only takes a few minutes between each town. Sure beats the walk though, although not long, involves steep ascents and descents that were not for us.

This is the second town, Vernazza. As you can see, it is extremely popular with the tourists.

Victoria asked me to take this picture, she was fascinated with all the purple flowers.

In Vernazza's harbour you can see these amazing folded rocks, created during Noah's Flood when huge amounts of sediment were laid down, then bent by uplifting following the flood. Geologists will tell you they were laid down millions of years ago, but you cannot bend solid rock, it has to be in a plastic state.

All the buildings are painted bright colours. This is Vernazza looking back from the harbour.

Next it was off to Corniglia. We walked along the path towards the town, took one look of the ascent and said "Nope, not doing that" and returned to the train.

This is the picture postcard photo of Manarola showing all the houses clinging precariously to the cliffs.

We had lunch here at a restaurant and just soaked in the scenery. We didn't go onto the last town Riomaggiore as it was getting late and we had a long winding drive out of Monterosso back to our accommodation. Truly and excellent place to visit.

Just to prove we were here...