After a good nights sleep, only interrupted for a short period of some severe lightning and thunder, we awoke to a sunny day (finally!!). We actually slept in a little more than we had planned, still just trying to catch up on the sleep we missed from the transatlantic flights. We got ready and went to the buffet breakfast at the hotel, which is included in the price of the room. They had various pastries, but would bring you cheese and ham if requested, or also make you any style of eggs. Knowing we were going to do another hike today, we opted for some scrambled eggs for Stephanie, and fried eggs for me. Of course, we also had to have some bacon. It was all very good.
More Steps on the Monterosso to Vernazza Trail
Terraced Trails – Monterosso to Vernazza
Today, the planned hike was for the longest lower trail, which connects the cities of Monterosso and Vernazza. We had read suggestions to walk the trail in this direction, from Monterosso to Vernazza since there are a total of about 700 steps at the first part of the trail. They are not continuous, but there are only a few breaks in between long sections of steps. Since it was Sunday, and since it was very nice and sunny weather after all of the rainy days, there were a lot of people doing this particular trail. There were many places where you had to stop and let other hikers go by that were traveling in the opposite direction.
Sometimes, it was in the very narrow terraced areas for the farmland on the hillside. In reality, that is the main purpose of these trails, they were originally made to go between the towns, but also to go to the various farming areas on the hillsides. The farming is all done on large terraced areas, and some of the trails are actually at the base of the walls of the terraces. Mostly, there are grapevines being grown, but some areas also have olive trees. The grapes are interesting, there appeared to be both white grapes and red grapes growing together. The grape harvest is sometime near the end of September or the beginning of October, so the grapes are very large and in large bunches on the vines.
Town of Vernazza From The Trail
It took us about 2.5 hours to complete this portion of the hike, there was a lot of stopping to let others pass by, both going in the same direction as us, but walking faster, and in the opposite direction. We finally made it to Vernazza, and went into the town for some lunch. After lunch, we actually started up the trail between Vernazza and the next city to the south, Corniglia. We mainly went up the beginning of the trail for photos of the town. We then headed back down to the Vernazza train station and took a train to Manarola, the fourth city in the line of cities as you head south. Our plan was to walk the short trail between there and Riomaggiore again since it had be rainy on this part of the trail on the first day. It was a lot less crowded by this time, most of the large tourist groups had already arrived and departed. It was a nice walk without all of the people. We took some nice photos, and then headed into Riomaggiore to walk around. This was a nice town, similar to Vernazza, but a little more hilly and harder to walk in. We headed down to the marina area to walk around and take pictures. Each of the cities has a small protected harbor, but during storms, they pull out all of the normally moored small fishing boats with an electric winch and lift, and keep them on land for protection.
Coastline at Riomaggiore
The boats are rolled on dollies and spread out in the main streets of the town. Apparently, before we initially arrived in Cinque Terre, there had been some type of major storm in the area, and all of the boats had been pulled out of the water. It was easy to see why this is done. Even though there was no storm while we were here, there was some large surf, and it was still pretty rough even in the small protected area of the harbor, and by small, I am talking about 100′ by 50′, if that.
We visited another grocery store and bought a bottle of wine, the same wine that we had drank with our pizza the night before. It was very good compared to some of the others we had tried, much smoother, and was actually made in the Levanto area.. In Riomaggiore, there was a nice area down near the water where we sat on some of the large boulders protecting the coastline to enjoy our wine and watch the sunset. We did noticed that the walkway went on farther around the side of some large cliff areas, and we walked over to see where it ended. On around to the side, there was a beach area that people were sitting on to watch the sunset. We headed over to join them on the beach. The entire beachfront area was filled with very smooth, rounded stones from a few inches in diameter, to about a foot in diameter. There was absolutely no sand on the beach at all.
After Sunset on the Rocky Shoreline of Riomaggiore
There were some large waves breaking, and it made a very strange noise as the water ran back out over the rocks and into the sea. We waited about an hour for the sun to set, and it was very nice.
Afterward, we headed back up into the town and ate dinner. We both had a seafood dish, Stephanie’s was seafood spaghetti that was served wrapped in foil. It was full of mussels, small clams and some shrimp. I had the seafood risotto, which had the same types of seafood in it, but mixed in with the risotto. Of course, we had some wine with dinner, as well as fresh baked bread. It was a very good dinner. We headed back to the train station for the train back to Levanto, arriving back at the hotel after 10:00 PM, another long but fun day.
Town of Riomaggiore After Sunset
Tomorrow, we head over to Pisa, but we are planning to take a ferry boat ride along the coast to see Cinque Terre from the sea before we leave for Pisa in the afternoon.