Friday – we grab the hire car, a Ford Focus diesel and set off to Liguria – Levanto in the Cinque Terre. We go through Monaco but don’t stop. Lots of tunnels, one including a roundabout inside the tunnel. Coffee at Menton In France, lunch at ? In Italy.
On to Levanto and the Vignola bed and breakfast. bnbvignola.com Nice room, nice people, lovely pool. Excellent coffee and food at breakfast.
Saturday. Train to Monterosso Cinque Terre. Train only 5 mins about 4 mins of that in tunnel. joke about a view. Walk, lunch, panic about return train only to find there are lots of them and we get one straight away. We swim, sunbathe, then into town for dinner.
Sunday. We drive to Vernazza intending to drive on to Corniglia. The main road to Corniglia is closed so we have to go via Vernazza. Small winding roads up and over steep mountains. Fabulous views of forested steep slopes and the sea beyond. Houses cling to the slopes and there are some vines in terraces. Road into Vernazza is washed away in places with temporary concrete barriers at the edge with a steep drop beyond. Quite challenging for the nerves of the driver and passengers!
Vernazza has a huge picture of the floods of October 25 2011 when houses were washed away as the water rushed down the narrow gorge through the tiny town and filled the harbour with tonnes of mud. Much has been rebuilt but the roads are in a bad state and you have to park a way away and walk down to the village.
We abandoned the idea of driving further to Corniglia, and made our way back to a main road and the big port town of La Spezia. Not much there on a Sunday so we drove through towards Portovenere and found a little cafe by a marina and had a snack lunch.
Back on the autoroute – quick and easy.
Monday. Rained – went to laundromat. Went to pub at night – Belgian beers and snacks. People in the bar were looking into a small cardboard box and exclaiming. We couldn’t contain our curiosity and asked one of the locals what was in it. He returned with a bizarrely- shaped object the size of a can of tomatoes that turned out to be wild porcini. They had been picking the mushrooms in the hills surrounding the town. We talked bout walking from Levanto to Monterosso and the gave us a few tips.
Tuesday … lovely sunny day, so we went walking on route 1 and 10 from Levanto to Monterosso. The locals said it would be an hour and a bit – turned out to be a three-hour tough walk, but very enjoyable with fantastic views.
We climbed up from the town past the old castle and kept going up and up the hills, gasping for breath. We soon heated up and had to shed our sweatshirts. The path went through some woods, but mostly along the side of the hills a few hundred feet above the sea. Some of it was precipitous, some not so bad. We were overtaken by lots of serious walkers (mostly Germans) with hiking boots, walking poles, and those special travelling trousers with zip-off legs. Those trousers obviously give your legs some magic extra power!
The path was slippery in places from all the rain, but we managed to stay on our feet and enjoy the journey. There were some tiny waterfalls crossing the path and a few trees that had crashed across it. In some parts there were big stone steps, some of the track was sandy, and bits were sandstone rock.
Coming down was hard because there were lots of slippery rocks. The last part was down a steep, windy road and my legs were a bit wobbly by the time we reached the flat. We hopped on the train for the short trip to Riomaggiore, another of the Cinque Terre Towns, where we met Bob and Julie. We had a fabulous lunch in a little restaurant overlooking the tiny harbour, starting with a local speciality – gattafin – herbs, cheese, egg and marjoram in a thin pastry deep fried. Very light and very delicious!
Then the girls had spaghetti with fresh anchovies and the boys had spaghetti with fresh tuna, washed down with a litre of the house red. After lunch we went on the train to Manarola and had a look round. These villages are very pretty, but very tiny and there,s not a lot to see in some of them. We wanted to go home by boat but the sea was too rough and the the boats weren’t sailing so we got on the train again. We found a very nice bar in Levanto for our evening sojourn.
Wednesday. Wet. We had a look round the market in Levanto, then headed off along the autostrada to Portofino, about an hour away. Smooth going through Rapallo and Santa Margherita Liguria and then narrow windy roads to Portofino centre. It cost us 14 euros to park for three hours but we take it on the chin! The village is charming, set around a small harbour with some lovely old boats at moorings.
