Knowing that the bus to Cinque Terre was going to be at 07:00, it meant that even though I was only going to run one mile this morning, I needed to be up and out early. So, just after 05:00 I was running around the quiet streets of Florence. It was dark out, but fortunately the area we were in had decent street lights. To start with I ran to the Ponte Vecchio to see how that looked in the dark, and then to the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore - it was nice to see it without crowds of people around. On my way there though I’d also paused briefly in the Piazza della Signoria.
After my run, we both had breakfast and headed out at around 06:20 to give us plenty of time to reach the bus stop at Piazzale Montelungo. It was the same place as the Pisa tour, so this made it easy to find at least, we just weren’t sure how long it’d take to get there with my sister’s ankle the way it was. It’d improved somewhat since yesterday, and the bruise was now starting to show on her ankle too. It looked painful, and seeing it reminded me of walking on an injured ankle in Moscow a few years ago. I could imagine what this was like for her.
The bus left just after 07:00, and went in the same direction as the bus on Tuesday had as if it was going to Pisa, but then turned at Lucca. Our guide for this tour, Renata, pointed out the mountains we could see in the distance, and explained that the white tops were not glaciers, but were marble. It was then I noticed that in the industry alongside the road were massive blocks of marble that were obviously being prepared for sale.
At around 09:00 we arrived in La Spezia, and left the coach at the Centrale station to board a train to Manarola. This is because coaches cannot get to the UNESCO World Heritage site, so everyone goes in by train instead. As you can imagine, the trains do get quite busy.
In Manarola the washroom facilities cost €1.00 per person, and had an attendant that would clean out the one working cubicle they had after every couple of people. Most of our group decided to continue down into the old fishing village. We were told the colourful houses used to be this way because the owners would paint them the same colour as their boats so they could be easily identified. So the blue house would be the owner of the blue fishing boat. These days this is no longer the case, but there are still boats around, and the houses are still colourful.
We were also told that we could walk up the hill to an old church, and that path would then go through the grapevines, around the cliffs to come back down facing the houses, and the sea for a great view. My sister didn’t like the sound of that, so as much as I’d have liked to have done that, I joined her going down to the sea front for a few photographs. We got as close to the sea as we could as this also helped with trying to keep the sun out of the photographs when looking back towards land.
We’d got about an hour here, so we walked up some of the path, and this greatly improved the view. We went as far as a restaurant that overlooked the bay, and then headed back down a very steep path to then go up another steep path towards town. As we’d got time to kill, and it was mid-morning, I suggested we go for some gelato. I got a tub with two scoops - one of ‘kinder’ which seemed to be white chocolate and nutella, and a scoop of the cookies and cream one. This time the gelato came with a wafer, and it tasted really good.
Whilst I ate it, I wandered up the path further whilst my sister sat and waited. I reached a belltower with a pretty good viewpoint, but the church itself was behind scaffolding as it was in need of repair. As soon as I’d seen it, I rushed back to my sister, and we returned to the meeting point at the platform. When everyone had arrived we then hopped on the next train which took us a few stops down the line to Monterosso.
Our second stop of the day would be our lunch stop, but first we were led from the train station and along the coast to the historic part of town. This included going up and down a little, but my sister’s ankle was so far coping okay. When we reached the meeting place we were then told we had until 11:55. At that point anyone who was having lunch would be led from there to the restaurant. This only gave us ten minutes, but we walked down to the beach and sat right in front of the water. We watched the waves wash up on the pebbles of the beach until we had no choice but to head back.
At the restaurant it was a set menu again, and this was either a seafood starter that most people chose to avoid, or the mozzarella and tomato one. I wasn’t keen on either, so I gave the tomatoes to a couple from Singapore, and had some of the mozzarella myself. The main course was spaghetti and pesto, and we’d not expected any dessert, but we did get a small bowl of ice cream that came with pineapple and melon.
Once we’d eaten we’d still got around an hour left to explore, so we wandered in and out of a couple of churches in the area, and up and down the main street through the town. It felt like there wasn’t a great deal to see here, so my sister bought a t-shirt. We walked up along the coast briefly, but didn’t think it was worth going too far, so eventually found somewhere to sit until it was time to head to the meeting point.
This time, instead of being taken on another train, we were led to the seafront to board a boat to Vernazza. This is a fairly short boat ride, but in the midday sun this was an incredibly warm one. By the end of it my sister wasn’t feeling great, and not long after we got off the boat she was wandering off to find some shade. The snag was that this was when we were being given instructions. So I wouldn’t lose track of her, I jumped down off a wall to follow, and missed the most important part of the instructions - where the train station was we needed to meet at. Hopefully it wouldn’t be too hard to find if we had a viewpoint.
After sitting down for a few minutes in the shade, my sister suggested I looked inside the church that was in front of us whilst she took some painkillers. This church was made of huge blocks of stone, and was fairly dark and plain inside. It was very different to the ones we’d seen so far on this trip. I then suggested we walk up some stairs to Doria Castle, but first we walked around a little more before going up the first few steps. My sister was not happy with these at all - she was still suffering at times with her ankle and these were not going to help her at all. I suggested if we were going to go up, then we should at least take it slowly, but she seemed to prefer to go a little faster and complain about it. I stopped frequently to ask if she was okay, and make sure she was doing okay even though in truth there weren’t that many steps at all if you compared it to somewhere like our apartment.
When we reached about three quarters of the way up she took a rest on a doorstep, and asked me to carry on to see how far it was. I got as far as the entrance, and then peered inside to see one more flight of stairs after that so reported back to her what I’d seen. I’d expected her to suggest I go up and take some photographs and return to her, but she pushed on and made it to the entrance. I paid €2.00 each for us to go in, and she sat on the wall at the top in the shade so she could try and cool down whilst I got some photographs.
I thought we were quite short on time now, and didn’t know where the train station was. We got back down the steps relatively fast, and began walking up the street through town. I eventually thought about using Google Maps to locate the train station and found it was more or less in front of us, we just needed to keep walking. Eventually we rounded a corner and could see some steps up to it - we’d arrived ten minutes early!
It was very crowded at this station, and very hot in the sun. To avoid this, Renata led us inside the train tunnel to wait, not too worried herself about how close trains were passing to her. Eventually we boarded one, and it took us to Riomaggiore for our final stop of the day. This town seems to have the only public washroom in Cinque Terre that is free, but it’s a little worse for wear and under some circumstances would be inadvisable to use. When we left the train station we could go right to the marina, or left into the historic quarter. There was actually a third option though and that was to take some stairs in front of us to reach a square that was over us. This gave us a view of the marina, and once up there we could easily take another route onto the main street.
The shops here were all busy, and anywhere that sold food or drink would have queues outside. After we’d been walking for a few minutes my sister sat down and sent me the rest of the way up. All I could find of interest were two more churches, and nothing particularly special about them. On our way back down we bought a chocolate muffin each for €3.00, and continued all the way down to the marina to sit by the sea one last time.
With twenty minutes left, we headed back to the meeting point, and bought an extremely overpriced drink from a vending machine there, as well as splitting a chocolate bar between us. When we boarded the train here, it took us all the way back to La Spezia and the waiting coach. They’d said we’d be back in Florence by 19:00, but before this trip had even started I’d predicted thirty minutes later than that. By pure chance, even though a three car pile-up on the highway was causing minor delays, we arrived back into Florence at 19:30.
Once we’d done a bit of shopping so we’d have things to eat this evening, and for lunch on Saturday, we headed back to the apartment to finally eat, and relax ahead of our final day of tourism.