La Spezia … Vernazza to Monterossa hike, train to Riomaggiore and Manarola

September 18th

The morning is cool and cloudy with the possibility of rain, we hustle down to the train station tickets in hand, and are on our way on the 08:15 train to Vernazza….as you can see the station is empty …

We wind our way through the village and are climbing above the village in short order.

…it is kind of funny to see these types of warnings on these trails but when you see the people on the trail without even a bottle of water you have to wonder how stupid can they be ???

Today is supposed to be a bit harder, longer >>> about 2 hours of hiking… a nice start, nobody on the trail, and we climb through carefully tended terraced vineyards. The views back to Vernazza are just outstanding…

 

Some of the drop-offs s are precipitous indeed but the trails are well protected…

It has been lightly raining from to time but now the sun has come out! The descent towards Monterossa is quite steep with lots of steps…these are very cool paths which wend their way through rather steep and narrow terrain via the locals’ fields, unfortunately, our timing is marginally off as hordes of tourists of 20-30 at a time are on their way up…so we step aside as these are single track trails and let them through (somewhat reluctantly I might add) … as I quipped to one group, it is like, “the Hillary step on the way to the summit of Everest”. No pics of the tourists > as I didn’t want to waste my “film” on them, and soon we have Monterossa in our sights… and it is worth the sweat… “old” Monterossa in the foreground and the new seaside resort area (which we had visited yesterday) in the background…

 

 

A bit of a walkabout in the centro historico …click on the images to enlarge

Then we headed through the tunnel …

 

…to the train station in the “new” town and onwards to Riomaggiore. It has a wonderful setting on the sea and we enjoyed touring the town site although there were a few too many folks for our taste…

I must admit I am a sucker for seafood, and the “cones” of mixed seafood proved irresistible …fresh and fresher !!

Then back to the train station, we left for Manarola, the last of the Cinque Terre towns…on arrival, it was crazy busy with throngs of tourists led by “flag” waving guides wandering through the town like locusts… as a local looks on at the madding crowd…

Fighting our way through the crowds we got to the seaside and got to take in the wonderful setting, watch folks frolicking in the water…and checked out the boats arriving with ever more folks…

As a reward, we treated ourselves to some gelato >>> absolutely delicious and trained it back to La Spezia…

A great day and after checking out Tripadvisor we settle on a neighborhood resto, call for a reservation and snag the last table albeit outside. Restaurante Petronilla > English speaking waitress ensures we know it is a tasting menu composed only of fish > polenta with monkfish, fish mousse, pasta with shrimp, fish with mushrooms/mayo….ice cream + apple cake ….Chantilly w fruits and a bottle of white wine, sparkling water + coffee all for a very reasonable set price>>> what a find everything was delicious as clearly the full house of locals felt the same. We strolled back the 10 minutes to the apartment feeling mighty good!!!