Day Five – Yes, but where is OUR yacht?

Day Five – Yes, but where is OUR yacht?

Jamie managed to sleep in today, sort of. We rolled out of bed at almost 9am, me with a significantly fuzzy head. Apparently I’d had more to drink last night that I realized and couldn’t really remember coming home, writing the trip report, or going to bed. Good times, until the hangover kicked in.

Our mission for the day was to visit the town of Santa Margherita Ligure, a little way up the coast from the Cinque Terre, near Portofino. We stopped at the train station to find out when the trains ran before getting breakfast – as it turned out, we had about 5 minutes before the next train to Riomaggiore; from Riomaggiore we could catch another train to Santa Margherita and be there before noon. We rushed over to the platform, caught the train, and made it to Riomaggiore.

It turns out that Riomaggiore is a very busy little village in the morning, and everyone seems to congregate in the piazza shared by the train station, the tourist information office, and the start of the walking path to Manarola. After fighting through the massive and slow moving crowds, we staked out a little patch on the platform. In due course, our train arrived and we pushed on. All the tour groups in the world were already on the train so we had to stand until we got to Monterosso, where most of them got off. We found some seats at that point and had quite a nice trip the rest of the way.

We got off the train in Santa Margherita and made our way down the steps to the harbour front – yes, pretty much EVERYTHING in this part of Italy seems to be either up some stair, down some stairs, or both. We walked along the harbour front, looking at both the ocean view, the cute town itself, and all the yachts and sailboats moored in the place. Some of them where monsters (not quite Capri-style, but some of them were close) – we wondered which one was ours.

We walked pretty much as far as we could along the harbour before we started looking for a place to eat lunch. We were both craving pizza, however we couldn’t really see anything that had it on the menu. We checked out one really expensive place, and another that looked okay but was in an alley with no view, before settling on the uber-touristy bar on the waterfront that we found – so non-descript that I don’t even know the name, although it did have a large sign on the sign advertising their speciality of the house – sex on the beach. Classy, I know. Not our normal venue for lunch, but they did have pizza.

We sat in the bright and sunny dining room watching a few ducks swim around, a bunch of fish in the water, and a whole load of very expensive boats, while we enjoyed our pizza and wine. Not the best pizza in the world, but it had a nice view.

We walked back towards the train station along the beachfront, dipping our toes in the warm Mediterranean water. As with the Cinque Terre, it seems that the beaches in Santa Margherita are mostly rock and not so easy on my sensitive city-boy feet. After rinsing off, we started walking back up the hill to the train station, stopping for a quick gelato on the way. On the stairs back up to the train, I noticed a strange black/brown thing on my foot. On further examination, it appeared that I’d stepped in something black and tar-like, probably on the beach. It had become lodged between two of my toes, and despite a vigorous session with a gelato napkin, I couldn’t manage to shift all of it.

Disturbed and slightly disgusted, we got on the train and found a seat. We both managed to fall asleep on the ride back to Monterosso, which was quiet other than the few minutes of my frantically looking for the train tickets (I’m a creature of habit, however I’d accidently put them in the wrong pocket in my camera bag. Jamie was NOT impressed). We changed trains at Monterosso for the intra-Cinque train and got back to Manarola without even having the damn tickets checked!

We headed up to the balcony to finish off the remains of the wine from last night as well as the beer I’d conveniently put in the fridge the previous day. The sun was a bit hit and miss, large grey clouds looked like they were moving in. I kept having to put my shirt back on, then take it off again, over and over. The wine and beer made it less annoying.

At 6ish, we decided that despite it being very early for dinner in Italy, we were both hungry. We got ready and walked the long way down to the village, stopping briefly to dump the rather embarrassingly large collection of empty wine and beer bottles in the recycle bin at the end of the road. While we fully support recycling, putting the bin in the middle of the road where everyone in the village can see how much you’ve drunk is a bit off-putting.
We stopped in at our favourite of Manarola’s restaurants for dinner – Trattoria Il Porticciolo. We’d had such an excellent meal on our first night in town with Sam and Chelsea that we thought we’d give it another go. We weren’t disappointed. Jamie started with the Caprese salad just to be different, and I had stuffed squid. The salad was as you would expect, but the stuffed squid was amazing – it had a sort of thick ragu/cheese filling in a tomato sauce that was so tasty. The taste of the filling initially overpowered the taste of the squid, but as you chewed the squid came to the front – not rubbery or chewy at all. We followed that up with ravioli for Jamie and Trofie in pesto for me (trofie being a local type of pasta) – both excellent, but so much trofie!

Desert was gelato down at the seats overlooking the harbour – we were both sad about our last night in the Cinque Terre. After gelato, we went down the boat ramp and stood in the breaking waves for a little while, feeling the water of the Med wash over our feet one last time. Maudlin, I know, but it’s an amazing place.

We’ve ended our last evening in the Cinque Terre with a final bottle of wine on our balcony, writing this report and watching possibly the most beautiful sunset of all time – a break in the clouds bathed Corniglio on its hill with golden light. We’re sad to be leaving this place, but looking forward to our 5 day driving tour of Piedmont starting tomorrow.