June 23, Friday
Levanto/Monterossa
We stopped by the information booth to find out where the trailhead to Monterossa was - it was a free trail unlike the now toll trail that you have to pay to hike between the Cinque Terra towns (3.00/day). It was a steep uphill climb as you'll notice from the pictures everything is either a steep uphill climb or steep downhill. The heat was already rising by the time we started our two and a half hour hike. I was sweating buckets within the first thirty minutes. The great thing about Italy - for better or worse I guess is that people seem to be more comfortable with their bodies than they are in the USA. Woman of all shapes, sizes, and ages were wearing bikinis on the beach or other skin bearing clothing while out and about town. It's no wonder since it's so hot here what you'd really rather be doing is walking around with no clothes on at all. Did I mention it was hot here? Jon notes that it's not even July and thank goodness we won't be here in August!
The hike to Monterossa was beautiful, challenging (Jon doesn't think it was challenging) and fun. We shared the trail with mostly Germans and a few Italiens. The Germans were decked out in head to toe hiking gear. The Italiens were wearing Speedos, and tennis shoes. The hike was more inland that the other Cinque Terra hikes. We both noted that the foliage changed drastically once we entered the Cinque Terra park boundaries. It went from more bushes to leafy trees to pine forest. I made the comment that it really reminded me of eastern Washington. Many of the areas we traveled through in Italy reminded me of eastern Washington and Jon felt reminded more of Spain than Eastern Washinton.
Once we got to Monterossa we were ready to eat. We had foccia, one with proscuitto for Jon, foccacia rossa for me and we tried the rice foccacia with is a thin crust with rice and something yellowish, not delicious but not bad tasting either and two giant bottles of water. Afterwards we walked around the new town and the old town connected by a tunnel. The new town is where the train station is located and the old town has all the character. The beaches were billed with deck chairs and umbrellas that looked really inviting. The Mediterranean Sea looked cool and refreshing after a sweaty hike. It wasn't long before we were renting a spot on the beach with deck chairs and umbrella ( 15 euro for the entire day). Jon quickly snoozed and I read my book for a while then couldn't resist the water any longer and went in. The sand on the beaches are friggin' hot, it's more rock/pebbles than sand and once they heat up it's probably the closest I'll come to walking across a bed of firey coals. I would pull my chair forward, have my feet in the sand for MAYBE ten seconds and literally jump back into the chair and put my feet on the edge of the seat until they cooled down. You could tell who were the natives to the area and who wasn't based on how they were tolerating the sand. I mean it was amazingly hot - like really hot - hot.
The people watching was great/scary. The Italien woman - the much older ones would come out in their bikinis and bake all day. I was horrified to see this one woman with a tan/burn? That made her skin look purpley/red. Is this suppose to be attractive? Then there was the vacationing English family who came to the beach that day pastey and pale but left red as a lobster. I'll admit that I too got burned despite my efforts to not stay in the sun too long. Gelato helped. We had it twice that day. After the beach we went looking for dinner and consulted our Rick Steves book - we had ripped out the pages on Monterossa that morning to lighten the load for our hike. We were headed to the old town. A world cup game was just starting so we chose a bar with Sky TV and watched. We had a lite dinner of Bruschetta with tomato sauce, moz and shrimp and we had a antipasta plate. It was tastey but nothing special. I had a glass of local wine which was OK but not nearly as good as the Levanto white wine I had had the day before which was excellent. After dinner we strolled around town, took the train back to Levanto, walked back to camp went straight to bed. It had been a long day.
