We spend two nights in the quaint fishing town of Manarola. This part of the trip was our “roughing it” segment. Steve picked the cutest little (I mean little) room for us in an apartment on the hill where a local family rented out rooms called Casa Capellini.
The room was dirt cheap at 68€ a night and was super clean, but very very small, with a bed that you could feel the metal box springs and no A/C!!!
Normally, I am not a big a/c fan, but the temperature here in the daytime was about 95+ degrees and really nothing could have prepared us for this humid heat!
The town of Manarola is about as big as my big toe and take about 5 minutes to walk through, that is if it weren’t placed on a steep hill. Yes, we did get amazing views from our balcony, but we had to pay the “steep” price of walking up and down a super steep hill several times a day. There are hardly any cars that go up and down this road, so walking is pretty much your only option.
The allure of the Cinque Terra region is gorgeous hillside towns, beautiful ocean, and hiking. You can actually hike all 5 towns along the cliffs, which takes about 5 hours. To Steve and I that didn’t sound so bad considering we are avid hikers, but in 95 degree heat and blazing sun, I think not!!
The hike from our town Manarola to the next town of Corniglia was actually closed for renovations anyway, so we decided to take the local train down to Corniglia and hike to the next town Vernazza, which was about 2 miles and supposidly takes 1 1/2 hours.
We set out for the hike at the worst possible time around 12:15 pm, and we were in for a shocking hellish hike. Again, all these towns are all on steep hills, so guess what?! The hike was up and down steep cliffs!! In 95 degree heat and blazing sun I felt like we were on a death march! We somehow managed to kick this hikes a** and do this trail in under an hour (probably because my only motivation was just to finish and jump in the ocean).
I was not too happy on the actual hike, but we are really glad we did it because it the views were unreal, and when in your life can you walk from one town to another on the side of a cliff overlooking the ocean???!!!
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