Day 10 - The Pirates who don't do anything

A whole day on the beautiful Cinque Terre and we don't want to waste a minute.  One of the main attractions of this area (apart from all the stair, obviously) is the hiking trails between each of the towns.  They are apparently pretty hard work, so we decide that today might be the day.  To take the ferry between the towns instead.
We head downstairs (about 900 of them) to the dock to catch the ferry.  It's an all day, hop on hop off affair so we decide to take the trip to the furthest of the towns - Monterosso al Mer - and then make our way back home, hopping between ports. We will spend much of the day on the beautiful blue Mediterranean.   Soon our ride is here:

We board the ferry and settle in to enjoy the cruise.  We will be getting a good look at all 5 of the Cinque Terre in the next hour or so.  Here's how it went:

Leaving Riomaggiore. Probably too far away to point out where out apartment is.

We skip past Manarola and Corniglia, intending to check them out on the way back.  As we head in to deposit some of our fellow sea farers at Vernazza, I can't help noticing that the restaurant at the top looks like it has added an extra outdoor area by attaching it with masking tape.  The unsuspecting diners can't see from up there, but I make a mental note to give that place a miss.

 
Soon we are at Monterosso and looking forward to a nice lunch at a restaurant called Milky - strange name, but it comes highly recommended. Here is the town as we are heading into dock.  We didn't pay it much thought at the time, but for those of you paying attention, you might notice the sky is less than blue.

No problem.  We get off the boat and have a bit of a wander through Monterosso.  Not surprisingly, it turns out to be a beautiful place with lots of colourful buildings, lots of stairs, lots of cafes and ristorantes, and lots and lots of tourists.  You can't see much of it, but check the colour of the sky over those hills.

 Here's a shot of me.  We are walking around to the restaurant, and although the sky is darkening by the second, we are quite confident all will be well.













Not so.  Zeus is once again angry with me and decides to give us a short burst of his wrath.  We take refuge in the underpass of the train station and wait for about half an hour.  Google maps taunts with the fact that we are 180 metres from our lunch destination and the rain doesn't look like stopping.  So we decide to run for it. By the time we get there, I am soaked to the skin and my socks will not be dry until they have been removed, washed, and hung high above the laneways of Riomaggiore.  And the restaurant's closed.

No matter, we trudge back and enter the first restaurant we can find.  Annie has the anchovies (which are plentiful and lovely) and I go for the grilled fish.  The bones are plentiful and it's a little small but tastes very nice.  We leave the restaurant and it's nothing but blue skies above.

We do some touristy things in the town which are not interesting to the reader and then wait at the dock for our ferry.  I can't stop humming an old Chris de Burgh song which is annoying, especially since I've already paid him.

We then return to Vernazza.  From the water, it looks like another one of these beautiful little towns with brightly coloured buildings built in a really hard place to build things.  Once again, most of the buildings are on top of other buildings, the laneways are steep, and stairs are common.

 I am astounded to see that this deck has not fallen into the sea in the past few hours, but here's proof.  If you can zoom in on this picture, you'll see what I mean.  And promise me that should you ever get to Vernazza, you will never, EVER, go up to this place.  Especially you, Michelle.

As you can probably tell from the concise nature of today's blog, there were not a lot of interesting adventures to recount.  But time got away from us nonetheless and the next ferry out of Vernazza was the last one of the day, so, the next two towns will be seen from the boat.

 Corniglia. We'll be visiting it tomorrow.

Manarola.  We'll be sort of visiting that tomorrow too.

 Riomaggiore.  Home, sweet home.  Regular readers will recognise the washing hanging from our kitchen window in this photo.  Soon, my socks will be there.

Walking up from the dock to the street.  You can't call it the main street when it's the only street.  Incidentally, this is the table that we dined at last night.  Tonight we will buy some local produce and eat in.

Big day tomorrow.