Day 9. Train in Vain

Today is the day that we say au revoir to France and make our way to the land of the forefathers of many of my compadres - Italia. It's been a lot of fun for me in France, trying out my very basic French, and I've had a few very satisfying moments.  And a few that fell flat but it's been great fun trying.  No more sadly.  I'll have to go back!
Anyway, today is going to be largely about sitting on a train, so don't get your hopes up.
An early start from Nice station heading for the famous Savona.  Not much to tell you about Savona.  There is a train station there.  We took no photos.
From Savona, we board the train to Riomaggiore.  Some nice scenery from the train, but constant readers will be getting a little tired of shots of the Mediterranean as viewed from a speeding train. Tough.  Here's a couple more.

We are headed to Riomaggiore which is the fifth town of the famous Cinque Terre (five lands).  You will be seeing photos of all five over the next couple of days.  Basically there are five beautiful old towns that are built in ludicrous places and are all improbably steep.  There is a walking trail connecting each of the five towns.  More on that later.

We disembarked as planned at Riomaggiore and had been given clear instructions on how to find our new digs.  I'm paraphrasing but it was something like this:

Find the steepest hill you have ever seen and drag your bags to the very top, where you will find a tree.  Wait there.
So we did.  Here's Annie waiting:

You can see the station at the bottom of the hill.

Soon, our host Maddy came and found us and led us further up the hill (!!) to a little doorway at the top of some stairs.  Beyond the doorway was six flights of stairs which opened up into our beautiful home for the next three days.  It's very nice, and twice as big as the previous places we've been in.  The view is ok.  Here's how it looks out of the kitchen window:

And here's the view from the bedroom. 

Here's what our place looks like from the boat we caught the next day:

If you look carefully, you can see us in the windows.

A few household chores to be done.  Normally the washing wouldn't make it into a page turner like this blog, but Annie felt strongly that she was settling into the local customs and was proud to be leaning out of a fourth floor window to get our socks dried.

Here's how it looked to the folks below

We then set off to explore our local surroundings.

When navigating around Riomaggiore, North, South, East and West are not that important. There's really only two directions that count.  Up and down.  There is only one street here, and a million staircases that will eventually lead to that street.  You can't get lost.  You are either going up or down. It mainly feels like up though.

Here's the main drag.

 
And here's a tiny selection of the steps you will find.

All's well that ends well though and just near our place there is a lovely little bar that overlooks the whole town.  We stopped for a couple.  Annie is loving the Aperol Spritzes.  This picture looks blurry, but I think it was actually my vision that was blurred.  The beers were very nice.

We then ventured down to the bottom of the town again for dinner.  We had a lovely dinner and chatted to a couple from Brisbane (there are a ridiculously large number of Australians here).  No photos exist of this event though, so it may not have really happened.