Italy 2014: La Spezia and Cinque Terra

We moved on from Turino and headed to La Spezia. Our motel is just across from the train station. It made our job of dragging our "getting heavier every day" bags rather easy. It is a lovely place...the staff are friendly....the furnishings are very 1930s and grand.....and Amy has voted the brekky the best yet!! Not a fan of twin beds though.
We wandered around downtown Le Spezia on Wednesday afternoon. It has the biggest naval base in Italy, and some other luxury boats in the harbour. It was very relaxing and great to see lots of people out and about just going for a stroll and having a chat with their friends.

Hotel Firenze.....twin beds (ugh!)

Amy (loves Milano .....or so the t-shirt says) and John at the fountain in Piazza Garibaldi (downtown La Spezia). It is very lovely except for all the rubbish tucked under the rim.

Here we are wandering along the boardwalk near the harbour. We had a chat with some old fellas who couldn't talk any English (and our Italian is poor). They got that we were 'Autraliano' cos we heard them telling someone else about us later on. We all laughed and got on famously.

Thursday and Friday saw us 'trekking' Cinque Terra. We caught the train to Riomaggore. We checked out some of the local sights, got lost (as is usual) and then decided to walk over to the next little town, Manarola. Good plan, except the blue trail along the coastline is closed (there have been quite a few landslides on the trail) so overland it was. It was only about 500m but we all had our tongues hanging out and doing lots of puffing and panting by the time we got to our destination. There were many steps and it was straight up..or so it seemed. It took us about an hour and a bit to go what takes about two minutes in the train through the tunnels.

Riomaggiore

The start of our trekking adventure.

The middle ... with tongues hanging out....but what a view.

The descent .... and more steps!

Manarola .... our destination. Phew!! It was HARD work.

More steps..in Corniglia this time.....heading to the train station and home for the day.

On Friday we just did our trekking around the towns and then caught the train to the next town.We did Monterosso and Vernazza today. Here are some of our favourite pics.