The Cinque Terre: a Mediterranean paradise comprised of five cities in the Liguria region with cliffs jutting into the majestic blue-green sea surrounding it. There are hiking trails, nature paths, and even kayak rentals—more than any outdoorsy person could ever ask for! Despite all this tranquility, my trip to the Cinque Terre was a chaotic, spontaneous, and bizarre mess that I should’ve realized immediately from the beginning…

 

 

I was supposed to take a 9:57 am train—for which I was going to wake up at 9:00—slip on a bathing suit, jeans, and a tank top, then head to the Firenze Santa Maria Novella station. I wound up waking up wide awake for no reason at 4 am when I had just fallen asleep at 2:30. I knew exhaustion would eventually catch up to me (and it did hit me hard around noon) and trying to hike in the Cinque Terre would now be like a 90 year old grandma attempting the same feat. 

 

After my random 4 am ‘alarm’ went off, I had realized while lying in bed that my camera’s memory card was full. To add insult to injury, it was dead too. After waiting the oretta (a little over an hour) to put the old pictures on my laptop plus charging the battery, my mp3 player needed to be charged.   At that point it was 8:30 am, but I decided to plug it in anyway for a bit since I was planning on leaving at 9:30. At 9:34 am my cell phone rang. I was running a little late (and who isn’t in Italy?)

 

“Andrea, hey, where are you,” asked my friend Dave, my travel partner.

“In my apartment, charging up my mp3 player, why? The train’s at 9:57, right?” 

“Well,” he paused, “if you don’t get here within like five minutes, you won’t be able to get a ticket because they’re gonna stop selling tickets pretty soon I think.” Why he didn’t just offer to buy me a ticket instead of me cascading down via Nazionale towards the station, I’ll never know. 

“I’m running.” I ripped my mp3 player out of the charger, grabbed my napsack while simultaneously throwing on the clothes I had left out the night before, and (literally) ran out the door. I reasoned within those 30 seconds that my purse would not be necessary, since I put 110 euros cash directly in my napsack. I bolted down via Guelfa and via Nazionale to get to the station (typically a 10 minute walk) and wound up making it within several minutes! Phew, first obstacle passed.

 

 

Riding the train(s) was no picnic, especially since I get motion sickness on anything that moves. It was one of those Intercity trains, no Eurostars here! Whereas Dave assured me that the train would take maybe an hour and a half, it wound up taking us about three and a half hours to get there. We left Florence around 10 am and got to the Cinque Terre at 1:48. We had to change twice to get to Corniglia, one of Cinque Terre’s stops. The train is honestly the most impractical mode of transportation in Italy (when it’s not a Eurostar). And if anyone is planning on going to the Cinque Terre, do yourself a favor and either take a bus or even go to the extreme of renting a car (or maybe I’m just bitter…). Renting that car would really be helpful as you travel from one city to the other (since there are five of them), considering the trains between them are unreliable, persistently late, and infrequent. Sure, you could take a ferry, but they’re always crowded and I’m sure most people would get sea sick on them (like me).

 

I have to say that Dave had no idea where he was going or what he was doing because he hadn’t fully researched our trip. It’s cool that he’s spontaneous and all, but trips like these need to be planned out before just packing bags the night before. He had no idea that we had to change trains—we stop at La Spezia Centrale and all of a sudden the train lights go off and just stops. Is our train broken down? How long is this delay?  I see everyone around us get off. Did we get the wrong train? Are we lost? We wait a few minutes, trying to be patient while I’m trying not to panic.    Finally, I ask an Italian couple what’s going on. It was just the last stop on the line, they said, I needed to buy another ticket to transfer to the Cinque Terre, whichever stop I wanted. There’s more than one stop? We were under the false impression that the Cinque Terre was just one city, but no, in fact there were five (hence cinque terre, or five lands). I get Dave and go to a ticket window to find out which stop we had wanted in the Cinque Terre. While he stood in line, I asked Information where the beaches are and was told that Monterosso would be the stop we should go to. I tell Dave the information, but he says that he thinks it’s Corniglia where there’s a great beach that a friend told him about (mind you, he didn’t even know the name of this city, only that it began with a “C”; he only found out about it after asking the person behind the ticket counter). Very well—Corniglia it was. But that train to Corniglia was another forty five minutes away, so we hopped on the train to Riomaggiore and would wait for the train to Corniglia.

 

 

Finally we get to Corniglia. It took maybe about twenty minutes after yet another train transfer. Don’t they make any trains to stop at each and every Cinque Terre stop? It really makes no sense. When I got onto the final train after Riomaggiore and before Corniglia, I realized I had accidentally left my ticket on the train. I thought for sure they would’ve checked tickets only because I had forgotten mine. For some reason, I didn’t.

 

Now comes our quest to this mysterious beach that Dave heard about. So essentially he told me he knew it was somewhere on one of the paths, just not exactly sure where that would be. Wonderful… so we would wander around hoping that we would just stumble upon a beach. If anyone has been to the Cinque Terre, it’s not just a straight hiking path, but rather a winding trail practically through wilderness. After hiking about an hour, it being about 3:30 at this point, it didn’t even make sense to continue trying to find it. Perhaps it was determination, frustration, curiosity that made us keep looking…who knows? Suddenly we see a rather large rock on the ground with a hand written sign “Free beach, this way,” “Beach beautiful this way,” and “Only 15 minutes walking.” Being the skeptic that I am, I can’t honestly believe that a beach could be at the bottom of this path. Besides, I think I have to stress that this was not a path that the park service had established and that it really was scaling down an actual cliff, whereas before we had at least been on paths that were straight and somewhat paved with rocks and maintained. The path looked fake, so I tell him that it’s probably a joke and we shouldn’t do it, meant only to lead people down this windy and perilous trail and then eventually wind up at a dead end with a “HA HA You’re stupid” sign similarly etched on a rock. He insists that it has to be true since we were all up and down the trails in Corniglia and couldn’t find anything else that resembled a beach. We start to slowly rock climb down by holding a rope that was assembled there down the first level (seems like an awful lot of trouble to go through for just a joke). Being as sleep-deprived as I was, I lose my footing and slip on my back for a few seconds until the bottom of the first plateau when I got my footing again. It was no biggie, maybe a six second slide, but still an inconvenience nonetheless. 

 

Dave laughed (of course). “Andrea, let’s turn back. You’re right, this is probably a joke,” he said. I don’t know what it was that came over me, but no, I wanted to find this confounded beach! I guess as they say, curiosity does kill the cat—but satisfaction sends him back! I had to find this beach, even if it killed me (which it really could have). We take the windy road down and down. After a few trips and stumbles and a twenty or thirty minute hike through wilderness and animals running across the paths—rats, mice, garden snakes, and loads of bees (one of my biggest fears and I always manage to scream really loudly and bolt when one flies by my ear…not too good when you’re cautiously tip-toeing through these difficult hiking trails)—I couldn’t believe it. There it was in all its glory, the elusive beach that Dave’s friend had told him about. Just the fact that we had surpassed all these obstacles felt great. It wasn’t that nice of a beach, I should say: it was a rock beach, so there was no sand, and it was really small. Not to mention it was a nude beach. Though it sounds sexy, it is anything but that. No young, attractive Europeans here. Essentially just all old men willing to bare it all on the beach to avoid tan lines. Well, at least we had found it! So we sunbathed a little, even though it was around 5:00 at this point. At least there was still sun, I suppose? We had to at least say we had enjoyed this beach somewhat!

 

What goes up must come down…or is it what goes down must come up? Dave said that he could’ve sworn his friend knew of a tunnel to get to the beach and wouldn’t risk hiking back up the trail we were just on. Thank God, I thought, we don’t have to head up the way we came. We wander around the beach and see the tunnel that his friend was talking about…but as soon as we get close to it we see that it was locked. Up the way we came then. Avanti! We were battling with dehydration at this point since we hadn’t drunk anything for hours. We eventually make it back to the regular downtown city part of Corniglia after I had lost my shirt on the trail (I was carrying it in my belt loop and just wearing a bathing suit because it was so hot out). Time to eat, we both decided. We hiked back to Riomaggiore since we had spotted a really cute bar/eatery there and calmly had some drinks and snacks. We saunter over to the train area just to check what time we could get back to Florence (after transferring five hundred times), hoping to then get dinner. All of a sudden, at 8:30 pm, the worst part of our trip happened, something that we didn’t think would happen (though maybe it’s our own faults since we’ve lived in Italy for several months now):

 

 

My mind was racing…You’ve got to be kidding me? A train strike?! All trains? Maybe there’s a bus to Florence? No, none. Not even a bus terminal. Well maybe we can take a train to Spezia Centrale (at 8:46 pm) and hopefully catch a bus to Florence from there. No and no: we found out there are no buses to Florence from Spezia and plus, a train running in the middle of the strike’s hours could mean just getting stopped in the middle of nowhere and getting chased off the train and having to walk to the nearest stop. Wait so…we’re trapped here? What do we do? I only have 54 Euros left on me… 

 

Dave was able to calm me down, telling me that we should look on the bright side of things in being ‘stranded’ in a beautiful place like this. He was right, though, at least we’re trapped here and not in Spezia or in the middle of a tunnel or something. And he would spot me for some cash. We decided to get a room for the night and then find a place to get some dinner.

 

We started our hunt to find a room. Finding a room in such small towns in Italy is pretty hard: either all the rooms were taken (tourist season) or reception areas were closed. After about a half hour of endless stair climbing in places where we couldn’t even find a reception desk, we stumbled upon a quaint cottage-looking type place advertising vacancy with rooms to rent with piano music softly playing from inside. Have any of you seen the movie Psycho by Alfred Hitchcock? I felt like we had stumbled upon the Bates Motel. I kid you not when I say that this man was just as odd as Norman Bates was, in both his mannerisms, speech, and even the way he looked. Honestly, all he needed to say to convince both me and Dave of this was “Mother likes it when I play the piano.” After handing us the keys, Dave slammed the door and couldn’t believe how massive and beautiful the room was! Sure, it was oddly decorated with penguins and Chinese fans everywhere, but it was gorgeous! I paid 50 for the room and Dave paid 15 (he ran out of cash and had to switch to credit card for the rest of the time). I was completely out of money, but still, he said, he would spot me the rest of the day tomorrow. We calmly ate our dinner—pasta with pesto, a traditional Ligurian dish, and then mussels after—and headed back to the room. Dave bolted the door shut with two chairs and a sofa (just to be safe because of Norman wandering around…). I think I should mention how we had no bathroom supplies: no soap, no toothbrushes, no toothpaste, no facial washes, no expensive eye creams, no change of clothes, nothing. But at least we had found a place to stay.

 

 

The next morning we spent our day calmly sipping drinks and having yet another delicious dinner, this time a large and filling risotto alla pescatora, and hiking through four towns (Riomaggiore, Manarola, the infamous Corniglia, and Vernazza…I still haven’t been to Monterosso which is supposedly famous for its beaches). After dinner, we figure it would be best to check train times again since the strike was coming to an end. Well, it seemed like they were just easing into regular service again because almost all trains were still canceled and one train back to La Spezia Centrale was running thirty five minutes late. Though I forget the exact breakdown of the train schedules and hours, we had a fifteen minute ride back to Spezia and twenty minutes to get on the train to Pisa Centrale (what the information person had told us). In those five minutes of transferring we still had to buy a ticket and of course use the sottopassaggio (underground passageway) to get to the transferring train. 

 

When we got to Spezia, we had no idea which train to take, since the train to Pisa Centrale was canceled (and then change over to Florence). We saw there was a train to Livorno that had the same time that the information person had given us (the Pisa train was later than the time we had written down from him) so we assumed that was our train. Three minutes left. Dave illegally bolted—without using the sottopassaggio—across two sets of train tracks to buy us both tickets. The train to Livorno was pulling in and I see Dave running back across those tracks again. I thought by some good grace he had just purchased the ticket and was able to make the train. I was about to board with him when he said:

“I couldn’t make it, I didn’t buy the tickets. I heard the train coming and I just ran back.” 

 

At this point we had two options: get on the train and risk a hefty fine, or wait for another train to Florence. If I remember correctly, the last train (eventually) to Florence was the next one which was at 11:48 at night. Did we really want to chance having that train canceled or running late, then getting back to Florence at 4 am? We had just hiked for the past two days and all we wanted to do was get a good night’s rest. We took the risk like the renegades we are.

 

We took a seat next to each other and the train started moving. Dave cursed to himself since he saw that it was a slightly nicer train, so he was convinced someone was going to check tickets. But what are the odds? This late at night, with the strike just ending? Not one conductor had checked our tickets for the past two days. I said I would be the lookout anyway. I stood up to go check the other train car and there was no one there. I walked back to our seats and there he was—“Biglietti (Tickets Please).” Instead of panicking as I’m prone to doing, I waltzed over to Dave and whisper to him “Get up and go.” He understood immediately and got up and followed me.

 

“Hide in the bathroom for a few minutes, we’ll meet up later. Go, go,” I said. We were tucked away in the nastiest bathrooms I have ever seen and both got train sick (since there are no windows in the bathroom). After about ten minutes, we met outside the bathrooms and stayed in the corridor near them just in case we saw another conductor pass by. Finally we get to Viareggio where Dave figured out that we had to change trains to get to Florence (thank God he did because if not we probably would have wound up in Livorno and would’ve had a whole new set of problems). We hop off the train—we had done it! At this train station, though, we bought tickets…and of course didn’t get checked on the next train. Figures…

 

We took our seats on the next train to Florence. Our story finished like a movie right when Dave flung his backpack onto his lap. A travel size liquid shower gel from a Best Western came falling out from an open side pocket. “Huh, look at that, we had soap the whole time.” Real funny, Dave. Honestly, I have to say that I burst into laughter when it tumbled out. I had to ask myself: could comedy writers dream of ever writing a story like this? And finishing it so brilliantly?