Sunday morning we donned our poncho’s and walked to the train station where we hopped the train south to the fourth town of the Cinque Terre, Vernazza , from here we had planned a day hike north, back to Levanto, but found the trail between Vernazza and Monterosso closed due to landslides. We decided to take time to explore Vernazza before taking the train north to to begin the half day hike back to the B&B in Levanto.
Vernazza was wonderful, perched on rocks at the mouth of a creek it is typical Cinque Terre. Endless narrow passages winding between the houses where you could touch the adjacent walls with outstretched arms. More stairs then I care to remember and many private wine cellars at the base of many houses. Most established households make their own wine and have for
centuries. The only available space to grow grapes was on the shear hillsides, so for over 1,000 years the terraces have been a work in progress. Imagine gathering rocks on a hillside and then piling the rocks into walls and then backfilling the walls with soil and then planting grape vines and then repeating this process from the sea to the mountaintops on an entire coastline, only then can you understand the majesty of this place. I think working on a pyramid may have been easier. At first I didn't think the terraces covered the entire coast from north to south and from sea to mountaintop, but I was wrong. Many of the terraces have been overgrown by foliage or tumbled by land slides. The life is hard, too hard for the younger generation that continues to migrate to the larger cities. You grow grapes, you make wine, you fish and you trade what you have grown or caught for what you don’t have. The people are proud, strong and gracious hosts.
3/29/09 - afternoon
Well we finally made the 3 minute train ride from Vernazza to Monterosso. In Italy it is important to not only buy your train ticket, but to validate it in one of the many machines before boarding the train (we found this out after about three days). Monterosso is right at sea level, its a long narrow town by Cinque Terre standards and has a more moderate elevation gain as you go east up the coastal foot hills. This is where Ann actually took the picture of the bicycle in front of the little shop and not Vernazza. Since we knew there was limited time left in the day and we were unfamiliar with the territory (especially if we were to hike to Levanto in the rain), we immediately started looking for the red and white blaze (trail marker) that would lead us to the coastal trail. We found the blaze just outside the train station and headed north along the beach. There would be plenty of time to explore this town in the following days. The trail followed a little street parallel to the beach until the town ended. At this point the trail just headed up the first set of what would become hundreds of ancient stone steps. Now forget all you know about steps and handrails in the overly protective and litigious good ole USA, this is Italy. These things were easily a minimum of a foot tall and seemed like they would never end. With all the continuous rain they had become hundreds of little waterfalls. Ann had the Gortex shoes, I had trail runners. There were no switchbacks, just these stairs taking the shortest distance between two points to gain the elevation needed to traverse along the top of the coastal range. This particular route excited us because we understood that the entire Cinque Terre region could be viewed from the top. It was a strenuous climb in the rain, but well worth the view. The hike back down to Levanto was much less strenuous. The challenge was fording a dozen streams swollen from the constant rain and at times the trail itself was a stream. Three hours later we entered Levanto, Ann striding smartly in her Gortex and me sloshing in my never to completely dry trail runners. We had a light snack and retired early, tired and anxious to meet the next day with the people that would be our companions for the next week in what would be the official hiking, cooking, eating and drinking tour of the Cinque Terre, the cooking, eating and drinking conceived and directed by Pamela Sheldon Johns and the hiking guided by Kate Little.
The pictures are of Ann in Vernazza. The first atop an old fort and the second waiting for the train north to Monterosso. As you can see, having the day pack under the poncho lends a kind of hunch back look to the entire ensemble. Ann said that under my gray poncho you could see the two blinking LED’s of my SPOT tracking device, lending a suicide bomber look to my outfit. In the bottom picture Ann is standing near the northern tunnel mouth and you can clearly see the southern tunnel mouth behind her. For you engineers in the crowd, the speed of the trains passing this station pressurized the space between the two tunnels with what felt like mini hurricane, I wish I had a photo of the umbrellas that were turned inside out when this phenomenon happened, it was hilarious. 
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