Italy part 3: Cinque Terra with Kas

Part 3 of the adventure in Italy with Kas. The search for Kas, hiking in Cinque Terra, beaches, caves, and missing trains.

The search for Kas…

The only plan that Kasmira and I made was to at the Principe train station at midnight in Genova, so at 11:30, I decided to take the metro there. However, the metro was closed for the night, so I needed to find an alternative way to get there. I knew that I could take a train from the Brinole station to the Principe station, so I started asking around “Dove esta la estazione Brinole?”. To this day, I still have no clue whether I was properly asking the question, since I got directed to about 5 or 6 different locations before finally finding it. I finally found it and took the train to Principe 15 minutes late, and couldn’t find her anywhere.

Alright, she wouldn’t ditch out because I was 15 minutes late. I knew that Italian trains are sometimes late, so I checked the ticket office, and found out that her train arrived on time. I know that she would have called but I didn’t have a phone, so I went on a mission to get internet access to find her phone number and to check if she sent me a message. Of course, finding internet access at 1 AM is nearly impossible, but when I managed, I didn’t get any messages, and she didn’t answer my skype calls. Of all the women in the world, two of the ones that I would trust most to get out of bad situations while travelling would be my sister and Kas, but I was starting to get worried.

I went back to the train station, checked the place that we were supposed to meet, hoping that she’d be smart enough to stay put at the ticket office. No one there. I do a lap around the station, trying to see if there are other locations that she might confuse for the ticket office. Nothing. Finally, I head back to the public phone near the ticket office to call her one more time, when I saw her turning the corner, a little bit past 2 AM. It turns out that she missed her stop, and ended up at the Brinole station, right after I was there, and had a hard time getting back to the Principe station.

We talked, caught up and hung out for a bit, and decided that we should get some sleep before going to Cinque Terra the next day. We were just going to sleep in the train station, but as we were walking around, we found a nice carpeted glass room that would keep us warm, shelter us from the wind, and keep the bugs and the noise out. Perfect… Since my clothing were still damp, I decided to hang my clothing up on the meat string that was given to me earlier that day.

We stayed here the first night. Our alarm clock was three police officers...

Bright and early the next day, we heard people knocking on the glass door. 3 police officers were gracious enough to offer us a wake-up call service. After showing them our passport and playing the tourist card, we got off with a warning to not do this again. We went for breakfast and took the train to Cinque Terra.

Monterosso’s beaches and caves

Kas told me that Cinque Terra seemed like a very interesting place, and she had some engineering intern friends going there s0me time that weekend, so we decided to go there. From Wikipedia:

“The Cinque Terre is a rugged portion of coast on the Italian Riviera. It is in the Liguria region of Italy, to the west of the city of La Spezia. “The Five Lands” comprises five villages: Monterosso al Mare, Vernazza, Corniglia, Manarola, and Riomaggiore.

The coastline, the five villages, and the surrounding hillsides are all part of the Cinque Terre National Park and is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

The Cinque Terre is noted for its beauty. Over centuries, people have carefully built terraces on the rugged, steep landscape right up to the cliffs that overlook the sea. Part of its charm is the lack of visible “modern” development. Paths, trains and boats connect the villages, and cars cannot reach it from the outside.

A walking trail, known as Sentiero Azzurro (“Light Blue Trail”), connects the five villages. The trail from Riomaggiore to Manarola is called the Via Dell’Amore (“Love Walk”) and varies in difficulty from an easy stroll to a rough and physically challenging hike. The stretch from Manarola to Corniglia is the easiest to hike, although the main trail into Corniglia finishes with a climb of 368 stairs. The trail from Corniglia to Vernazza is steep at certain places. The trail from Vernazza to Monterosso is by far the steepest. It winds through olive orchards and vineyards and is rough in places, but offers the best view of the bay and the spectacular approaches to both Monterosso and Vernazza. The difference in height for the whole Sentiero Azzurro is more than 600 meters^[3] and the length is more than 10 km.”

We arrived in Monterosso at noon, and guess who we found? Yes, we found her friends! So we chatted for a while, and decided to part ways. We walked around for a while, and decided to go to the beach and swim for a bit. I had gotten changed earlier by a secluded train platform, so I ran right into the water. While I was keeping an eye on our bags, apparently Kas changed right beside the change rooms because she couldn’t find it…

It was a beautiful day. We swam for a while, slept on the beach, and decided to start hiking. We found a small cave with a water entrance, so we decided to go explore it. We found some minnows swimming around, and even found one that looked quite colorful.

We hiked onto the next town, and the people on the trail were super friendly, such as a guy from Australia who’s been travelling around the world for the last 5 years, and went to the Himalayas. We saw a bunch of stray cats that have found a home and people to feed them on the Cinque Terra hills. The views were beautiful, and the multitude of hikers around did not make the place any less amazing.

Vernazza’s gelato and cactus fruit

We were told that we should try the amazing gelato in Vernazza, and it didn’t disappoint. I always choose to try new things, so I picked one flavoured Opuntia ficus-indica. I noticed that the image of the fruit in the store was the same as some of the cactus-like plants in Cinque Terra. So while hiking to Corniglia, I picked up one of these fruits, and had tons of small needles in my hand.

Opuntia Ficus Indica

Alright, new strategy… I carefully used a napkin to pick the fruit off the cactus, and rolled it against a rock to get rid of all the needles on the Opuntia. Alright, step 2 is to figure out how to eat this fruit. The skin didn’t taste good, so I tried opening the fruit, but I didn’t have a knife, so that failed too. I used a trick that a guy from high school used on grapefruits. Poke a hole and suck it out. Fruits will probably be one of the most interesting foods in the world because it is always an adventure trying to figure out how to eat them properly. For those who’ve never tried eating palmagranite, try to figure that one out on your own, I know I had a blast!

La Spezia

Since the trail from Corneglia to Manarola was closed, we figured that we should train it to La Spezia and walk back from there the next day. We decided to splurge, and go out to a nice restaurant for supper instead of sticking to the grocery store for meals. It was a great decision to try real, fresh, Italian pasta. After eating, we brushed our teeth and got changed in the restaurant bathroom, and we headed back to the train station in La Spezia to get some sleep after a long day of fun.

The next morning, we asked for directions to the grocery store, and a few people pointed us in a direction. After walking a few minutes, they pulled up in a car, and offered Kas and me a ride to the grocery store so that we could buy food for the day. After doing the groceries, we sat down to have lunch when a couple, with hair just as scruffy as ours, walks up to us and say: “You look like friendly people”. We chatted for a while about our adventures to see if there were fun things to do around the area, and then exchanged a few stories. They told us a few new tricks to travel cheaply, a few ways to have great adventures, and then invited us to become part of a caravan adventure in Croatia in December.

We parted ways, and decided to walk to Riomaggiore to take the train. Since we were on a tight deadline, we huffed it up a mountain, and down the other side, and made it with 10 minutes to spare… however, the train ride back to Genova was a lot slower than we expected, and Kas missed her train back to Switzerland…

A night in Milan

We arrived in the Genova train station, and rushed to the help center to figure out our options. Kas had work the next morning, and we were trying to figure out the best way to get her to her town in Switzerland on time. Of all times to get a useless person at the counter, this was not a good time.

The person at the counter did not seem to think that we could buy a train ticket for a train leaving within 15 minutes, and took her sweet sweet time looking up information. She missed a lot of information about trains leaving from Milan, and was quite negative. Apparently according to her, Kas could only get into Switzerland in the afternoon. so I logged on to the internet on the public terminal while Kas was bickering with her, and I whipped up as much information as possible. I found out that it was actually possible to get her in by 8 AM the next morning. I think it annoyed the person at the counter that we did not trust her, and angered her when we found a better solution…

We bought the high speed train ride to Milan, and chose to talk over whether we should try to rush Kas to Switzerland the next morning or to just take it relaxed. We decided to spend the night in Milan, to spend the night in a hostel, and visit the Milan Cathedral the next morning.

While trying to find a place to stay in Milan and trying to contact her boss to tell him that she’d be late, we found out that the other engineering interns also missed the train back. Too bad that they decided to stay in Genova, or else it would have been quite a night…

Thus concludes my adventure with Kas. I’d be excited to travel with her again some day. There’s a chance that I write a part 4 of this trip that covers my time in Madrid on the way back home, but I know that I’ve also got other stories to write too!