This is another one of my new favourite places in the world; Vernazza, in Italy’s Cinque Terre. It’s a small village connected to the other villages in the area by hiking paths and the train tracks you can see in the bottom right of this photo.
It was a fairly long walk from Vernazza to Monterosso al Mare up and down along the Italian coastline. When I arrived the first thing I did was sit down in a small cafe above this beach to enjoy parma ham and cantaloupe with a big bottle of water. It was while eating there that I discovered that wasps are attracted to ham. This would be confirmed a couple days later as I tucked into the same lunch in a different location.
You can see a loaded ferry seemingly on a collision course with the rocks in this photo of Manarola’s harbor. What’s actually happening is people are boarding as the ferry is nosed up to the “ferry dock”. I put the ferry dock in quotes because it’s less a dock than a rocky coastline with a couple of cleats on it. The ferry noses up to it, and the crew roll out a gang plank for people to climb aboard as the boat pitches and rolls with the waves.
On my third day in the Cinque Terre, I decided to walk from Manarola to Corniglia. I knew that there would be some walking up involved as Corniglia is on top of the cliffs. I asked at my hotel where the path started and they pointed towards a steep flight of stairs heading up the hill. I asked if that was the extent of the walking up involved and he told me it flattened out at the top of the hill. What I didn’t realise is that you couldn’t really see the extent of the hill until you were at the top of that first set of stairs. It was far higher than I realised!
Still, the uphill walking resulted in a lot of photos as I needed an excuse to catch my breath.