Cinque Terre

The Cinque Terre (UNESCO World Heritage listed) is a stretch of land on the Italian Riveria which is made up of five villages. Each village is connected by a railway line and also a walking trail. The walking trail takes about 5 hours (one way) so we decided to catch the train to the town furthest away, walk the first part and then catch the train to each of the other villages.

The villages were quaint and beautiful, each with amazing views of the ocean.

Huge painting on wood - outside our first train station

Cactus graffiti

This is the 'Lovers Chair'. People who are in love bring padlocks here, put their initials on it, lock it and throw the key away.

We didn't bring a padlock so we left some graffiti (legally) instead :)

The walking trail

Another hard-to-reach beach

One of the more popular beaches

The only trouble we had was at the last village. The train tickets we'd bought covered us only for the Cinque Terre stops. But we actually need to get from Cinque Terre back to our campsite back which was actually a few stops away. Not that we didn't want to pay, but both Alice and I were wrecked and couldn't really be bothered getting off the train, lining up for a ticket and then having to wait for another train that could be coming up to an hour later.

So we decided to just stay on the train, after all, what were the chances of running into a ticket inspector on the last few stops? Pretty good as it turned out! As soon as we said that, a scaring looking hulk of a man opened the door to our carriage and started asking for tickets. We jumped up quick smart and exited onto the platform. Yes it looked dodgy but I'm glad we did because had we been caught, we would have been charged around 100 Euros each :)