CEBToD: Day 14 -- Savona to Riomaggiore

So today was a bike-free day! After yesterday we desperately needed it. Well, ok, it wasn’t totally bike-free… we did bike from the Swiss hotel to the train station. But that was all of a mile. Anyways, we had been worried about the possibility of the train strike still affecting us. As you’ll recall, the south of France was experiencing a strike earlier in the week, which had hosed up our plans for getting around the coast. Though I forgot to mention it before, we had been intending to take the train to Genoa at one point yesterday, but found that there was either the same strike in Italy or a sympathy strike, which is what forced us to ground in Savona. But I spoke with the front desk at the hotel last night and found out that since today’s Saturday, the trains are running per normal. Apparently European strikes are a weekday thing… even strikers have the weekend off under socialism. Hahaha.

So anyways. We got our tickets and jumped on the train, and rode the 100 miles or more from Savona to the Cinque Terra. We had no idea which one we would stay in, but we figured we’d skip the first one (Monterosso) as it’s the most touristy and would likely be the hardest to find a hotel in, and I’d been there yearsssss before. We ended up jumping off the train at the last of the 5 towns, in Riomaggiore.
Riomaggiore is a tiny little town that’s nestled in what I’m pretty sure is effectively a fjord. It’s a very steep valley running down to the Med from these high-ass mountains that sit very very close to the water. So the town is super-steep and basically is built like a bunch of switchbacks running up the side of the mountain. It’s also ludicrously beautiful and incredibly quaint… very touristy (though not as much as Monterosso), and easily in my top 3 places we visited in Europe on this trip (with Girona and either Avignon or Lucca, the latter of which my narrating voice hasn’t been to yet, so pretend I didn’t mention that).

We walked our bikes up the super-steep hillside and found a hotel to check into. Our room looked out onto what we called the kirchenplatz (church square), which seemed filled with kids and villagers and flowers and birds at all hours of the day. It was terribly serene, at least for me. We hung out for a bit and watched some European track championships on tv, then headed down to get some food and try to hike between the towns. If you don’t know much about the Cinque Terra, they’re basically a series of 5 small Italian towns that, like Riomaggiore, are squeezed between the coast and these very steep coastal mountains. The road to get to them is really obnoxiously steep, which is why we had no intention of biking in (though maybe Dan and Ben will do a day trip tomorrow (they didn’t)). The towns are crazy beautiful, and there’s a hiking path along the Med that connects all 5. That path has some impressive vistas, and is absolutely worth doing. However, if you’re faint of leg, I’d suggest just going from Riomaggiore to the next one (Manarola); that stretch is pretty easy and still crazy pretty.

So our standing lunch included a bottle of wine, which Dan was hilariously still reluctant to drink openly on the street. At this point in the trip, however, I was an unabashed lush and had no problem letting the world know. But to reassure Dan that it was ok, I asked the lady at the store “posso bere out there?” and she was says with gusto, “Si!! C’e Italia!!!!” To which I turned to Dan and said, “see?! It’s Italia!!!!” And so we drank on the streets. =D After lunch, we picked up the most amazing gelato of the trip, and ate it as we hiked to town #4. The hike was, as mentioned, beautiful. Though the water was incredibly choppy… normally people would try to swim in the rock cove of Riomaggiore, but that would have been suicidal on a day like this. Still, we saw people rock diving in town #4… brave souls. We decided to continue on to town #3, even though it was getting late in the day. We finally rolled into town #3 (starts with a C?) at 7ish. #3 is perched high on a cliff overlooking the Med, and there’s quite the climb up to it from the hiking path. But the view was well worth it.

We grabbed dinner in town (at one of I think 2 restaurants in this tiny-ass village) and Ben won dinner… his pasta dish was phenomenal. The great part was we had no idea what it was… it wasn’t until days later that we looked up the name and found out that the secret, delicious ingredient was none other than… pig cheek!!! Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm, pig cheek!!!

So by then it was getting dark, and so we gave up on hiking to the next town (which Dan had done years earlier and said is a bitch of a hike). Instead we walked down to the train station to catch a train back to Riomaggiore. On the way down we ran into 2 Canadian ladies who were headed to Monterosso for a night out on the town… they were pretty fun, tho poorly dressed/shoed for running up and down steep cliffs. After a bit of a wait, we made it back to Rio, where we grabbed some booze and wandered town at night, drinking, eventually ending up by the water. After we were good and drunk, we picked our way back up through the precariously steep alleys to our place and passed out. Yay!