Monterosso
Il Cinque Terre are five little villages on the coast of Tuscany, where the houses are truly built inside of the rocks. All five villages are supposed to be truly magnificent, but we only got to see one.
We headed out to the largest of the five villages, Monterosso, since its easiest to get a train going there, many not stopping at the stations of the other towns. However, its supposedly very easy to walk from one town to the next.
The day before, when walking upto the hostel in Pisa, we started chatting with an Irish girl by the name of Florence, whom we also found traveling with us towards Il 5 Terre the next morning. We had already started on our second bottle of whisky and she was appalled at us drinking so early in the day. That is, maybe for 10 minutes, after which she started drinking like a true Irish girl. Florence had a hard time deciding on where to go next. The ticket she had bought brought her to a town just before Il 5 Terre but, on the train, she decided she wanted to go on to one of the villages of Il 5 Terre.
Since we had run into some minor problems with a conductor (you have to stamp your tickets on the train station before leaving, which we didn't know), we talked her into hiding on one of the toilets until we would be at her stop, which, she figured, was going to be the third stop after her original destination. Little did she know, and neither did we, that the train's first stop was going to be the last of the 5 countries. So if she truly hid in the toilet and was counting the stops, chances are she ended up in Genoa, maybe some 50km past her desired destination…
One of the guides we had convinced us Monterosso was being overlooked by gigantic statues cut out in the face of the rock. According to an awkward person at Information, we had to walk up a mountain on the north side of the town, which would be a 15 or 20 minute walk, to see the statues. Walking to the next town, Vernazza, would take maybe 90 minutes.
Supposedly, Vernazza is the most beautiful of the five villages so we decided to first look for the statues and then walk on to Vernazza. By the time we came back from our walk up north, it was more then four hours later. We were dead tired. We were not going to see Vernazza. In stead, we started looking for some supermarket, found a German Spar and ate Dutch cheese. Just before boarding our train back to Pisa, we not only bought another bottle of Whisky, but also took a swim. A nice ending to an interesting day.