Backpacking in Cinque Terre, part 2 5:26 PM

We definitely overslept in Monterosso, but it was well needed sleep.  we woke up with half the day behind us, but we still had a great day.  By the time we did get up and into the town we were welcomed with Corpus Domini 2011.

You can Wikipedia Corpus Domini to find out the significance of the holiday but we were amazed with all the local participation into this day.  These rock/flower walkways were beautiful and covered the whole city.  They were so cool to watch being constructed and designed by the locals.  There was also a parade of all the monks and priests in the city singing in Latin, I believe, which was a little creepy.  Tamanna and I spend the rest of the day on the Monterosso beach in the Mediterranean Sea.  It was awesome the water was so calm and warm. we swam out to these rocks you can see in the picture below and just relaxed on them for awhile.  What a great day!

I can’t say it enough but swimming in the Mediterranean Sea was awesome.  The water was so calm you could just float in the water and you’d stay afloat.  It was also so clear you could see the bottom the whole time. 

That night Tamanna found one of her favorite things at a local pizza place where we ate dinner, that’s right Nutella.

after dinner we were treated to a local fire dance show which was really cool. 

That night we went to bed knowing that our vacation had come to an end.  We packed up and boarded a train the next morning that took us up to Milan.  We had originally planned to spend the day in Milan doing touristy things but instead we decided to sleep at the station and go to the airport early so that we could get WiFi and catch up on things before boarding our plan to Amsterdam.  We spent one more night in Amsterdam, which was at an airport hotel which was very nice, and then boarded out flight the next morning bound for Seattle, WA. 

Cinque Terre VIEW SLIDE SHOW DOWNLOAD ALL

Before I graduated from school I always wanted to celebrate my college graduation with a big event.  My wife made it possible for us to go to India for the summer and top it off with an adventurous trip through Europe.  I have had a summer vacation every year for the last 20 years.  This year was my last year in school and it was my summer vacation before I start work.  I loved my last summer vacation, I loved it very much.

Backpacking in Cinque Terre, part 1 4:55 PM

I know this is taking me a long time to post all of this trip but the last part of our European adventure was the best.  A friend told us of an amazing national park called Cinque Terre “5 lands” so we looked into it.  turns out it’s a place where no cars are allowed and the only way to get from city to city is by bus or by ferry.  We knew it was our kind of place when we found a hiking trail spanning about 10 kilometers which went through all 5 of the coastal villages in Cinque Terre. 

From Venice we took an all day train to La Spezia which is on the south side of Cinque Terre.  That night we were delighted to have a jazz festival right outside of our hostel.  We hung out at the city just long enough to find dinner and take a ferry in the morning into Cinque Terre.

The ferry dropped us off in Riomagiorre which was the first of the five towns that we would be hiking through.

The first part of the hike was called Via dell’Amore which means The Lovers Walk.  It was tradition for tourists I guess to come and hook up a lock to the fence or the gates to prove you love is eternal.  Tamanna and I forgot our lock but we did carve out names into the rock and we figured that was good enough.  We didn’t spend too much time in the first city since we were continuing to hike all day.  the second city was Manarola.

We stopped and had lunch here in Manarola, the Bruschetta and pizza was delicious.  We wanted to hike between all of the towns but we were informed that we had to take a train to the next town due to a land landslide on the trail.  So we hopped a train and headed to Corniglia.  The train ride was no longer than 2 minutes which made us think maybe we should just keep taking the trains between cities but something about hiking along the coast just seemed to enjoyable to pass up.  Corniglia is the only city that doesn’t have a beach front location due to the position it is at on top of a cliff.  We had to walk up 382 stairs from the train station to get to it.

The pictures are not doing justice for this trip and neither is this post but these days in Cinque Terre were awesome.  We walked right through this town and headed to the next called Vernazza.  By this time it was mid day, and the sun was shining in full force.  We weren’t quite sure what we were getting into by hiking from town to town but this leg of the hike from Corniglia to Vernazza was an eye opener.  It was steep and hot, but not just hot it was really hot.  Tamanna and I felt a little overdressed compared to the people we were seeing on the trail.  We had t-shirts, shorts and two big backpacks plus our camera bags.  everyone had shorts  or bikinis and maybe sports bras.  We were in the Italian Riviera during the hottest season and we were feeling it.

Vernazza had a beautiful beach and it was tempting.  Everyone was swimming and we really were sweaty so a little dip in the Mediterranean sounded good to us.  In fact every town had wonderful swimming available.  We figured that we would come back to Vernazza the next day so we spent some time just chilling and finding some cool things to do but we continued onto our last destination of the day, Monterosso.

Monterosso was a beautiful town to walk into.  We weren’t quite sure if we would make it, we were very tired at the end of the day and as soon as we arrived we called up our contact for our accommodation and he took us up to our house.  We got luck in Monterosso because instead of a hostel we had a house for two nights which was out of town and actually the picture above is taken from outside on our porch.  It was situated in lemon and olive orchard and it smelled great and everything about it was great.

That night we slept well and long.  Hiking all day had worn us out and doing all this travelling in a different time zone was starting to get to us…(read part 2 for what happened the next day)

Venice in less than 36 hours… not enough time 6:10 PM

One of the coolest places to backpack through had to be Venice.  The trip down form amsterdam was chaos, our flight leaving amsterdam was three hours late taking off, it was too late to find any type of resteraunts open in Milan for the night, our hostel gave away our room because we came in late, so our hostel arranged for us to sleep in an already occupied room, so we ended up sleeping in a room with three other spanish girls.  they didn’t seem to mind they thought it was funny that they were woken up at midnight only to welcome two complete strangers into their room!! haha.  We woke up 6 hours later to catch a train out of Milan and travel to Venice. 

Venice is one of the coolest cities.  we loved it.  we got off the train and walked around the island until we could leave our stuff at our hostel

For the evening we took a quick 3 hour trip out to Murano, which is a glass making island off the coast of Venice, to check out the hand made glass out there.  It was such a cool trip.  We took a 20 minute ferry out of Venice to Murano.  We walked into almost every shop on that island it seemed looking at cool hand-made glass objects from balloons to spiders to earrings.  It was really cool and we just thought they were to coolest looking glass objects.

When we came back from Murano, Tamanna had few more earrings and necklaces to add to her collection.  They were just too pretty to pass by.  When we got back to the main island of Venice we ended up spending our whole evening in Campo Santa Margherita.  It was full of restaurants and other travellers.  We had a wonderful seafood dinner and enjoyed some gelato apres. 

The next day we enjoyed some 5 euro pizza and fresh peaches.

Venice is an awesome place and I would love to go back anyday, anytime!

Venice VIEW SLIDE SHOW DOWNLOAD ALL

Europe in a Week 5:13 PM

Tamanna and I decided to turn our trip back to the states into a little vacation in Europe.  we worked it out with our travel agent to give us a week stay in Amsterdam.  Since neither of us had ever been to Italy we decided to make the trip an Italian vacation.  This trip turned into a huge part of our summer and the next few posts will be about this trip.  we went to three places: Amsterdam, Venice, and Cinque Terre.

Amsterdam was one of my favorite places.  It’s a super clean place and there are tons and tons of bikes.

Tamanna and I rented bikes for the day and rode all around downtown Amsterdam.  We went to Madame Tussauds wax exhibit, which had a bunch of pop icons and other famous people molded into wax molds.  these things looked so real it was sort of weird to look eye to eye with some of them.

We had a blast of a time.  we finally found our hostel, Hotel AnneMarie, and put down our packs.  The Hostel was very well organized and it was a pleasant stay.  We stayed in a dorm style room but it was cheap and well located in the city.  After we dropped our bags off we went out and just enjoyed biking through the city.  We found a huge park and had a wonderful dinner.

Right before we went to bed we found the I am Amsterdam statue and took some pictures.  We left the next afternoon on an easy jet flight for Milan en route to Venice!!

For more photos visit our album:

Amsterdam VIEW SLIDE SHOW DOWNLOAD ALL