Day Forty-Nine - Manarola

We started the day with coffee at the café overlooking the harbour. It is peaceful in Manarola until the first tourists arrive by train at ten o’clock. This was our last full day at Cinque Terre and we went to Corniglia, the middle of the five towns. Corniglia is very different from the other four towns as it is a hilltop town and the smallest. There is probably a reason why the trains don’t stop as frequently at this town. From the little railway station we had to climb three hundred and eighty-two steps to reach the township.
We spent a couple of hours in the village walking around the tiny lanes before returning to Manarola. We walked down steep steps to overlook the tiny, undeveloped harbour. On the steep hillside on the other side there were three workers abseiling down and clearing as they went with machetes and then rolling wire netting over the hill. Occasionally, they would loosen rocks and these would roll down the hill and crash into the water. It didn’t look like our kind of work!
We sat in the sun in the middle of a piazza and had a tasty lunch. We walked down the steps back to the railway station rather than catch the occasional green bus. We needed to walk off our lunch but we did eat a gelato on the way down!
We purchased some more Wifi time at the Mararola Information Centre as we needed to get the details of where we will be staying in Rome and deciding how best to get there. It costs five Euros for one hour of access which we think is reasonable.
For dinner we returned to the restaurant we went to with Rod and Helen. We had a table overlooking the main street and we watched the children of the town skating and riding scooters up and down he steepish street leading to the harbour. The piazza and the streets and lanes are their playground as there is nowhere else to play. There was even a child’s birthday party this afternoon in the town’s piazza and we realised there would be very little elsewhere to go to have such activities.
Tomorrow is an early start to travel to Rome for our last week of our holidays.
Photos: Looking down over the steps from the top of Corniglia to the railway station; The piazza at Corniglia; The calm waters of Manarola Harbour.