Touring - Manarole and Riomaggiore

 We hiked down the steps to the train station and went to our first Village, Manarola. It was slightly overcast, but still a beautiful day for photos. We hiked up the trail above the village into the vineyards. It was a very very steep trail and I’m glad we didn’t hike the whole trail. It was enough to get a great overlook of the village. It’s amazing to see how the vineyards are positioned on the hill and the farmers have built steps onto the different terraces to get to their grapes. As usual it almost seemed harder coming back down the hill. We wandered around a lot of the village and then walked out beyond the harbor so that we could look back into Manarola. This is the beautiful picture that is so often seen of this village, and I was excited that we were not seeing it. we were slightly amazed at the boats in this town as we were trying to figure out how they got them into the water. We did see a winch but the boats would’ve had to maneuver through the rocks and today the waves are really rough so we didn’t even see any boats in the water. In fact we didn’t see any boats in the sea the whole time we were here in Cinque Terre. within got on the train to ride up to Riomaggiore, a whole two minutes on the train. This village is the brightest colored village of the five. we first hiked out past the harbor and took a picture or two looking back into the village. It is gorgeous. From there we walked up the hill and went into a church when it started to lightly drizzle. We had lunch at II Pescato Cucinato. They advertise street food and give you cones of fried food. We chose fried calamari and fried shrimp. They were excellent. We again hiked up the hill to the castle and although we didn’t go inside the castle we could once again look down upon the village. We were also able to see the hill where the workers were fixing the path between this village and Manarola.