We got 4 trains in 6 hours and arrived in Cinque Terre in the afternoon. We trudged up the very steep hill (have I mentioned we hate hills??) and arrived at our hostel, to then be shown up the 5 million very steep and narrow stairs to our room. Exhausted, I tried to nap but Sara said I wasn’t allowed to… then she got into her pyjamas and I let her know it was only 8pm, so we decided it best we go and see a bit of the town and find some dinner. We had been told that Cinque Terra was the land of pesto… mmmmmmm pesto…. So we set out to find some.
We found a little restaurant just down the road and ordered some beloved pesto pasta, then found a cute little bar with cheap cocktails, and settled in for the night. We met an Australian lady who we exchanged travel stories with and had a great night chatting to other patrons, before heading to bed.
The next morning, we were on a mission to get Glastonbury tickets. Glastonbury is a music festival just outside London, held in June over four days. We had previously tried to get tickets when in Sydney and spent 4.5 hours refreshing the webpage and redialling the international phone line on our mobiles, but unfortunately missed out as the 144,000 tickets sold out in this time. However, those who chose not to go ahead with the final payment, left a small amount of tickets for the resale that we were ready to snap up. So we got up at 7am, showered, dressed, and set off to find wifi. Our hostel only turned their wifi on during office hours 10am-7pm, and we knew tickets were going on sale at 9am London time. Though we were pretty sure London time was an hour behind us due to daylight savings we wanted to be prepared and be online at 9am our time, so we went down the hill to the tourist office to use their internet… When they eventually opened at 9.30am we began refreshing the website, waiting for the ticket sale to begin… After many refreshes, at about 10:30am Sara noticed a sign next to the computers that claimed that credit card details could not be entered on these computers, and they could not be used to book tickets of any kind… hesitant to believe the sign, we asked the staff who confirmed the impossibility.
In desperation, I left Sara to pay the internet bill, and ran up the hill (yes… ran… that’s how much I want Glastonbury tickets) back to our hostel to use their now open wifi. Our laptop decided to have a hissy fit so I began refreshing on my iphone alone, waiting for Sara to join me in refreshing and redialling, and to hopefully fix the computer. Eventually Sara did arrive, however, the reason she took so long was because after paying for the internet and making it almost to the top of the hill, realised in her haste that she had left her bag in the tourist office, and had to run back to get it before climbing the hill once more… (it’s very stressful trying to get tickets, trust us, we barely knew our own names). Finally I got onto the bookings page and began entering our details, though in the time it took to enter my details, the particular bus I had booked to the festival booked out so I had to start again at the beginning… which meant getting back in queue…
At this point I was very frustrated, but still determined to get tickets, continued refreshing while Sara continued redialling. Once again, I was finally let into in the bookings page, entering my details and then…. The internet lost connection… NOOOOO… trying to be polite but clearly almost at screaming level, asked the owner of the hostel what had happened to the internet, to which he replied that he had switched on the light, which in effect turns off the internet… luckily he was able to reboot the internet and I was able to refresh my bookings page and continue entering our details… and finally… WE GOT TICKETS!!! We were utterly in a state of shock, and convinced we must wait for the confirmation email for it to be real… and 4 hours later (don’t worry we went and did other things while we waited) it arrived… it has been confirmed that Sara and I will be attending the Glastonbury festival of 2011!!! (throw your hands in the air and scream YEEEEHAAAA… and you will get a sense of what we did).
Now with a spring in our step, we went back down the hill to begin our day. Cinque Terre is the name of the region of 5 small villages along the coastline, connected by a 12 km walkway, train track and boat ride. Unfortunately, the walking track was only open between the first and second town, as the rest are closed after bad weather due to landslides. So we decided to walk to the first town, get a ferry to the last town and then trained back to the others on the way home. It was a lovely walk, except for the high volume of inconsiderate tourists in our way. Every man and his dog found it necessary to walk at a snail’s pace, using mountain hiking sticks (this was no mountain climb), and thought stopping in the middle of the pathway was helpful… it was not… So Sara and I elbowed our way through the crowd and made it to the second town where we trawled through the many tourist shops and waited for our ferry to the end town. After some exploring we got the train back to the forth town, and then back to our home town of Riomaggiore. Each town was similar but had its own flair, my favourite was Venezia, and all had stunning views of the crystal, glittering water.
We spent the next couple days exploring the shops and marina in our town, followed by a few more cheap cocktails in our favourite bar, while chatting to many other Australian tourists. Cinque Terre was gorgeous and we absolutely loved it. Italy is certainly making it to our list of favourites…
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