Lovely sunny day on Sunday, so we figured we’d better seize it and go for a walk. Cinque Terre is a very popular place for walkers, with walking tracks between each village plus a few more challenging, higher tracks which visit other nearby villages away from the coast. Our guidebook noted that some of the paths might be closed. Oh yes indeed, we were warned.

We thought we’d do the walk from Corniglia to Vernazza, which was written up as a 1.5 hour walk and one of the nicest in Cinque Terre. There’s an information booth at the start of the path, but the woman there told us that the walk was closed, we couldn’t purchase the necessary pass for it, but that we could do it at our own risk. Um, right. And then the young man at the information place in the village told us that all the walks except the long trail to Manarola were closed and that if we did any of the closed walks, we would be fined 500 euros. O-kay. And then when we were catching the train back from Vernazza to Corniglia, there was a notice at the station advising that all walks are closed. Hmm. So who really knows what’s going on? Nobody, I suspect.

We did do the walk from Corniglia to Vernazza, along with lots of other people walking in both directions. Took us 2 hours including a few stops along the way. It was lovely. Mostly on well-maintained paths through olive groves and other vegetation, with a cafe/bar about 2/3 of the way along, then a steep drop down into Vernazza. We ate lunch at the beach, which was closed due to rough seas. There were no boats out on the water on Sunday or Monday, but on Tuesday the sea was calm again. We caught the train back to Corniglia, and then there are a couple of options for getting back up to the village. There’s a shuttle bus which looks like it seats about 12 people, there’s a set of 385 steps up, or you can just walk up the same road as the minibus drives, but  we only worked that out after we’d done the 385 steps. I watched one woman drag her wheelie suitcase down the steps, bumping it on every single step, and wondered  if it still had all its wheels by the end.

After a gelati each – chocolate for Greg, basil with olive oil drizzled over it for me – and while we were in a walking mood, we also went down and up several hundred more steps to get to the ‘harbour’. There are houses almost all the way down to the water, and the one right down the bottom even had its own letterbox – it would be quite the trek down and back for the postie to deliver letters there!

On Monday it rained on and off all day. We thought about doing one of the longer, higher walks, but decided against it because of slippery paths. So then we thought we’d have a go at the short walk which goes from Corniglia railway station around he coast to Manarola. Our guidebook advised that it had closed due to a landslide in 2012, but that was 5 years ago and it should be open again by now, right? Well, no. But we didn’t actually find out until we’d walked about 500metres along the track and came to what looked like an enormous sinkhole. There were 2 young, fit German guys who had climbed the stone wall and even they couldn’t find any way around, so we conceded defeat, walked back to the station and took the train to the first or last village, Riomaggiore. There’s a nice walk , Via Dell’Amore, from there to the next village, Manarola, but I’m sure you can guess what I’m going to write next. Yep, it was closed too. So we  had a walk around Riomaggiore – much larger and even steeper than Corniglia, then caught the train back ‘home’.

And then I spent the rest of the afternoon caught in front-loading washing machine hell. We feel like we’re pretty used to using different washing machines when we stay in different places, but this thing just wouldn’t play nice. It wouldn’t open at the end of a cycle, or rather, it would only open at the end of every 5th cycle, so I spent a couple of frustrating hours turning knobs and hoping that this time I’d be able to get our clothes out and start drying them.