The Five Lands

I live-journaled our entire bus ride to Cinque Terre. Often it strikes me how transient yet profound is the human mind, and I want to capture it and keep it locked between dusty pages for my lifetime. That way if vegetable state ever strikes this body or if one snow-halted day by a fireplace I wish to vicariously re-experience these ventures, I can. So here goes:

Italian Riviera, what a name, almost to suggest a rivulet-infested coastline which would in fact be beautiful.

Pistoglia, north of Florence on the way to these lands, is a town famous for plant nurseries and metal working skills.

Apennines, the spine of Italy.

Luca aqueducts, a modern desperation of irrigated - or should we say irritated - water system... no longer functioning.

Puccini's Madame Butterfly was inspiration of this here drive we are on.

Forte di Marmi and Versilia.

White marble mines hollow out the Carvara hillside. Michelangelo would travel here to hand select his slabs.

The steep hills of Liguria are known for pine trees and chestnut trees.

Poppies pepper the pathway we're plodding.

Lord Byron & Percy Shelley had their summer homes in La Spezia, a famous Italian Riviera town. It's really quite ugly but no one asked me. Their writings found their muse in this Naval base, concrete town, as have mine obviously.

La Spezia has a cathedral that was rebuilt after WW2. It resembles a football.

Gulfo di poeti is the gulf of poets. In this place, my philosophizing has found its destination.

Chestnut tree degeneration seems to be a worldwide phenomenon, no?

UNESCO 1997 revitalization of Cinque Terre aka tourist trap acquisition, but beauty remains uncompromised. It established the "cooperativa agricultura" and peninsula tunneling.

Terracing: from Macchu Picchu to Cinque Terre, it has seemed to work pretty well.

Cinque Terre's wines are white & sweet. 3 grapes are grown here Vermintino, Alberola e Bosca.

Monteroso, one of the five villages, is known for its lemons. Limoncello is a citrus delight.

From South to North you may hike from village to village. Here's how to do it from start to finish: Riomaggiore, Manarola, Corniglia,Vernazza and Monterosso.

Now for the experiential recount:

We arrived early in the morning to Manarola, the second of the villages. Now that there are trains that connect them, we decided to take a train from Manarola to Corniglia. Corniglia was devastated by a flood of some sort back in the day, so the ruin is still apparent. Nevertheless the buildings' colors are untainted and the vibrancy of the vegetation is truly Eden-esque. If heaven were a lemon meringue pie, this was a slice. We then hiked to Vernazza. This required that we climb five hundred vertical stairs where our lunch awaited us. Easy. We had octopi cerviche or something raw, I assure you. That coupled with pesto pasta made from Ligurian pine nuts and our first hiccup with "frizzante" water (gassy nasty seltzer water), and we were ready for the real hike.

Glorious would be an understatement. In 2 hours we had sung every Disney song we could recall and expended some pent-up energy hopping from rock to rock, doing yoga on random bridges and running segments of the trail.

A swim awaited us in Monterosso. We downed a bottle of wine between five girls, made a quick wardrobe change and hit the sand or should I say hit the pebbles? Il Mediteraneo was the perfect cool down, but never tame for too long, we sought out a rock levy about a half mile off shore. A short swim later and several prickly encounters with sea urchins we were bleeding but on cloud 9.

We took a boat from the most northern village, Monterosso, down to the first village, Riomaggiore. In an attempt to even out my hideous shorts tan from an unfortunate day wearing biker shorts while kayaking a couple weeks prior, I propped up on the back of the boat and soaked up some sun.

Often my realizations are not like striking blows or light bulb thoughts, rather ensuing cloud-like encompassing profundities or euphorias. This was one of those times, if that makes any sense. I was so keenly aware in every fibre of my being, it felt, that in the moment, I was experiencing something so good. Embodying and living every aspect of the word "freedom," in both body and soul. I knew no bounds, and if you had reminded me of certain physical limitations or had attempted to pluck me out of my cloud into a spiraling conversation about human fragility, I would have been one of those empowered fanatics that refused to reckon with such a reality. Mine was in the wind that carries the salt that fuses and crusts to my hair.

We arrived in Monterosso and hiked the Via dell' Amore back up to Manarola where we started. The Lover's Lane was a winding trail on the side of the cliff. It started off as one of those make-shift engineering necessities when they were doing dynamite blasting in the 60s and just needed scaffolding. And since it's always in vogue to break a rule, some couples started the trend of sneaking out onto this overlook and securing a lock onto the metal structure. Now, of course, people tie anything they have with them. We saw baby diapers and the occasional watch, which to me seems to give the opposite message of a love that can stand the tides of time. Now it's like:"I'm a ticking time bomb with a baby on the way." But it really was a beautiful angle to the coastline of these five lands, at which time the sun was now setting.