Cinque Terre Trails
Our route today will pass through the Cinque Terre (5 lands) along the northern Italian coast. The trail is about 7.5 miles long, and winds through five towns that cling to the edge of coast. There is realistically no road access, to get between these towns, you’re reduced to boats, the trails, or the train. As a result, each of these towns preserve a colloquial feel, towns without a single street, boulevard, and anything resembling such, they are entirely, walking towns.
And they are stunning in scenery. Hiking the trails is quite arduous, though well maintained, there are hundreds of steps up and down the cliffs between each town, allowing for elevation changes of hundreds of feet. The scenery is comparable to Big Sur in northern California, with the added benefit of a picturesque coastal village every couple of miles to provide local color, excellent dining and refreshment. Indeed, after sweating canteens, diving into the incredibly blue waters of the Mediterranean recharges one’s cells like no gatorade ever could. The water is heated pool temperature, and so incredibly blue and clear that you can see right to the bottom some 30 ft below. Under the surface, schools of fish swim without need of goggles or snorkeling gear for clear viewing; the experience is just a little bit incredible.
Winding rails, similar to roller coaster tracks weave in and out of the coastal cliffs, these are the rails to the grape trains, small carriages that allow a grape picker to clip their harvest to and send to the collection point. Grapes are a predominant crop in the region, they are carefully tended, and I spy some sort of curing process going on in the home of one of the locals, his grapes hung carefully all across his apartment.
Hikers on this trail quickly fall into very definitive stereotypes. Italians are decked out in capris and pumas, looking more like they belong at the mall or the beach. Americans and Australians have obviously been reading REI catalogues and are equipped for hiking. Austrians, French, and Germans have been reading expedition manuals, and are equipped for serious trekking, full mountaineering boots, camel backs, and telescoping walking sticks. I run into a french woman who asks me some random question in french, to which I respond back in kind. She compliments me on my accent, and asks if I’m french.
“Je parle un petit peu, mais non.” I reply with my standard catchphrase.
“Ou, tu es Italiano?” She aks.
“Non! Etats-Unis!” I declare triumphantly.
“Oh, Americano!” Her surprise is evident, and she flexes her biceps to communicate her general impression of Americans. I hope it’s positive, but feel it best I not pursue it and we bid farewell as she continues down the trail. It’s been fun all along, playing the greeting game with italians and frenchies, spitting back at them in their language of choice just as fast as they can dish it. Success is the best confidence booster. Though sometimes I mash the languages together in my attempt to answer appropriately to amusing results.
The day is warm, the steps are many and steep, but I jog the stairs with ease, a lifetime of foregoing elevators seems to be be paying off. A few days before, while wandering Venice, I’d have to sit every ten to twenty minutes, as my lower back would ache constantly from traversing and standing around the city. Today, with miles of vertical traversal, I’ve never felt better. An english man curses me mildly as I jog up the vertical stack, sweat running rivers down my chest. Somewhere, over the years, I’ve trained my body to accept the vertical, at the expense of the horizontal. My father has the same disposition, and probably would approve of my mountain goat antics as I bounce from boulder to boulder up the cliffs. Near the towns, the trails become quite picturesque, merging directly into the towns themselves, on rock staircases. A saxaphone player sits by the trail, his simple tunes echoing off the cliffs and lending a distinctly Italian vibe to the whole adventure.
Cinque Terre
Three towns down, we pull out the map to consult the route towards the fourth town. It is here the map gets confusing. There are two trails, the steep hill trail, and an easier one, one that runs a hundred meters above the water along the cliffs. Though the coast trail is the preferred route, it also labeled somewhat confusingly on the map as “closed.” Here in front of us however, a well constructed staircase descends down towards the coast, and the painted markers delineating the trail are plain to see.
“Up or down?” I ask Bee Jin.
“Down,” is her simple answer and we descend towards the train station of the third town.
Below, we pass the station and continue, a trail marker indicates that the trail is closed ahead, but as far as we can see, the trail continues, an easy sidewalk down a leafy path. Shrugging, we continue down the trail past rows and rows of block apartments, their entire surfaces facing the trail covered in a tough plastic mesh. Behind the mesh, the gaping holes of their windows betray an abandoned complex, gutted and emptied except for the lone toilet.
Abandoned apartments
Down this long corridor we walk, eventually it opens up again to a view of the beach some forty meters below. A steel staircase falls towards the narrow beach. Down below the old, baked, saggy leather flesh of the elderly lies baking on their towels, completely absent of clothing. So, here we are, a nude beach, and unsurprisingly, not a tantalizing piece of skin to be seen anywhere. The elderly have nothing to show, and so are more concerned with matching their scrotum color to their forearms.
We stalk down the path again, some three hundred meters ahead, we finally run into a rusted gate with a sign on it. Though the italian is indecipherable, the message is clear, the trail is closed. To go back to the high trail is over a mile behind, to go back in this heat is hardly something we’re eager to contemplate. I propose to go down to the beach, skipping along the boulders by the cliffs all the way to the next town. Bee Jin, down with the idea of an adventure, agrees.
We backtrack to the staircase leading to the old nude flesh, and make our way down, providing a spectacle to the locals simply by our youth. We pick our way down the beach, surprising lone nudists far down the beach, dancing away from the waves as it laps our feet. The thread we run is particularly narrow and we pick our way on boulders at the bottom of tall cliffs that go up to the trail somewhere above us. The going is somewhat slow, and I’m particularly startled as I clamber over a boulder to spot the rotting carcass of a dolphin, brown with decay, it’s tongue and teeth falling out of its mouth. Nothing has come to eat the flesh, or pick the soft tissues of the eyes, and they stare back at me in ominous warning. I stand there for a minute, testing the wind gently for the scent of decay, but detect nothing.
Bad omens
Nonplussed, I continue down the beach, looking back at Bee Jin some hundred meters behind me to see her reaction to the carcass. She’s far too concerned with the boulder field and not breaking her camera however, and walks by the body within touching distance without ever noticing it. I shrug my shoulders and put my camera away, picking through the boulder field again; it’s gotten difficult enough that I need both hands to navigate the path.
Soon enough though, the path ends. The waves lap straight into the cliffs, the boulders end suddenly, and our options diminish abruptly. The rock is broken here into a chimney of sorts, allowing for some good hand holds for rock climbing up. Or, we turn back, over the boulder field, all the way back to the last town, almost two miles away. Bee Jin looks at it all.
“Back?”
Back was never in my vocabulary, and the handholds look good enough, even for someone without experience to clamber up, I grab her camera bag and strap it to myself.
“Up.” I respond.
I clamber up easily, and wait as she navigates the handholds with some difficulty, offering her tips to clamber up the chimney. For a time, things go well enough; thirty meters up however, the chimney peters out into nothing, and all that’s left is a pointed ledge of jagged rocks that stick out of the cliff. I grimace silently; though it’s now gotten significantly more difficult, it’s gotten quite dangerous for someone of Bee Jin’s limited ability, and we’re not roped in to anything or each other. Down is no longer an option either, though coming up wasn’t terribly hard, going down is nearly impossible to a novice climber, and I press my lips in frustration. In my reckless confidence in my own abilities, I have pushed Bee Jin’s well past any sort of acceptable safety tolerance, and now we’re stuck on a ledge a third of the way up a rotting cliff with a limited number of downright shitty options.
Still, hesitation will not help our cause, and if there are two qualities I’ve always had in copious quantity, it has been confidence and arrogance. I employ it here, instructing Bee Jin to follow my path exactly and climb up the protruding ledge. I am dismally aware that the last pull I took utilized my unique strength to body weight ratio, allowing me to pull myself up to the narrow shelf without my legs helping at all. Though this is fine for myself, I know Bee Jin will never make the last pull. There is nothing to do except guide her up the ledge, lock in my right arm, and then pull her up the last few feet up to the ledge I’m standing on. The maneuver goes off well enough, but the ledge is too small, and to allow her to stand on it, I roll to the side, directly into a cactus. A thousand thousand needles pierce my thighs and forearm, but I’m oblivious to the sensation. With startling quickness, the threads of our lives has narrowed to narrow slits in a dark tunnel, and the task of getting off this cliff face is all that matters, cactus be damned.
The broken line of ledges continues up above us and we repeat the process again, and again; I scramble up a couple of feet to a narrow ledge that just allows for us to pause, and instruct Bee Jin where to place her limbs, and when she’s close enough, pull her forcefully up to whatever ledge I’m on. My voice is controlled and calm, the same tone I use when winning over cats and dogs, and I offer small congratulations every time she makes a ledge. For her part, Bee Jin is a champ, she follows my directions explicitly, answers my questions punctually, and climbs with the knowledge that her life depends on it.
“Bring your butt into the cliff, don’t cross your feet,” I instruct in firm tones that also sooth in their noise. Communication is key, and I know that she needs a constant stream of instructions, even mindless noise to assure her that I’m going to lead her out of this.
Because I’m going to lead her out, I’m responsible for this mess, and I’ll be damned if I don’t fix it appropriately. I lead the way again, the cliff is rotten, every rock treacherous, and I grab solid looking boulders and yank them out of the dry crumbly dirt and toss them to the side. When I pause on another ledge to instruct Bee Jin again, I mentally trace our routes and options, the universe, the multi-verse has narrowed to an incredibly small set of choices and paths to climb. Nothing else matters, not my arms bleeding and torn by cactuses, not Bee Jin’s legs racked by acacia thorns, not the white sap of cactus juice that stains the front of my pants like an overexcited masturbatory accident. We have to go up.
And up has just run out.
The protruding rocks we’ve been climbing up this cliff face end in a snarl of cactus and acacia bushes, there is nothing to grab onto anymore. To my right, a moraine of rock and dirt of a recent landslide sliding off the cliff down into the Mediterranean some sixty meters below.
The landslide area isn’t quite as steep, the incline in places is just enough that it would be possible to stand, but we’d have to lose altitude to get to them, and worse, we’d be in the moraine, an extremely dangerous area of sliding dirt and rock, with few handholds and even more treacherous footing. Still, up has run out. The multi-verse of options has collapsed once again, we’re getting close to where I could count the multiple universes on two hands, and I feel their probabilities dancing around me, ethereal, and yet tantalizing close, ready to collapse with every action we take.
“We need to get to that incline.” I point at a slightly less steep section of the moraine, “Be extremely careful of your footing and handholds, the ground is loose here.” And off I spring to the ledge my steps disturbing a small avalanche of dirt and rock that tumbles down the moraine some thirty meters and then drops off the cliff suddenly into the boulders erupting from the sea’s edge.
“C’mon over,” I motion to Bee Jin. She navigates the first section successfully, and we cling to the dirt like treed cats. Again and again, I maneuver to a higher incline, point out the handholds, lock myself in, and pull Bee Jin up. Sometimes the ledges are too small, and I have her climb over me to the ledge, while I dangle on protruding rocks and work my way around her to another ledge. Several times Bee Jin slips, and a worried tone escapes her as she scrabbles for another hand hold.
“No, no. Not that.” I admonish gently. In my mind’s eye, I watch the multiverse expand suddenly, but all of these new universes immediate options involve Bee Jin tumbling off the cliff entirely. I push them out of my mind, and pull her up to another ledge. Though she isn’t panicked, I can hear her breathing accelerate, and if she crosses that threshold, we’ll be stuck for good, and fear will push us off into the void as certainly as any of these treacherous hand holds.
“Just a few more feet, I point to a ledge that looks as wide as a boulevard, and solid to boot, on the edge of the moraine, some three meters above us. I work my way up again, and instruct Bee Jin.
“Grab the rocks, right hand there, left hand there, and up!” She grabs the rocks, and clambers up.
“Here, grab my hand.” She obeys and I pull her up, but even as I pull I feel my other handhold give away suddenly, and her weight pulls down on me abruptly pulling me away from the cliff face. My feet are well braced, and I collapse without thinking, sinking to my knees putting the center of gravity behind me into the cliff face. Bejin gives a terrified yelp as she plummets, and my other hand scrabbles for a new purchase even as I murmur insistently.
“Easy, easy, I got you, everything is fine.” I now need to say the words for my own benefit as well, the lie I must tell to prevent the unthinkable. Somewhere in the pit of my stomach, the first flash of panic arrived, and I sooth it out, easing it away even as my other arm finds a new hand hold and grabs frantically. It’s a lousy position though, most of this position is dependent on my legs as opposed to my upper body, which was never my strong suit, and between the wave of panic and this uncompromising position, I watch my legs tremble suddenly at the strain, feel them shake as the sharp taste of fear rides down my lower body.
“Bee Jin, you need to go back down, this path isn’t going to work, I need to find a new purchase to secure.” She complies and I turn to the task at hand finding a new place to lock in.
“All right, now, grab my arm.” She complies, and I pull her up, and continue pushing. ‘Climb over me, grab the ledge above me,” she does, and I push her from below. “Go go go!”
She hauls herself over the ledge, and I scramble up after her. We’ve crossed the moraine, and are sitting on crumbling concrete, the closed trail. Across the moraine, some twenty meters wide, the other section of the trail yawns into the empty openness. So this is why the trail is closed. Bee Jin gives a cry of emotion and hugs me.
“We did it! We’re alive!”
I smile quietly, ashamed that I’ve put her into this position in the first place and offer my apologies. And suddenly the pain in my arms and legs comes flooding up, and I notice the thousands of cactus quills stuck into my limbs. Beejin is covered in them too, though to a lesser degree, and we spend the next few minutes picking the very worse of them out. Beejin insists on snapping a few photos of our success, but I’m too mentally drained to take my own photos, and even then, a photo seems to suddenly cheapen the meaning of our lives that we just snatched out of death’s hands. Though I agree to Bee Jin’s pictures, I make no move towards my own camera, focusing instead of pulling spines out.
Though much of my body is covered in random spines, cactuses like to grow them in clumps, and where they clump into my skin, it is explicitly irritating, feeling like a stitch binding my flesh together. I pull at them with some measure of success.
When we’ve rested a bit, we walk down the remainder of the trail to the next town. A kilometer later we encounter the other gate, barred with jagged spikes to prevent the persistent. After what we just went through, the gate might as well be a ladder, and I clamber over it in a heartbeat, navigating the spikes with ease. Bee Jin protests the whole thing loudly, yelping and hollering at the whole ordeal, causing a scene and drawing the swimming locals attention.
I ignore her cries and let her scream all she feels like. Her raucous noise is proof positive that she’s not in any real danger, and perhaps she’s making up for the terror of the cliffside. When she’s over, we continue down the path, the locals muttering at us and how we’ve come over the wrong side of the gate. When we get into town, I take the first opportunity to dive into the Mediterranean again, letting the azure waters wash the sweat and dirt off, floating in the waters, picking cactus spines off my legs.
The sweet taste of life, bobbing in the cool water, the scratches from the thorns bright and angry red on my limbs; I smile at our brush with Death.
“That’s two for me bud.” I smirk and dive under water, blowing bubbles.
