Day 33 - Cinque Terre / Florence (Italy) - I do love to sit beside the seaside

OHHHH MY HEAD! As per previous post, keep drinking to a minimum when planning to travel shortly after on a long journey. That being said, somehow Yen and I stumbled our way on two trains (and so did our two American friends) to the Cinque Terre region on the west coast of Italy (about 2 to 3 hours from Florence depending on how many train swaps you need to make, and only costing around 30 euro each way I think, though I would recommend purchasing a return ticket at the start to make life easier later on... in my case the ticket machine was the least of my worries first thing that morning!). We passed Pisa on the way, but we had to leave something to do the next time we visited! The quick rundown on Cinque Terre is that it's not an actual place, it is actually a region on the coast of Italy running for about 18 kilometres and encompassing 5 postcard towns - each town is joined by a walking track along the ocean and there is very limited access by car, so it's either walk, train or boat between each town. To give you an idea of the "postcard" nature of the place, when our train came out of the tunnel and arrived at the first town, you get your first view of the ocean and literally everyone went "Woooowwww". If you're energetic you can walk all 5 towns in half a day... if you're sensible and don't have to prove your manhood you can do what we did and walk the first two towns, have some lunch, train to the last town and then catch a ferry back to the start (we bumped into the Americans at the last town just as they finished walking all five - manhood proved). The water is a bit chilly and the beaches have rocks instead of sand but I still had a swim ( I'm still finding rocks all sorts of places... just kidding). Just enjoy the scenery and have fun counting the Dutch hikers with their fibreglass walking sticks (I think we lost count at around 50).
LESSON FOR THE DAY: Trains and boats were invented for a reason.