So far, so good

Among the eight (yes, eight) concrete resolutions that I have this year: to plod at least three times every week and to become "fluent" in French.

Of course, I sincerely doubt that I'm actually going to be able to speak eloquently in a language I've been learning for all of six months, but I'd like to be able to understand and read as easily as possible and to be somewhat conversational by the end of this year.  

As for plodding, well, to be fair I haven't actually stopped since I started but with language lessons five days a week, three hours a morning last year, my exercise schedule ended up being unsatisfyingly irregular.  

The solution this year: French once a week on Saturdays, which leaves me (hopefully) time to read and learn and explore on my own and mornings to test drive my new plodding gear.  C'est chouette! 

The first on the first

"What sort of diary should I like mine to be? Something loose knit and yet not slovenly, so elastic that it will embrace anything, solemn, slight or beautiful that comes into my mind. I should like it to resemble some deep old desk, or capacious hold-all, in which one flings a mass of odds and ends without looking them through. I should like to come back, after a year or two, and find that the collection had sorted itself and refined itself and coalesced, as such deposits so mysteriously do, into a mould, transparent enough to reflect the light of our life, and yet steady, tranquil compounds with the aloofness of a work of art."

      -- Virginia Woolf's journal                      

This year: more writing, more learning and more sight.

Europe, Episode 9: Cinque Terre, the agony and the ecstasy

The one place Bear wanted to go to in Italy was Cinque Terre.  We had seen the postcard perfect view of the warmly painted houses above and she wanted to recreate it for herself.  Roughly translating as "five lands", Cinque Terre is a gorgeous cluster of five villages located in the seaside hills of Northern Italy.

We were staying in the southernmost one, Riomaggiore and while we were in Nice, Bear's friend very kindly emailed us a set of suggested activities, including an easy half-day trail walk between the five villages.  "That sounds great!"  I told Bear.  After all, we love walking and we love scenery.

Yeah.  Bear's friend?  A massive fitness-buff-marathon-runner type.  The trails?  Anything but easy.

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We crossed the border from Nice into Italy on an early morning train.  Getting into Ventimiglia, our first Italian stop, was like going blind and waking up all at once.  For Rebecca, who speaks neither French nor Italian, the move between both countries was seamless.  But I went from being able to read signs and ask basic questions to feeling completely childlike and lost once more.  There was no doubt about the shift across borders, though; where the French talk in pinched, quiet vowels, the Italians we encountered... well, yelled.  At Ventimiglia, large, warm families boarded the train with voluminous voices and everyone, from oldish hausfraus to young girls dressed like they were in Jersey Shore, held loud, intense conversations.

After switching a couple of trains, we finally got into Riomaggiore and installed ourselves in a big, airy room over the main village street and its restaurants.  The view was instantly charming, but the noise didn't stop here either.  At all hours of the day, tourists shouted to each other across balconies.  Laughter floated up from the street and one morning, we started awake at the sound of glasses crashing violently under our window.  It was a little like living inside a very laidback beach party.

I greatly enjoyed Cinque though, it was touristy in a pleasant way.  It wasn't overly crowded and there were no touts or rip-offs, just the sense that there are people from so many different places around the world that you never exactly feel lost.

Our village flanks a dangerously sloping, cobbled street that runs like a vein from mountain to sea.  The walls of the buildings are painted warm, bright colours that glow in the sunlight.  We had our first meal in a trattoria where the playful, friendly proprietress taught us how to ask for the bill over some seriously piquant anchovies and Bear's first delicious, real Italian coffee.  I can still taste the smoky, fishy firmness of the lemon-laced fish, slippery with olive oil.

After lunch, we strolled down to the sea and watched boys leaping off rocks and kicking up geysers of salt spray.  When we felt sufficiently digested, we turned to each other.  "Shall we try walking through the towns?"

At the little tourist office, we grabbed a map and traced the softly undulating sea route to Manarola, one village down.  The woman at the counter saw us and shook her head.  "No.  Coast road is closed because of landslides.  You have to take the mountain road to Manarola.  Is a bit longer, maybe forty five minutes."

"Oh, is it difficult?"

She shrugged.  "You just follow the road up there and make a turn and you'll be at the start."

Forty five minutes didn't sound too bad, so we loaded up our camera gear (for the famous views, you know) and on a whim, thinking it might get hot, I changed into a pair of shorts.  The walk started off pleasantly enough on a real pavement and then suddenly, everything went to hell.  The path should really have been lined with guide ropes and traversed by sherpas.  It was at least one kilometre of fiendishly steep, dusty steps cut into the rock, sometimes with sheer drops on one side.

(This lock business is just too much.  Do we need to declare our love even on random fencing at three hundred feet above sea level?!  Fences collapse, people!)

I kept making dangerous, heartstopping slides on loose rocks and dust and Bear was obliged to walk in front of me so that I wouldn't kill myself.  Panting and swearing violently, we struggled upwards for about 20 minutes in the searing afternoon sun until the path briefly plateaued at a (surely ironically named) Picnic Spot.  Heaving as we tried to catch our breath, we threw up our hands and stared at each other, "Who the fuck wants to picnic here?"

Bear, a seasoned athlete who had been waiting to see Italy her whole life, yelled into the wind, "What the hell Italy?  I'm not sure how I feel about you now!"

 
The walk's difficulty was somehow emphasised by the fact that there were stunning views at every turn - craggy, sun-warmed cliffs dropping away into an endless, vast blue sea dotted with pale boats.  The water stretched into a perfectly-curved semi-circle that made me feel like I was looking at the edge of the world.  And we were fighting so hard to stay upright that each time we paused to appreciate the view, we were simultaneously gasping for breath and snapping ferociously.

There wasn't much time to pause, either, there was enough traffic going both ways that meant that we couldn't stop for long which was a pity because I wanted to capture everything - the flaming orange poppies by the roadside, a mysterious blue door, even the field mouse of glistening eye who burst suddenly into a little grass clearing.

We were swindled by signs announcing Manarola's presence at every turn and actually ended up struggling along the dusty hillside, clinging, at times, to staples and ropes in the hill wall, for about two hours.  Worst of all, we had forgotten to bring water.  

Actually, I like hiking but only when I know I'm going hiking in advance.  Had I not gone plodding consistently for a good six months before the trip, I'm pretty sure I would have been on my knees, begging Bear to leave me for dead.  Thankfully though, I just about managed.

Most amusingly, we kept running into people coming the other way.  We would meet each other's eyes, realise we were all dead tired and panting, and laugh together in sympathy. At one point, we met an elderly French couple and just after we had commiserated with each other, they were stopped by a Chinese lady just behind us.  The poor thing had also underestimated the walk and was togged out in ballet flats, a skirt and, unbelievably, a Chanel handbag.

"How much more?" she pleaded of them.

The husband said, "Fourty five minutes," in an encouraging voice while she let out a cry of anguish that almost toppled me.  As she floundered on dispiritedly, I heard the wife say to the husband in French, "Fourty five minutes?  I thought it was much longer than that!" and I had to stop and walking and lean on the hillside because I was howling with laughter.

At the highest point of the climb, we were looking down into the valley of Manarola and realising how much further we had to go.  Even in my despair though, I had to admit that it was gorgeous. 

Finally, finally we hit pavement once more and staggered down the winding streets into the town.  

My tiredness was assuaged by the picturesque lemon trees, the sight of elderly people playing cards by the sea and at long last, the ice cold bottle of sparkling Primavera water we inhaled after collapsing into the nearest cafe.

Rebecca had a coffee, of course, and we passed a very amusing hour seated across from the gap in the wall where the mountain trail ended.  It was gratifying to watch dusty, dishevelled people burst out into the street, realise their ordeal was at an end and triumphantly high-five and hug each other just as we had done earlier.

"We can go back again that way you know," Bear teased me, her face deadpan.

"Oh of course," I said, trying to sound nonchalant.  "That little climb?  Please, I can totally do it again."

Eventually, we were fortified enough to explore the village.  We scrambled down to the seaside just as the sun started its long descent and found ourselves face-to-face with Cinque Terre's most famous postcard view.

(Earlier, we'd asked a man in a shop to recommend a good time to take the picture.  He smiled sagely, pointed in the direction of the sea and said, "The moment is now".  The phrase became our slogan for the rest of the trip and we still bark it at each other today.)

While Bear set her tripod up, I walked up and down the along the railing, taking pictures of people and birds lounging on the rocks.  At one point, what looked like a pair of geese flew low over the water and I caught a couple of pictures of them before they completely disappeared.

While waiting for the sun to truly set, we explored a random courtyard and found our very attractive waitress from earlier that afternoon playing with a child.  The girl was fascinated by a compass tiled into the ground that pointed out the distances to famous cities all round the world.

Eventually, as the air cooled, we went back to the railing and sat down at the edge of the sea, content to watch bathers climbing and leaping off the rocks.

When everyone started packing up to go home, we looked for a restaurant and rewarded ourselves for the climb with a fantastic seafood platter spilling over with tender calamari, fish and sweetly charred octopus. 

As we washed it down with a dessert of biscotti dipped in sciacchetrá, Italian sweet wine, Bear leaned back and said to me decisively, "I think I love Italy".  

I grinned at her, having made my peace with the terrain.  "Me too."

"Great.  Shall we do the rest of the villages tomorrow?"

"And this time we take the coast road?  Like normal people?"

"Perfecto."

And then, we finished our meal, paid up and like two intrepid explorers with a taste for challenge and adventure, we took the train right back home.