Kieran's Gap Year: Cinque Terre, Italy

Entry 8.

The next morning we woke up at 5:45 but Guy still wasn't feeling well so he decided to stay another day in Milan and promised to meet up with me and Jose the next day.
When me and Jose arrived in Cinque Terre it was a beautiful day and our "hostel" turned out to be a private apartment with view of the sea, a kitchen, and double beds. We were living large. We dropped our bags and went to the water, where the "beach" consisted of a bunch of large boulders thrown in the water.
We found a high dive from one of the cliffs that jutted into the water and jumped off it a couple times and then headed back to the apartment. On the way back we picked up food for dinner and some detergent to wash our clothes. A home cooked meal and clean clothes - the night was looking good.
I cooked Italian Sausage and Peppers and Pesto for dinner but severely overestimated the amount of food we would be able to eat, our stomachs started groaning after the first bite. After dinner we gathered our clothes for laundry but never made it further; we were both asleep by 21:00.
At 7:00 the next morning I awoke feeling incredibly refreshed and went to the patio only to find the entire sky covered with clouds and the sun nowhere to be found. Jose and I did the laundry and the clothes actually looked a little cleaner, but more importantly they smelled clean. When Guy got in we immediately hit the trail that links all 5 city's of Cinque Terre together. We were at the 1st city and hiked to the second one and since it was raining, the next section of the path had been closed to landslides. We took the train to the 3rd city and on the trail we saw a sign that said "free beach" so we followed a windy and difficult trail down an almost vertical wall for 2 km. As we got to the bottom we passed a group of shirtless hippies hanging out under a tree. When we got to the beach it was completely abandoned except two completely nude people. Apparently it was a nude beach. I gave them an awkward head nod as I walked past and we set up our stuff on the opposite side of the beach.
The walk back up was exhausting and when I got to the top I remembered that we had just started the hike from the 3rd village and still had a long hike to go until the 4th one. The rain made all the rocks slippery and after about an hour we finally made it to the 4th village. We rehydrated and had some pizza in the harbor and then caught the train to the 5th town where we hung out for a while and then took the train all the way back to our town.