middle name 'adventure': Chinka terror

Bonjourno! Here we are, sitting right on the water in a little bay in the Liguria area in the North Western Mediterranean coast of Italy. Splendid! It’s definitely been an interesting few days what with a stop off at a dirty little hospital in the backwaters of Italy for false alarm appendicitis. Days of rest…just in case anything else might appear to be about to explode in Sal’s body. Extreme roads, coasts, cliffs, weather, landscapes. Because of the little ‘incident’ mentioned we so far haven’t done that much since we drove into Italy except a day spent visiting Portofino and Santa Margharita where we did some splendid people watching and lay on the beach all afternoon (well deserved!) and yesterday we went to Cinque Terre ‘five dramatically located villages cut into the craggy Ligurian coast, backed by steep vineyards’ to quote our trusty Lonely Planet. We had HUGE expectations of the area and we wondered if they were a tad too high for when we got there they seemed the same as the rest of the coast we’d driven through since Spain, except every shop was selling something aimed at the tourist. You can train hop between the 5 towns and by the time we got to the third we thought we’d have a quick look and head back to our splendid campsite but it was smaller and less touristic because of its location (up a VERY steep hill) and we got a very appreciative feel for the UNESCO world heritage area. We were supposed to be appreciating the back breaking work of the farmers who farm on extremely steep hills and we got that for sure. We spotted so many different things growing from – Basil, wine, roses, apricots, lavender, olives, and pine nuts…bello! The ‘slow food’ movement was started in Italy and we are happily living by that philosophy. It’s been such a pleasure to buy local produce and cook up storms in our little kitchen! Ohhing and ahhhing to the last mouthful. You should have heard us last night - we cooked a feast of fresh pesto (the pesto here is AMAZING!), pasta, parmesan cheese and beautiful olive oil (which we’ve plonked a whole heap of garlic into) and a salad with parma ham, boiled eggs, alfalfa seeds, cherry tomatoes and local cheese. YUM!
Today we plan on enjoying a bit more beach time before heading inland to Tuscany for 4-5days. First stop Piza – expect a cliché photo of us holding up the leaning tower of Piza in the next post!Ciao!