Italians love a good tunnel. With half their country covered in mountains, they've had lots of practice building them... and when they have finished building one lot of tunnels, they turn around and do the job again... with bigger and better tunnels. So it was in Cinque Terra... in the days when trains were small and slow, a train line was tunnelled along a path that hugged the coast... lots of tunnels that periodically broke through the rock wall to give a glimpse of the sparkling Mediterranean. When tourism attracted large numbers of people to Cinque Terra, the rail system had to be upgraded... building roads would have spoilt the region... it had to be rail... mostly tunnelled... out of sight. Today, that new rail system is heavily used between the five small towns. Trains run each half hour and we have found them all to be packed.
So, what was to be done with the old tunnels? Rip up the lines... put down a bitumen surface... add some lighting... and you have an added tourist attraction... one suitable for wet weather when trail walking is not possible. Today was bright and sunny... so the number of cyclists was low... plenty of room for inexperienced cyclists like Joye and me. We needed to take a fleece... the tunnels are long and the air in the middle doesn't get a chance to warm-up.
We cycled to the next train station at Bonassola... some 2.8 klms away... on perfectly level path. Like Levanto, it is too big to get a guernsey as part of the Cinque Terra specials... but it was a delightful seaside resort. We had coffee observing the strange way people use their Italian beaches... without the dynamics of a decent surf... the whole scene looked to be asleep... full of old people sunning their bones... young mums sunning their infants... everyone seems to be waiting for the surfboarders to arrive... for the Life Savers to put up their flags... for the surf to start thundering.
The final leg was a 2.7 km ride... this time with much longer stretches of tunnel between glimpses of the sea. The town was perched 200 metres above the railway line... so we excused ourselves from making a visit and made our way home.
What a great day. We realised how long it had been since our last bike ride... our sense of balance took an hour or so to sort itself out.
Tomorrow, we meet up with friends we met on the Balkans packaged tour... a couple of mature ladies from Tasmania. We will enjoy catching up with their news.
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