A Little Welcome…Le Tre Amiche
I was thoroughly exhausted from nearly 40 transit hours (Kathmandu to Delhi – 22 hours in Dehli – Dehli to Helsinki and then onward to Milan) when I landed in Milan, then Helen and I bused our way to the Central Train Station to then turn around hoofed it the 15 minute walk to our hostel rendezvous meet-point with Jenn. Jenn arrived earlier in the day and spent her hours wandering through the parks and panting her way up the windy staircase to the top of Milano’s beautiful Duomo. Helen and I both visited the city previously so we spent just one night in Milan. A bit about our newest addition to the backpacking team – Jenn is an actor/model living in LA but with her roots also set firmly in the shallow Florida soil…she and I were on the same interactive improv team in college and bonded/commiserated in the beginning days of living in Los Angeles.!
Jenn packed pretty smartly for the trip and, I admit, I was immediately jealous of her possessions. Leaving on this rtw travel adventure, I was really hugely content with doing a year traveling around the world with just a 52-liter pack and a front pack for my full-sized computer. But pocket-sized Jenn (she’s about 5’3” I think…and I am sure she will correct me if I’m wrong!) brought along pocket-sized belongings and made minimalist travel an art. Her small ruck-sack backpack came in at just 45 liters and she added a small camel-pack that nicely held her 8-inch notebook computer. Now, a note on the 
ruck-sack style pack – the only drawback was the fact that it only allowed top-loading…party foul and a pain in the ass the whole time because she had to unload everything to get to stuff in the middle and bottom. But other than that, I come to the sad conclusion that my 15-inch laptop is a bit excessive; I plan to downsize the front pack to a camel-pack next year when I hit South America (still love my 52-liter though). Her streamlined look suits perfectly for her few weeks here with us…plus she brought me some US treats (like my favorite deodorant!) so that was like manna from heaven.
Anyhow, with Jenn now on the team the three of us headed south two and a half hours to the Ligurian coast. Our chief goal? To hike along the spectacular coast that runs through Cinque 
Terre, an area, quite literally, named after the five tiny Italian villages sprinkled along this stunning coast. It’s a UNESCO site which is actually pretty awesome because otherwise I fear that the rampant tourism would have this coastline washed into the sea within a decade.
The train ride from Milano was pretty simple and the countryside grew in beauty the closer we got to Cinque Terre…a highlight of the ride were Jenn’s squeals of delight as the train chugged out of Milano Centrale to take her on her very first train ride…I am a bit jaded right now I have to admit – at this point I’ve logged more than 200 hours probably on more than 40 trains (India and Australia are a HUGE countries!). Jenn’s delight though brought me out of that travel weariness and back into the moment – trains really are one of the best ways to take in the countryside and our trained hugged the shimmering coast for hours.
I will admit this right now because anyone who has traveled with me has learned – transportation puts me to sleep. It doesn’t matter how pretty it is outside or how uncomfortable the position (except for the hilarious head-bobby sleep, I can’t do that, that’s actually Helen’s style and she will kill me for writing that!) I can nod off at a moment’s notice. Jenn took a special delight in snapping the really unflattering photos of me that, in a moment of vanity I am declining to post. But it would be remiss of me at this point to not note that both Helen and Jenn now love to show me just what it looks like when I fall asleep huging my bag and proping myslef on one elbow – so very lovely…not.
Anyhow – the girls poked me awake as we reached our stop and we were all taken aback by the the magic of stepping off of the train at Monterosso – we were awed. The late afternoon sun’s blindingly bright orangey glow glinting off of both the clear blue water and the glistening human bodies 
tanning on the sandy beach. We found cheap hostel accommodation in the last of the five towns, Riomaggiore, so we hopped onto the small local train connecting the towns along the coast and hopped off in a tiny little one-road town lined with a handful of tourist shops and a smattering cafes – the road dead-ends into a darling little harbor with boats bobbing on the surface on the glassy surface.
With an hour to kill before checking into the hostel, we plopped down in a café with all of our belongings and ordered up a panini to tide us over. I have a love affair with Italian food even though I am not actually much of a carb junkie. Months in India eating knock-off Western food (only occasionally because I love me some Indian food) had me craving the plump juicy red tomatoes available in every hole-in-the-wall Italian restaurant and café. Indian and Nepali pizzas contain a distinct “other” flavor that made Italian style pizza the lead star in many of my dreams throughout the past five months. I opted for a warmly toasted tomato, mozzarella, and pesto panini and boy did it hit the spot. We rounded out our snack with a stop at the gelateria.
I warned Helen way back in India that I planned to show absolutely no self control when it came to Italian gelato. When I was living in Italy during a summer program in college, gelato was a thrice daily occurrence and I feel strongly that this is, really, the only way to effectively and happily travel through the country! My standby is pistacchio with straciatella as a runner up…this time around though I vowed to branch out from these two flavors…that was very challenging because I am a creature of habit in so many regards (I’ve loyally stood by mint chocolate chip ice cream for 25 years now, never shunning this flavor as my favorite in American ice cream!) and pistacchio gelato is simply amazing.
I succumbed to my favorite for my first gelato in the country and checked into the hostel with some pretty fantastically happy taste-buds. The hostel met our needs and even boasted some free laundry…a note of combined disbelief and excitement made my voice creep up an octave when I asked Jenn “Does that say free laundry?!?” I have hand-washed every single item in my pack for months now and didn’t need much of an invitation to dump it all onto the bunk, scoop it up, and gallop downstairs to throw it into the washing machine.
When my spasms of laundry joy subsided we ventured out for a quick dinner where we got had…they brought us a plate of tomatoes and bread and implied that it was all on the house…bread is fairly customary here so we ate it up and happily downed the tomatoes too…no one mentioned that they were four Euros until after we ate them! We headed to bed early so that we would be refreshed and ready to tackle the signature five hour hike along the Ligurian coastline.
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