Oh Italy, where the classic combination of wheat and cheese comes in so many different formats that eating lunch has once again become an enjoyable experience. Foccacia. Pizza. Panini. Pasta. Thank you, ye gods of Italian cuisine, for saving us from our daily dose of bog-standard, plain old bread and cheese.
Having arrived in Italy via the mountainous route in Provence, we thought we’d mix up our cycling (variety being the spice of life and all that) and spend a few days cycling along the Italian Riviera: the Ligurian coast, stretching along the Mediterranean North-West of Italy.
The first thing that we discovered was that cycling on the coast doesn’t necessarily mean it’s flat. The second thing was that navigating becomes incredibly easy – as long as the sea is on your right, then you’re going the right direction. This therefore allows you to put energy into observing other things; stretches of wild and rocky coastline, beaches covered with private deck chairs so you can’t actually see any sand, sunbathers on rocks (it seems to be quite the done thing), beautiful women of all ages, beautiful men of all ages and beautiful gelato of all flavours. Not that it was all beautiful; there was a good dose of semi-grotty Blackpool-inspired beach resorts mixed up with the James Bond frequented scenery (think little towns poking out of the coast line with all their different sized and coloured houses).
The third thing we discovered was that, being Italy, the approach to signage is laissaiz-faire to say the least. This has come up in several different guises, the most notable of which were: 1) the excellent cycle paths that exist at various points (including a long bike only tunnel into San Remo) with ZERO directions or indication of their existence. It must be like Fight Club, the first rule is “Don’t talk about fight club”; you can only find them if you already know they’re there; 2) getting lucky that some old bloke told us the only coastal road into Genova was shut due to a landslide and that the only option to get round was a train; 3) after following a very hilly balcony road above Cinque Terre we came across a sign saying that whilst the road we were on would get to some villages, it wouldn’t get us all the way to its end destination (again, due to landslides). To be fair, at least this last one had a sign, we just couldn’t work out why it wasn’t at the turn-off a few kilometres back.
Being in Italy has also meant the whole sweating thing has reached new levels of absurdity. There’s no pleasing us, we know – first we’re too cold and now we’re too hot. But we’re British and we like to discuss the weather. The heat is intense, and the combination of the heat, our ability to time our day’s route so that 2pm-5pm is our peak cycling time and some of the sharp ascents, makes us quite literally pour with sweat. What’s that dripping on my knee? Oh, it’s just the sweat from my face. Fantastic.
The Liguria coast has also offered us up some tourist-y ‘must-sees’: Genova (good cathedral), Portofino (probably the fanciest place we have ever been; no one looked particularly chuffed at having sweaty cycle tourists rock up and spoil their champagne view, even the police blew whistles at us) and Cinque Terre. The latter is a set of five coastal villages that date from the early Medieval period, which, until the mid 19th century, were only accessible by sea. Today they form part of a UNESCO world heritage site with a 19th century trainline running through them (there is no car access to 3 of the 5). Over the centuries inhabitants built the towns and many hundreds of kilometers of muretti, dry stone wall terracing, out of the dramatic cliffs and valleys. Nowadays it’s inevitably a tourist trap but it’s still both incredibly impressive and stunningly beautiful and offers some excellent hiking. We got involved in some coastal swimming and some rock-based sunbathing.
We had a rush of meeting other cycle tourists, including our second stint of cycling with another person, Eliot from London. He bought his road bike 10 days before setting out to cycle from London to Rome on his own having never cycled before (!). We met him coming out of Genoa and spent the day trying to keep up with him with his light-weight set-up. We managed to turn up to “the best wine bar in Italy” (a quote from the disgruntaled old bloke sat next to us) at peak lunch time after scaling a 4km hill. We quickly realised that our sweaty clothes and visages were unwelcome and that the wine was our of our price range but all agreed that we couldn’t lose face and go somewhere cheaper so the manager begrudgingly served us just coffee. That night we camped together and had the good fortune to meet Antonio and Jada, an Italian couple who had been away for two years (including South America by bike and backpacking) and were doing their last stretch home. Here’s their cool crossbreed tandem set-up (recumbent bike at the front, normal bike at the back):
Doubtless this is a super cool way to see the world on a bike, but we have learnt several things about ourselves as individuals and as a couple on this trip and one of those things is that tandem cycling would not be for us. We have successfully managed to stay together because when we’re cross with each other we can cycle off in different directions (Becky gets the map, Sam gets the tent). On a tandem it would be a matter of hours before the hacksaw was out and we were both on self-fashioned unicycles. Yes, it’s true love.
sambeckybikes 