Craic On

Weirdly, I quite like walking uphill. There is no denying that age, expanding girth and lack of fitness make this more of a challenge than for the younger, thinner and fitter, but as my friend, The Big Cheese, would say, “none of us are getting any younger or any thinner”. Downhill walking has had its day. After the rib cracking incident I’m for the climb up and working up a good sweat. There is no better place on earth to do that than The Cinque Terra (Five Villages) on the north west Italian coast. If you can do it in thirty degrees of heat, surrounded by hoards of tourists running past you like goats, you could grab yourself a little bit of heaven. As leg stretches go, it can be a challenge because the unmatched beauty of the coastal path is well and truly matched by the gradient of the ascent itself, of which there is a lot, not to mention the precarious nature of the ground under foot, which I can’t help but mention. This is not a stroll for the half hearted walker but the determined hiker. With