After about an hour to an hour and a half of walking, mainly uphill and over terrain littered with stones looking to trip you up at every step and steps so high you nearly have to touch your chin with your knee to climb up them, you come to a little flight of stone steps leading down to a little courtyard and cafe outside which is a welcoming sign offering coffee and snacks. "Thank god, I've arrived," you think, but alas this is just a cruel deception. What made the kind elderly gentleman who runs the place build a cafe half way along the trail and presumably hike out to it every morning to open up shop is anyones guess, or perhaps he lives in a hidden house out the back - in which case he doesn't so much live in the middle of nowhere as live in the next town over from the middle of nowhere! But whatever the story behind this oddly positioned cafe, it was more than welcome and I sat until the sweat gathering on my body had formed a nice puddle around my ankles, drinking a cappuccino and writing up this log. Afterwards, I bought a bottle of orange powerade, which swore blind in Italian on the side of the bottle that it would dehydrate the hell out of me, and I set off for the 50 minute walk the rest of the way to Vernazza. Another thing the guide book tells you is that this leg off the hike boasts narrow clifftop paths not quite wide enough for two people to pass, and that there are no barriers. Well, there are also no bicycle repair shops or shrines to Felicity Kendle, but neither of these things are particularly relevant either. Yes, the trail gets narrow and no, there are no barriers for most of the way, but at no point did I feel as though I was perched dangerously on a precipice, one slight nudge from plummeting hundreds of feet to my death. Neither is there anywhere where you feel like you'd be in horrendous trouble if somebody suddenly came the other way. In fact, there is barely a moment when somebody isn't coming the other way, because, alas, the Cinque Terre is no longer one of Italy's best kept secrets.

I really should learn not to pre-empt myself. Having written at the cafe mid-way between Corniglia and Vernazza that I had never felt that I was balanced on a precipice, one nudge away from certain death, I left the cafe to continue my journey and almost immediately found myself balanced on said precipice awaiting said death. It wasn't so much that the path was particularly thin, it was just that clearly nobody had been arsed to cut back the flora, so the only way to get past was either to walk straight through the brambles and arrive in Vernazza with something I like to call Bramble-Face, or to try to push them out of the way and squeeze past, in the hope that this manoeuvre would not result in a Simon shaped splat on the beach far below.

Can I say at this stage, while I think about it, that I have never understood those canes that hikers love carrying around everywhere - what the he'll do they do? They don't provide any real balance, they can't do, and if someone is about to trip and tumble over a cliff then a whole department store full of walking canes are not going to do them the slightest bit of good. The only thing that happens when everybody else on the trail takes a couple of walking canes with them (because obviously one isn't good enough, because that would make you look like a tripod and somebody might try to balance a camera on your head) is that normal people like me have to keep getting out of the way of people with 4 legs coming towards me instead of the usual 2.

Vernazza reminded me much more of a quaint Cornish fishing village in that the main road ran down to a harbour which was surrounded by tourist shops, restaurants and the ever-present ice cream parlours. Every one seems to sell different flavours, many of which it gives me a headache to think about, so I settled on a mix of liquorice, coffee and lemon and settled down on a bench next to the harbour to see just how disgusting it actually was. To be fair, it was initially far less odd than I had expected it to be. Individually, each flavour was perfectly fine, even the liquorice. What I hadn't factored in, of course, was that ice cream melts and that Italian ice cream melts quicker. So before long, my ice cream had become a wonderful combination of tastes - Licofflem - which made my tongue go on strike.

After walking up to the trail head for the path to the last of the Cinque Terre, Monterosso al Mere, I changed my mind at the last minute and decided to do the walk in reverse - the guide book led me to believe that the initial uphill hike from Monterosso would be followed by a mainly downhill trek to Vernassa, so I decided to hop on a train to Monterosso and hike the trail back from there. It's lucky I did. After arriving at the last of the Cinque Terre and hiking up to the start of the trail back to Vernassa, I found my way barred by a large iron gate with a padlock on it - the trail was closed. Now, here's the thing: if I hadn't backtracked at Vernassa, I would've headed off towards Monterosso and arrived, soaked in sweat, two hours later at a solid iron gate, requiring me to turn around and hike for two hours back along the edge of a cliff in fast approaching darkness. Don't they think of these things? So, my great trek of the Cinque Terre, in the end, ended up being a walk along lovers lane, a couple of train rides and an arduous three hour trek along a cliff top. Not bad, but I don't think I'm quite ready yet for the next Everest expedition.

Monterosso al Mere, the last of the Cinque Terre (or the first, depending on how you look at it) was the biggest disappointment of the day. I suppose, with the words "on sea" in the name, I should've known what to expect - think of anywhere with "on sea" tacked on the end and you think of saucy postcards, naughty weekends by the sea and Sid James' famous laugh. Nowhere with "on sea" in the name is ever going to a win a prize for destination of the year. After the quaintness of the other four towns before it, I was expecting something special - somewhere that people see for the first time and know they're going to have a great stay. What I found was a traditional seaside resort, very much in the style of any Spanish or Greek seaside hotspot you've ever heard of, but admittedly without the British lager louts trying to shag anything that moves. If it was up to me, I would strip Monterosso al Mere of it's Cinque Terre status - I'd make them rename the entire national park the Quadre Terre and relegate Monterosso to the status of closest seaside resort. So there.

About Simon and Burfords Travels:

Simon Burford is a UK based travel writer. He will be re-publishing his travel blogs, chapters from his books and other miscellaneous rantings on these pages over the coming weeks and months, and the entry on this page may not necessarily reflect todays date.