This is a quintessential perched village and it was an absolute delight. We were in Ventimiglia, the border Italian town with France a few miles away. In the mountains, along the border between Italy and France there lie some of the sweetest perched villages. There is a small gauge railroad that links all of them and SNCF, the French rail company and Trenitalia shares most of the rail tracks. I didn't know about Saorge till we arrived in Ventimiglia and were looking for cute villages to visit. The village was nowhere near the train station, we had a 20 minute hike up the road to get to it. We've hiked before. Monasteries in France are usually situated in remote areas. I remember I had to hire a car and driver to get to one of them, this was Conques. I paid the guy who drove us there in his car 200 Euros for the trip. I had wanted to see Conques that badly. There was another time when we went to Rocamodour, we walked an hour from the train station to get there and an hour to walk back to the train station. So this 20 minute hike was nothing. It was the most amazing sight as we approached the village, there, perched against the mountain is this sweet looking village. It is still one of the prettiest places we've ever seen. There was one main road that leads through it, past cute house frontages to the other side where a church and monastery is situated. There is one general store and you're looking at it, it sold everything. I stopped to buy some spice cake from the guy, he was happy, he had customers. Sophie went inside to take pictures, these are actually her pictures. We met some hikers from Germany when we waited at the same kiosk for our trains. They took SNCF to get back to Nice where they were staying. We took Trenitalia to return to Ventimiglia. That was one of the greatest days in our traveling life.
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