I went to Ölüdenitz on the south coast of Turkey in order to paraglide. It’s known as a mecka for gliders, with five different take-off sites, perpetually perfect weather, and a long beach on which to land; what could go wrong? Well, everything…
I arrived at midnight with my backpack and nowhere to stay, after two flights and two bus rides, thoroughly worn out. The place looked as I had feared – nothing but bars and night clubs and faux English pubs, plus loads of lodgings. I didn’t look around, but went for the second hotel I saw – nothing fancy, but there was a pile of paragliding equipment as high as I was, which I thought boded well.
The next morning the place was full of what looked like frequent flyers, but no-one seemed to be going anywhere. Turns out there was a big bike race on, so flying was forbidden. Not obvious why? They had multiple helicopters covering the race, and Mr Chopper is not a paraglider’s friend. I was kind of ok with that, because that would give me the day to find an instructor that could take me on. Or so I thought. Not a single one was interested. All they do is tandem flights – taking tourists for a quick top to bottom and then selling them photos and videos of the ride is a lot more profitable than actually teaching someone how to fly. So in spite of there being paragliders everywhere I was grounded (I don’t have a licence to fly on my own – hence the need for an instructor…).
🎵 Up there is where I belong…! 🎵
My backup plan was to hike the Lycean Way – a relatively new path that follows the coast of the peninsula – but it was simply too hot; 27 degrees in the shade and muggy as anything was more than I could take. So there I was, stuck in a tourist hellhole, with no prospect of doing any of the things I wanted. I went for a swim in the Mediterranean at sunset and pondered my options: stay here for the week and hope something materialized, or change my plans entirely.
The next morning, as paragliders started to appear in the sky, I went for another swim, and then got a flight to Istanbul for that evening. No sense in prolonging the misery.
Arriving in Istanbul late in the evening I got a taxi to the hotel I had found, got fooled by the driver into paying 20% extra (“bank fees”), and arrived only to be informed the room was double-booked, and would I mind staying somewhere else? Not an auspicious start. Turns out “somewhere else” was a huge apartment right next to Galata Tower (which, in competition with the bridge across the Bosphorus, is THE symbol of Istanbul), so that was ok. The prayer tower four meters from my bedroom window that called believers to prayer at dawn the next morning? A little unexpected, but a very efficient wakeup call. 😅
And so I set out exploring Istanbul. I have been once before on a work trip, some 25 years ago, so had seen Hagia Sofia and the Top Kapi, which I was happy about, because the lines to those attractions were such that I could have spent the rest of the week standing in them. Instead I went for long, meandering walks through the Old Town, taking in the sights and sounds and smells of the city. Impressions: dirty, chaotic, crumbling, hilly – oh, so hilly! – and cat-infested. There are cats everywhere, but they are looked after – people feed and water them, construct special houses for them, and there is even a system that lets you collect trash and get cat food in exchange – because one saved Baby Mohammed from a snake once; not a bad deal for the three million (!) felines that currently inhabit the city.
How to keep rats away from the garbage?
The smell of roasted chestnuts and cobs of corn fills the air of the bazaars and the maze of streets, where – in Arabic style – the vendors and their wares spill out into the streets. The olden way of business prevails here: all shops specialize in one thing, and they all congregate with their brethren (very few sistren to be seen), so that one street sells nothing but tools, another plastic toys, a third music instruments, and so on. How they make it work I don’t know: Imagine being an umbrella salesman in a street of umbrella salesmen – in a city where it doesn’t rain for at least six months per year… They don’t seem bothered tho. Mostly the men sit around and drink tea out of tulip-shaped glasses, and smoke acrid cigarettes. Quite possibly this has the effect of curing them (not of illnesses, but in the mummifying sense), because they all look to be about seventy, regardless of actual age. Wiry porters carry immense loads on their backs or on little carts, blocking the roads even more than the rest of the throng.
What’s surprising to me is how many of the old houses are actually gorgeous – a wonderful Turkish take on Art Noveau. It’s sad to see how many of them are in disrepair and/or hidden by shabby constructions of later date, but a hundred years ago this must have been an amazingly beautiful city.
Art Noveau Turque. Maybe.
There’s plenty of architecture of greater age that is even more impressive, of course. I had an amazing experience last time I was here, descending into a subterranean roman cistern, where I was suddenly alone in what looked like a half submerged cathedral, with nothing but ambient light and Pavarotti for company, making it more of a religious experience than I have ever had in an actual church. And so I foolishly set out trying to repeat that. It wasn’t to be. I saw three cisterns, one without water, one tiny, like a flooded basement, and one that was something like my original, only this one was filled to the brim – with tourists. Nothing like queueing behind selfie-takers to get you to commune with the divine, eh? After this photographic wankery I decided to steer well clear of any other major tourist attraction.
Roman reservoir. Still quite impressive.
Instead I saw several of the less touted mosques, and found them all beautiful. Who knew ostrich eggs were used to fight cob webs on the immense candelabra, or that the acoustics of the domed ceilings were improved by incorporating water vessels into the construction at angles that offset the bouncing sounds? An added bonus: the relative calm of the mosques’ grounds means that cats favour them – in one I’m suddenly ambushed by six kittens, who quickly turn me into a fairground for their play. Allah akbar, indeed.
Vase tree. And some building.
I see the Swedish General Consulate behind barbed wire and armed guards – a reminder that my country isn’t popular in this part of the world right now; a far cry from when Swedish varjag warriors were seen as an elite, and were made into a special bodyguard unit for the Caliph. Luckily my hotel is owned by Kurds, so we bond over the shared experience of being outcasts.
Swedes behind bars.
I drink amazingly good coffee in swanky cafes, and marvel at the patience of the poor (?) fishermen on Galata bridge, who stand in the heat all day for a bucketful of sardines. There are other marvels: the sight of women’s clothes, ranging from full body burquas to, frankly, astonishingly vulgar, as seen in the nightlife outside my hotel, which happens to be next door to both night clubs and what on medieval maps would have been called Gropeacunt Alley. There is also the many patients of cosmetic surgary to gawk at: nose reduction and lip expansion jobs for ladies, hair redistribution for gentlemen. Istanbul can really be a transformative experience…
The food is predictably good: Anatolian breakfast is a sumptious affair with twenty-odd accoutrements, accompanied by endless cups of tea, and fresh pomegranate juice. Sumptuous! Cheap and cheerful canteen-like restaurants serve healthy Turkish cuisine, like filled peppers, grilled aubergine and lamb shanks, and if one is thus inclined there is baklava on offer on every corner.
Turkish delight. And Anatolian breakfast.
And so I spend my days roaming the city, haggling over tulip bulbs and pashmina shawls in the bazaars for the fun of it, taking a boat ride around the Bosphorus, trying to imagine all the people and ships that have crossed through here since time immemorial (the cataclysmic earthquake that opened the strait between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean is what supposedly gave rise to the Noah mythos, after all, and the Illiad played out at the opposite end of the channel). I even cross over into Asia, just to be able to say my holidays spanned two continents.
Asia to the left, Europe to the right, just to confuse you.
It is not what I had hoped, but it’s a good trip nonetheless. My initial plan – to experience the Turkish wilderness in the air, on land and in the sea – came to nothing, and Istanbul/Constantinople/Miklagård might be an acquired taste, but it’s many incarnations and contrasts and history make it endlessly fascinating, and a wild experience. Mashallah!
I came to the mountains without much of a plan. I was on my own, so could do exactly as I wanted. All I knew was that I yearned for beauty, hiking, and solace. The alps usually deliver, and the Dolomites (roughly the Italian part of the mountain range) are particularly well known for their beauty, so I was fairly certain I’d get the first two.
Solace might be a different story, as for me it’s a part of the world I associate with the end of my marriage, so I was prepared for a few bad memories to resurface. What I hadn’t realized was just how commonplace bad memories are in the region. It was the scene of intense fighting during the Great War, when Austro-Hungarians and Italians wrestled over dominion of the Südtyrol region in valleys and on mountains all over the Dolomites. The former lost to the latter, and Südtyrol passed into Italian hands, but not before battle upon battle had been fought here, with intense suffering as a result.
Even now the scars are there, and the language you use will greatly affect the reaction you get, depending on the mother tongue of your conversation partner. As a local woman in her seventies confided to me (in German): the older generation doesn’t want to learn Italian, because of what happened.
She said it as if it (the first world war) had happened only last year, not over a century ago, but then the very land here still bears the marks to remind people. A case in point: the victorious Italians set about changing all the place names, but the old names still linger, in minds and on maps. And so it is that I set out from Dreizinnenblick/Vista Panoramico Tre Cime to hike up a long, picturesque valley to what is arguably the most recognizable of all features in the alps: Drei Zinnen, or Tre Cime, a constellation of three enormous rocks, that are the poster children of the Dolomites. To me they don’t look like crenellations (German) or chimneys (Italian) so much as three crooked old grave stones, leaning drunkenly on one another.
In a way they are, too, because many a man has perished in their shadows, either trying to climb one of the various routes up the rocks themselves, or in the aforementioned pitched fights. I felt as if I were about to join the ranks of the victims; my heart rate oscillated somewhere between ER and morgue when I finally made it up to the rifugio that sits across from the three giants. I was quite surprised therefore when I saw a lot of people strolling about up there – all the more so because I had set out early, and had hardly seen a single human all the way up the valley. It turns out that on the other side of the Big Three a paved road takes you all the up to the foot of the rocks, and so day trippers come up by coach or car and have a wee bit of a walk around. To me – fainting and damn near going into cardiac arrest – it felt like they were cheating: that’s not how you commune with the mountains!
Refugio vs Tre Cime
Thankfully, not many of those visitors elected to stay the night, which was a stroke of luck for me, as even as it was I only just managed to get one of the very last bunk beds in the rifugio/Hütte (although late in the season, reservations (and cash!) are of the essence, it seems.). After six hours’ hiking, 21km and 2,000 vertical meters, I ate everything in sight, and then promptly fell asleep around eight, still wearing my clothes.
The next day I set out earlier still, traversing the sella (saddle, i.e. mountain pass) that sits behind Rifugio Lavaredo in order to descend back down to Dobbiaco via Val Campi di Dentro. Up there was where I first encountered the remnants of real fortifications. I had seen a couple of man-made caves the day before, but here I stumbled upon a fortress hewn out of the bare rock – trenches, underground storage space, machine gun nests, walls, and perhaps most poignantly of all, a lonely little cairn. It was nought but a small pile of rocks with a cross made from a couple of sticks bound by rusty barbed wire, sitting across from the Tre Cime as a forelorn monument over some long gone nameless poor bastard who died here. It seemed so futile, somehow, to lay down your life in order to prevent someone you don’t know from crossing an imaginary line drawn on a map, only to be forgotten by all, a lonely rock pile being the only memorial to your anonymous existence. Was he Italian or Austro-Hungarian? No way of knowing.
The Cairn of the Unknown Soldier
I mentioned where I was to a friend, and it turned out that her great grandfather had been a Kaiserjäger, a member of an elite company who fought in these very parts. Even if you survived, how could such an experience not scar a man for life? And who can tell what this meant for future generations? I find it fascinating and depressing in equal measure. And so I was in a pensive mood as I passed across the pass, past several similar gunners’ nests, where once your efforts for climbing this far would have been rewarded by having your neighbours lying in wait to shoot you in the face. Today however, the only blood on the ground was Alpen-Bärenträube (lit. Alpine Bear grapes), a low growing and intensely red plant that brought a bit of colour to the rockiest stretches.
Then, as I descended further down into the valley, the trees grew higher, the undergrowth more verdant, and I followed a dainty brook all the way to the valley floor. In the middle of the forest I came upon the spooky old ruin of a former spa hotel, where once the upper echelons of society came to ”take the waters”. This they did from the five springs in the vicinity that (in spite of being very close together) were once – according to helpful signs – thought to cure a variety of vastly different ailments. I choose to fill my CamelBak with natural mineral water from two of them, the combination of which may well cure me of liver diseases, ulcers, chronic (!) gastritis, skin ailments and a variety of gynecological disorders, if the signs were to be believed. Pas mal! Thus fortified, I made it back to “my” hotel, where I again ate like a champ, then passed out like a chump.
Day 3 the weather had taken a turn for the worse. Where previously there had been clear blue skies, there were now ominous-looking clouds, but as the forecast said there would be very little rain, if any, and I had my magic potion from the day before to ward off most ailments, I still set off, this time going from Cimebanche/Im Gemärk up another valley to an area optimistically called Prato Piazza (Flat Space). From there it was onwards and upwards, skirting a massive peak coloured red by iron oxide, called Croda Rossa (Red Cross), or “the bleeding heart of the Dolomites”. I noted with surprise and great satisfaction that my own heart was neither bleeding nor fluttering like a kolibri any more. The trail was long and hard though, the massif looking like a giant dragon lying on top of the mountain, so it was with some trepidation I continued. The dragon didn’t wake, but the path did lead past areas of massive rockfall, where such immense quantities of stones had fallen from the heights as to create whole fields of red boulders (I later learned that the rockfalls can be sufficiently powerful to register as earth quakes!). Moving across one of those and hearing rocks starting to bounce down from high above you in the clouds is an experience that will make you feel very small and vulnerable, for sure.
When the path suddenly needs rerouting…
The same goes for passages where you turn a corner to find that the path takes you on the outside of sheer cliffs, where a chain bolted into the rock is the only thing to hold on to, and one misstep means certain death. The payoff is of course the immense vistas and god-like viewpoints you experience far away above the valleys, but I’m weirdly glad I was alone – for the simple reason that I’m not sure I could bear to watch someone I care for scrambling across those abysses. I remember my father forever calling us back from precipices when we were in the alps when I was a kid – I understand him now.
Find Wally!
Eventually I make it back down again, all the way to “the most beautiful lake in the alps”, Lago di Braies, which is truly gorgeous, but by this point the rain was hanging in the air, I’d been out for seven hours, I was exhausted, and my annoyance at the sightseeing day trippers was such that I just got on the first bus and went back “home”.
Prettiest lake in the alps?
(Incidentally, the people of “my” hotel must think me mad, because I check out every morning and come back (nearly) every evening; it’s because my guidebook (Walking the Dolomites) keeps insisting that my itineraries are 2-3 day affairs, which means I’m carrying everything I need for a week on my back wherever I go. In spite of this I manage to cover enough ground to be back down again every evening except the first one, hence my strange behaviour. Had I known I could have left 85% of my kit in the hotel, which would have saved me quite a few calories…)
The next day it is pouring down. The thing is, when it’s raining in the mountains you are literally in the clouds, so there is little chance it will let up. I grind my teeth and put on all my rain kit, and make my way to the start of a trail up to something called Val de Fanes (the Valley of the Fanes people – local fairy folk). Unfortunately, my local map doesn’t cover this area, and the guidebook is quite sketchy, so I’m in terra incognita. There are two sights on the way up into the land of the faeries that I know I want to see, however: Cascate di Fanes, the highest waterfall in the Dolomites, and Ponte Ulto (Ladin for High Bridge), crossing a chasm of similar magnitude to that of the waterfall – 70 meters. I hiked up to the edge of the canyon to see the waterfall crashing down on the other side. I then made it down to the bottom only to realize that the path back up again on the other side was a via ferrata, which really requires proper climbing gear. I made an attempt of it, but as it was pouring with rain and everything was slick and slippery I reluctantly decided I had no choice but to turn around.
Water, water, everywhere…
So back down the canyon I went, and then all the way back up again on the other side, back to the same waterfall, reached by another via ferrata (this one slightly less murderous, but still intimidating in the rain). So I saw the waterfall every which way you could, and the bridge as well (less impressive), but after the lengthy detour I had already used up about half the day, and since I didn’t know how far it was to the Valley of the Fairies, I eventually gave up. I had hiked for hours in the rain through the sodden pine forest, ever upwards, and in spite of my rain gear I was soaked through (condensation being just as efficient as actual precipitation in that regard), my muscles were stiff and cold, and I didn’t want to continue into the unknown. I was done.
By the time I made it back to the valley it’s late afternoon, and the hotel owner informs me that they haven’t turned on the heating yet, so there is no way to dry my clothes. It’s the mountain gods’ way of telling me this is it. The next morning I get on a train and leave the mountains behind. I make it to Milan and spend the next 36 hours soaking up the atmosphere and madness of the Milano Fashion Week instead – as contrasts go it couldn’t be any further from the solitude, sorrows and solace of the mountains.
For the second time in a row, my efforts to go paragliding in Spain have been twarted by unexpected rain storms.
Having returned to Algodonales where I first learnt about flying, I was hoping to be airborn every day for a week, and instead I found myself in a cold apartment staring out at a mountain ridge shrouded in unrelenting rain clouds. I don’t know if I should take heart from locals saying this is such a rare occurance as to be unheard of, or whether I should try to appease some local weather gods that I have somehow upset?
Luckily I had packed a bunch of books, so even if I was forced to stay grounded for the most part I still didn’t waste my time. And after a few days cooped up inside, my fellow would-be pilots and I did do some nice excursions in the area, enjoying the lushness of spring (at least the downpour helped with that!). First we ventured to the nearby mountaintop village of Zahara (It takes its name from the Arabic word for either crag or orange blossom – both highly applicable – but it has nothing to do with the desert), which looks like something out of Ferdinand the bull, and whose cobbled, winding streets have been hugging the hillside since times immemorial.
There is also a local nature reserve centered around a steep ravine that is favoured by large scavenger birds, so instead of following vultures in the air I sought them out in their lair. We saw at least three nesting pairs up close, their large dragon-like silhouettes sailing out of the mist in complete silence, sometimes as little as five meters away. I’m not easily impressed by birds, but these are as graceful as they are intimidating, forever sailing on thermals whilst watching every move in the world below. Thankfully they didn’t take after the Belgian blitz-buzzards, so we didn’t get attacked, but we all kept a mutually weary eye on one another.
The bottom of the gorge was sadly (and predictably) swollen with water, so we couldn’t traverse its entire length – possibly just as well, as my heart was racing like a hummingbird’s by the time I made it down. Instead we opted for an excursion in the opposite direction the next day, hiking up through an abandoned quarry to the summit of an isolated hillock, on top of which was an ancient Arabic watch tower. Even with a low cloudbase the surrounding landscape was visible for miles and miles, so it was not difficult to see why the Moors chose this site – any advancing army would have been spotted days away. Unfortunately, we could perceive equally clearly that the rain in Spain was not mainly on the plain, but everywhere, again and again, as far as the eye could see.
So with all hope of flying having been dashed I repaired to Seville for the last couple of days. It is a splendid town, epitomizing quintessential Spanishness, wearing its Moorish inheritance on its sleeve whilst showing off the incredible wealth that flowed into the kingdom with the discovery and exploitation of the New World. Everywhere you go the architecture displays both those influences, and nowhere more so than in Real Alcazar, the royal palace, and its splendid gardens. It is easy to see why Game of Thrones filmed many of the scenes from Sunspear here – the sensuous beauty of formal gardens filled with ubiquitous Seville orange trees and interlocking fountains, against the backdrop of a palace of Arabic ideals tempered by Iberian terracotta colours, with peacocks strutting like catwalk models through the landscape – it is quite difficult to surpass in elegance and sophistication.
Not that later generations haven’t tried. Right across the palace sits the vast creamy sandstone opulence that is Seville’s cathedral – large as a football field, cavernous on the inside and decorated like a wedding cake on the outside, its bell tower (once a muezzin’s prayer tower) unabashedly adorned in arabesque forms, even as its bells toll (loudly and repeatedly) to reawaken the Catholic faith.
The old town that surrounds the castle grounds is minute, but so maze-like that it is quite easy to get lost in its jumble of entangled alleyways, that occasionally spit you out onto unsuspected, intimate little plazas. Most of the old houses are built in the Medina style on the inside, with an open courtyard centered around a spring, whilst the outside is resoundingly Spanish – heavy gates, wrought-iron balconies and whimsical turrets with only the occasional tulip-bulb window hinting at the interior – and all of them have been painted in warm colours, so the overall impression is like a Spanish version of Chania, in Crete.
Also in the middle of town there is the Plaza de España, an enormous open space encircled on one side by an opulent bow-shaped castle structure – more theatrical backdrop than real building – and surrounded by a moat, whose arched bridges bring to mind Venice; it sits at one end of the immense Maria Luisa park, filled with temples and water features, formal fountains and informal paths, all hidden away in the lushness of palms, jaquarandas and the ever-present orange trees.
The last day of my week, wouldn’t you know it? The skies are blue, the sun is back, and Seville is awash with tourists even this early in the year, hinting at how busy it will get in high season; even now the horse-drawn carriages and tapas bars are doing brisk business. I take in the old bullfighting ring (now thankfully a museum), the weird mushroom structure (akin to Les Halles in Paris in its modernist madness), and the Golden Tower on the Guadalquivir river, below which is moored a full scale replica of the Nao Victoria, the first ship to circumnavigate the world. It looks ever so small and unimpressive, and yet on such flimsy foundations were built the first truly global empire, which in turn made all these riches possible.
All in all Seville is an interesting spectacle, quite splendid, and would have made for the perfect romantic weekend. But although I’m glad I’ve seen it all, much like was the case in Barcelona, I’d rather have been flying. The only flight for me this week will be the Ryanair one home. Third time will be the charm!
We went to the French coast this weekend, friend F and I. He needed to blow the cobwebs away, and I needed a change of scenery, so this was a perfect mini adventure.
We drove to the city of Boulogne-sur-Mer, half an hour southwest of Calais, which we would use as a base camp for our excursions. This turned out not to be a very original idea, as the oldest part of town is built on the grid the Romans established for their army camp, as they set out to invade Britain!
Not much remains of that endeavour, but the city wall still stands intact, high on a hill, reinforced over the millennia, making Old Boulogne an imposing citadel. The rest of the town seems to have gone downhill quite literally, as the further down toward the coast you get, the shabbier the buildings, right down to the waterfront, where ghastly high-rises from the 50’s and 60’s bring to mind Kaliningrad-sur-Mer.
Be that as it may, it is a good starting point for our hike up the Opal coast (the stretch between Boulogne and Calais), and the coast itself is lovely. The tide is out, the sky is high, a pale winter sun is shining, and there is a hint of spring in the air and in our steps. There aren’t many people about, just a few joggers and dog walkers. What there is a lot of, however, is wind. 40km/h wind with gusts reaching almost twice that. At times it feels as if you could just fly away, and I am thankful that I wasn’t tempted to bring my paraglider along – the gulls are clearly enjoying themselves, but I would be no match for the elements.
We hike up the coast, the sea and the heavens competing to see who is the most blue, past twee seaside villages nestled in the dunes. I did expect it to be pretty, and I’m not disappointed. What I wasn’t prepared for was the abundance of World War Two bunkers still in existence. Every kilometer or so we pass these sunken concrete monstrosities, some of which are still accessible. We break for coffee at one and I venture inside. Cramped, cold rooms with a lot of debris give an idea of what life here might have been like for German soldiers; low ceilings and an absence of light give me my first World War Two wound, as I crack my head on a low piece of concrete.
Of course, guarding against perfidious Albion goes back a lot longer than Nazi Germany; the emperor Claudius erected a lighthouse/garrison on a rocky islet just off the coast here, and Calais was the last British outpost on the continent – both lighthouse and British possessions were still around well into the Middle Ages, so maybe the bunkers have the tacit approval of the local populace?
We make good progress at any rate, but the wind keeps getting stronger, and F’s feet are not happy, so we cut our hike short once we reach the one village where the one bus of the day can take us back to whence we came. Instead of trudging more kilometers through the sand there’s an opulent lunch in a local fish restaurant, followed by hot showers, siesta and an even more opulent dinner. Hiking in style, as it were.
The next day the weather gods seem to have a score to settle with the whole continent, so we explore the vaults of the ancient basilica and then the medieval fortress, both of which now hold eclectic museums. In both cases, the buildings themselves prove to be the most interesting bits. We stroll around the city walls, and try to imagine the citadel in its heyday, when Charles Dickens bumped into Napoleon III and Prince Albert having a chinwag here, in what must have been the most Victorian moment of the whole Victorian era. Today, however, the rain drives everyone away, including us, so we get in the car and drive to Calais.
In Calais one last memento of the strained relations between the continent and their island neighbors awaits us, in the shape of a monumental statue by Rodin. During the Hundred Years’ War the city fell after an eleven-month-long siege by the English. Edward III was annoyed with the citizens for their “obstinate” resistance, and was going to kill everyone who had survived. In the end, his wife – who apparently tagged along on her husband’s mini adventures – managed to get him to change his mind, but not before the city’s noblemen had been forced to walk barefoot through the city with nooses around their necks. The statue in front of the Hotel de ville shows half a dozen of them, in their moment of despair.
With a history such as theirs, it is perhaps easy to see why France and the UK seem to have difficulties getting along after Brexit. Maybe Macron’s attempts to mediate in the Ukraine is brought about by a fear that Londongrad will otherwise take the opportunity to stage an attack on the mainland Eurostar station, thus to preempt any further migrant invasions, in the ultimate effort by BJ to make people forget about Partygate? Or maybe I just need to find a new mini adventure to go on? Watch this space.
At the outset of every year I pause and think about what I want to achieve. This year was different.
Or rather, I wanted to make sure that I would be more likely to achieve my goals, so I resolved to be smart and make ’em S.M.A.R.T.– Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Time-bound.
Did I succeed? Yes and no.
Chess: ✅ I played every day for a month and got the rating I had set my mind on. (Then promptly lost it.)
Reading: ✅ One non-fictional book per month. Done.
Piano: ❎ I did play, but didn’t learn as many pieces as I had hoped. The temptation is to stick with the ones you know…
French: ❎ I didn’t learn anywhere near as much as I had planned, mainly because I had to focus on Danish.
Travel: ✅ I went to Morocco, Egypt, the Seychelles, Norway, Italy (thrice), and Denmark (plus Sweden), which is less than usual, but still acceptable, especially since Egypt, Italy and Norway was with the kids.
Fitness: ✅ The year was marred with injuries – first recovering after the paragliding incident, then a wonky neck, a messed up Achilles’ tendon, a tennis elbow, and finally a slipped disk – so running and biking and swimming suffered. I did manage the Paris marathon, and a runstreak of 100 days, but I’m nowhere near the distance goals I set myself for runs and biking. Nor did I learn to crawl, but I’ve racked up some 100 gym sessions, including an ironstreak of 40 days or so, which has meant three or four extra kilos’ worth of muscles.
Challenges: ✅ Apart from the aforementioned run- and ironstreaks I’ve successfully given up coffee, tried intermittent fasting for a month, I’ve become vegetarian, and I’m currently on a no sugar diet, so that’s gone well. Less well went my attempt at keeping a diary – I kept it up until Denmark, but then fell out of habit, unfortunately.
Work: ✅ I added Danish to my language combination, and continued working in Communications. In addition to that I MC’d a couple of conferences using participatory leadership, which was fun, too.
Blog: ✅ I increased my readership quite spectacularly this year (from just shy of 3,000 readers to 5,500, and from 5,000 views to nearly 10,000), which is really gratifying.
So. What worked and what didn’t? Some goals turned out to be insufficiently specific, such as “learn a piece of music”; others were unattainable due to factors beyond my control (the fitness targets) or had to be downgraded in terms of priority (French, when I was paid to go learn Danish), but overall it’s a sound principle, and one I will continue to use in 2019.
Now all I have to do is decide what those goals should be…
I got L for fall break this year. The children’s mom and I decided to split the kidlets for the first time. And now I was nervous.
You see, we were going to Italy, and now I watched in dismay as the weather turned from bad to worse to Noah’s Ark. Parts of the country were under water as we set out, with more to come. The west coast was one big thunderstorm. It didn’t look good.
Upon arrival at Milano airport there was a queue for taxis that stretched around the block, with only the occasional car coming in. As we finally got one ourselves it became apparent why: the trip into town was plighted by long detours, as necessitated by storm-felled trees and inundated stretches of street.
The streets of Milano…
Having settled in in our apartment I surveyed our options. The east coast was out: the water levels in Venice were 1.5 metres higher than usual, with gondolas all but entering the duomo; the alps were downright dangerous, with mud slides and torrential rain; the west coast looked like our best option – hiking Cinque Terre it would be.
We took the train southwards next morning. There was no rain, but nor were the skies particularly promising-looking. News reports were alarming: 20 dead and counting. L took it all in his stride, the way only a ten-year-old with a good book and a smartphone can.
Una di Cinque Terre.
We managed to arrive in the port town of La Spezia without any incident, and the next day we set out for the five coastal villages that form Cinque Terre. Alas, all the hiking paths were closed, so we had to go by train again, but given just how mountainous the region is, and how tired L got from strolling around the labyrinthine alleys and stair-cases of the ones we visited, and the number of gelatos that entailed, it was probably for the best.
The villages are beautiful, for the record, and this time of the year (and again, due to the weather-scare) the number of tourists was not too horrible, but there was no way they would be able to live up to my expectations, so having done three out of five, we left it at that.
Instead we headed for Lucca next day, a medieval town with a completely intact ring wall, something which I thought might intrigue a ten-year-old boy.
Well, the fates smiled upon us. Unawares to us, the city is home to one of the biggest comic-cons of the world – the whole town essentially transforms into a games and comics-themed amusement park for five days, and this happened to be day one of that extravaganza, so the medieval setting was full to bursting with cosplayers of all kinds. L was mightily pleased.
Lucca-like contest?
We essentially did la passergata on top of the ring wall, oohing and aahing at all the weird and wonderful critters we encountered, and on top of that there was zombie face painting and manga drawing lessons, whole tents devoted to computer games and a cordoned-off area where people could fight apocalyptic paint-ball wars. It was boyhood heaven.
And so passed our last day in Tuscany proper. The next day we set out for Milano again, and had time both for some quick shopping and several hours worth of browsing the fantastic museum devoted to all things Leonardo Da Vinci that is housed in the Vittorio Emanuele II-galleria.
It was the renaissance equivalent of Lucca: models galore, all the well-known gunships and flying machines and robots, and all of them with virtual displays showing how they had figured them out based on his drawings; some you could assemble yourself using building blocks, with explanations as to what would work and what wouldn’t.
Lisa does Technicolor
All his most famous paintings were equally disassembled, explained and restored digitally: you could view Mona Lisa in the colours in which she was painted (instead of the yellow fever’d version), the Last Supper the way it was meant to be seen (before it was bombed and “restored” with equally ghastly results), and the Vitruvian man came to life and walked out of his painting. It was another childhood dream come true.
All in all, travels in Tuscany with my ten-year-old wildly surpassed my expectations. We managed to work around the weather (literally) and had a grand old time. Not setting a rigid itinerary payed off in spades, and with a bit of luck we had more fun together than I think either of us dared hope for. Da capo!
I was thinking about what I want to try to achieve in 2018 when I came across some good advice that really resonated with me. If I have failed to reach my goals in the past, it’s nearly always been because I haven’t made sure they were S.M.A.R.T. – Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Time-bound. So that shall be my credo for 2018: be smart about what tasks I set myself.
The fundamentals haven’t changed: I want to develop as a person, intellectually and physically, by testing my limits, working diligently and hard towards certain goals, and I want to travel to see the world and broaden my horizons, ensuring that by the end of the year I can look back and see progress and time well spent.
So: smart intellectual challenges – the ones I’ve worked on for a couple of years now still remain the same: I want to read more non-fiction, get better at piano, French, and chess. That’s not very specific, tho, so measuring progress will be key; I need targets I can quantify. One book per month. One new piece of music learnt every two months. One hundred French words per month. And as for chess… well, getting a rating of 1400 before the end of the year would be an easily measurable goal, if not necessarily that easily attainable. (I’m hovering around the 1300-mark as I’m writing this…). Plus I will note down every half hour spent on each activity, thus keeping a tally for accountability purposes.
So I’ve got all of those down to an A.R.T. Physical challenges are a little different, mainly because of the uncertainty I’m living with at the moment, so for 2018, I have decided to change tack a little. For my first challenge in January I will do a runstreak. Running every day will hopefully allow me to rebuild what was damaged in the accident in November. If that goes to plan, Paris marathon in April will be another milestone on the road to recovery, and if that goes well I’ll sign up for either another ultra marathon, or a full length Ironman. Or both.
Alas, there are too many unknowns at this stage for me to know if I will be able to run such distances again, but if I can, then a total of 1500k each of running and biking seem attainable goals overall. At least I know I can bike, so if running is out then I’m doubling that number for biking (and only watching Netflix while on the stationary bike will kill two birds with one stone – limiting my Netflix binging AND encouraging more time in the saddle!).
Weights have never been anything but a complement to my other workouts – now more so than ever as I try to strengthen my weak leg – but again, if I find I don’t recover my running capacity, I will focus more on getting strong/building muscle. Having always been skinny it would be interesting to see if I could actually muscle up.
As for swimming, I want to learn how to crawl properly! At present I can hardly do one length in the pool, and even though I managed the Ironman 70.3 anyway it would be nice to shave off five or ten minutes from that time, so learning how to crawl at least a kilometre is another challenge.
I will be working more in 2018 than I have for a decade, which will hopefully have the dual effect of giving me the opportunity to take on more interesting work on the job, and allowing me a bigger travel budget, as, happily, my children have said they want to travel more with me, so that will affect what trips I take this year.
2018 promises an Arab spring once more, as I’m going back to Morocco in January and have another trip to Egypt in February (with the kids). I have a week of holidays in March that I don’t know what to do with yet – downhill skiing would be nice, but again it’s dependent on me making a complete recovery. I want to go back to Spain and get a fully-fledged paragliding pilot’s licence. Hiking in Iceland would be lovely, the last part of Bergslagsleden still beckons, and I want to do at least one journey further afield – maybe watching the great sardine run in South Africa? Or taking the kids to the US? There’s no shortage of possibilities.
Other challenges: I wouldn’t mind doing more for the environment. This could involve installing geothermal heating in the house, keeping hens for eggs, joining a wind power collective or other changes. One thing I do know I want to try is becoming a vegetarian. At least for a month.
Not eating any sugar in any shape or form may be another challenge, and limiting my social media intake to half an hour per day wouldn’t be a bad idea either.
And of course I want to continue building my blog, writing about my experiences for the joy of writing, but also as a living testament to what I do with my life when I don’t have my kids. Hopefully my readership will continue to grow, but that is less important. If I can inspire only two people, that is more than enough for me.
Here’s to a S.M.A.R.T.er future!
P.S. All this goes out the window if I were to get my dream job, of course… 😄
It’s fair to say the year ended on a bum note. Things don’t always go as planned. But what of the rest of the year? Time to look back and reflect on what went according to plan, and what didn’t.
But for the butt injury, I might have had a sporting chance at reaching my distance goals for running and biking (averaging a marathon distance per week for each), but realistically that was too much. I did do that much on average when at home, but traveling got in the way, and that lowered total mileage significantly. Need to set more realistic goals, especially with next year’s runstreak requiring time every day.
I did my first ever triathlon – an Ironman 70.3, and the result was better than I had hoped. Still not sure whether a full-length one is worth the trouble, but maybe… saying I did half-something jars my soul!
I didn’t lift weights, swim or do yoga anywhere near as much as I had planned. I did some, but found it difficult to fit it all into my routine. Will have to find another balance to make it all work. And actually learn how to swim.
So much for fitness. I didn’t read as much non-fiction as I would have liked, but what I read was good. I’ve played a lot of chess and piano, and studied French, too, but I’m still not sure how to measure progress here. I know I am progressing, but how to tell? The system of dividing up the day into half hours to ensure that things get done works, at least, so I will continue doing that. And only watching Netflix when I’m on the stationary bike will kill two birds with one stone…!
Travels and challenges, then? I certainly travelled a lot, and two themes emerged: island hopping around Africa, covering Pemba, Mallorca, and Madeira (following on from Malta), and hiking in the alps in France, Bavaria and Sweden (ok, so we don’t have alps, but parts of Bergslagsleden were really hilly!). Add to that the two(!) trips to Andalusia – once to see Alhambra, and once to learn how to paraglide – and a nice long weekend in Paris, and you have what I would deem a pretty good year of wanders. More of that, please.
Lest I forget, the year has brought some wonderful new people into my life, as eclectic a bunch of characters as one can hope for: an Argentinian telenovela starlet in Tanzania, a Scottish philosopher in Spain, my own personal stalker, a Phillipina philanthropist, a Swedish ultrarunner in Amsterdam… in fact, if I were to write a book about them all it would probably seem outlandish, which brings me to my last point: this blog.
I’ve continued to write throughout the year, about everything and anything, from great tits to particle accelerators, and my readership is steadily increasing (visitors up 25% (to 2800+) and views up 50% (to 5500+) at the time of writing), something for which I’m immensely grateful! It’s humbling to foist your words on people and have them not only actually read them but also come back for more. So thank you, dear reader. I hope you have enjoyed the ride this far.
Home from the hills. Après les alps, le deluge. Or so it feels. Coming-home blues is a real thing, as hard a come-down as anything ever sung of in the Mississippi river delta.
To alleviate my ills, I turn to friend Florian, a man so well-travelled he makes Magellan look like a kid playing with his toy boat in a tub. His journeys are so many and far-reaching it’s as if Marco Polo popped out for a quart of milk at the corner shop by comparison. He suggests the Haute Fagne, or High Moor, as a best place in Belgium for a day trip, and who am to disagree?
Located in the easternmost part of Belgium, straddling the border to Germany, it’s a peculiar highland, more akin to the Scottish peat bogs than anything else. A big bog to take my mind off things? Well, I’ll give it a try. Maybe seeking out the antithesis to what you miss is the way to go? And so off I, well, go. I don’t pack hiking gear, figuring I can run the 30k trail F suggests. Famous last words…
When I get there, looking out across the moor, the landscape looks like something out of a post-apocalyptic dystopia: nothing but a few stunted shrubs and dead trees. The nuclear heat of the day does nothing to detract from this illusion. Once out there, running along the duckboards, it’s a different matter. The marshland is home to hundreds of plants, mainly grasses and flowers, and it’s quite pretty in a low key way.
There isn’t much time to look out across the landscape, however. The duckboards prove to be quite difficult to run on, in spite of being perfectly dry. The bog swallows everything eventually, but since it isn’t happening equally fast everywhere, this means one part may be perfectly stable, and the next one might tip to the side as you step on it, bounce, or simply break. It makes for a rollercoaster run.
This feature of the bog landscape is of course the main reason it has been a borderland for as long as can be remembered. The oldest border markers found here date back to the 7th century, and several imposing stone markers still show where the borderline between Prussia and Belgium once ran. Much like marshlands elsewhere, they were simply too difficult to traverse, and of too little economic interest for countries to fight for.
Unfortunately, Belgian budgetary authorities share this view. Many paths through the moors are being abandoned, and only a few kept open – the others are allowed to sink into the boggy ground and disappear. I run along the main route towards Germany, and after only four kilometres I am suddenly off the beaten path. No longer able to run, I walk along a brook. It’s hard going, but very pretty, reminiscent of Swedish forests, with ferns and firs growing high, and not a living soul around. Pieces of abandoned duckboards appear intermittently, but it’s clear that not many people come here any more.
Like a Zorn painting. Only one thing missing…
I have long since left Florian’s suggested route behind, and decide to turn around before I walk back into Germany, and there, suddenly, I’m no longer alone. A photographer and his two nude models are hard at work under a tree!
It’s difficult to know what to do in certain situations. Do you say “hi”? Stop and admire an artist’s work? I briefly consider asking if they need another model, but I figure this blog has seen enough of me in a state of undress recently, and besides, the couple are twenty years and twenty kilos each past attractive. I get back to running instead.
I run back through ferns and grasses and dead trees, the ground muddy and slippery and mostly hidden by the undergrowth. It’s a hard slog, the ground either sucking at my shoes or sliding away and a couple of times I come close to wiping out. After a painful misstep and a near face plant, I slow down to a walk again, but once back on the duckboards I force myself to run once more – mainly to get out of the sun.
After two hours I’m back where I started, at the one inn on the one road leading across the moors. The Baraque Michel (or the Obama Inn, as I like to think of it) has been a beacon to weary wanderers for well over two hundred years, and it’s easy to see why the family-run establishment is doing brisk business: my feet are wet and hurt, my shins and calves will require at least two showers to just be dirty again, my clothes are soaked through with sweat – I can’t bring myself to leave.
I’ve done about half the suggested route, but I’m quite done. Properly bogged down by Belgium.
The Bavarian Alps. The most German setting imaginable. Marvellous mountains, nestling green valleys with villages taken straight out of Grimm fairy tales. Birthplace of the grimmest of ideologies.
I’ve come here for a week of peaceful hiking with my friends Florian and Iris. It doesn’t quite turn out that way.
We come by train from Munich (where a local beer hall made our layover as enjoyable as can be), through pleasant rolling hills, and arrive in Oberstdorf (lit. “The highest village”) in sunny, warm weather. That’s a nice surprise in itself, since the forecast is promising thunderstorms and rain for most of the week.
Florian suggests a “light” hike for the first day, climbing the nearest alp, Rubihorn. Coming in at 1,950m high, it’s no more than a 500-metre climb from the first lift station, but the sun is out in force, and by the time I reach the summit I’m wobbly-legged and woozy from the effort. That’s nothing compared to F and I, however. They arrive wheezing and gasping for air. But once heart rates have come down to something resembling normal we have a splendid 360 degree view for our efforts. We are at the edge of the alps, so to one side are the lowlands, and on the other there are hundreds of peaks as far as the eye can see.
What draws the eye more than anything, however, is the incredibly blue waters of the lake hidden right underneath us, shimmering in the heat like a Fata Morgana. Declining the kind offer of summit schnapps from a friendly local, we begin to make our way down a slippery slope towards it. When we finally reach its shores I’m so hot that the lure of the cristalline water takes over, and I join the friendly local and his buddies going in for the coldest dip of my life.
Afterwards I will read up on it and learn that the lake is source-fed from below and therefore maintains a steady – low – temperature all year around (never glazing over in winter), but getting out of the water Iris sums up the experience rather succinctly: “I see it was this cold”, she says, grinning, showing a most unflattering distance between thumb and index finger. Suffice to say when the offer was made anew, I gratefully accepted the (plummet) schnapps this time around.
Playa del Rubihorn
The next day we make for Fellhorngrad and a ridge walk that would have been ideal as a first day introduction to the area. Straddling the border between Germany and Austria, it’s a pleasant enough hike, but too crowded and pedestrianised for my taste. The best that can be said for it is that it offers splendid views into the Austrian valley where we will be exploring next day.
The vale is effectively an Austrian enclave in Germany, because there is only one real road into the valley and it arrives there from Bavaria, which must have made everyday life for the inhabitants rather cumbersome back in the day of border controls. More importantly (to us) it’s also home to one of the more impressive gorges in Europe, the Breitachklamm. And so our third day sees us going to Austria.
Getting off the bus well above the Klamm (“pinch”) itself, we follow the Breitach downriver in glorious sunshine along a very pretty road that would have been a joy to run. I say as much to my hiking friends, forgetting the adage that you should be careful what you wish for. You see, after an hour or so of hiking Florian discovers that he has left his outrageously expensive camera hanging on a bench where we took a break. It’s a good kilometre back up the road, so I offer to run and get it before someone else does.
Unfortunately someone else already has, and so I continue running back to the last lodge we passed, yet another kilometre upriver. When I finally arrive I’m drenched in sweat, but the camera is there, handed in by the finder (hikers are nice people!), and so all that remains is for me to race back to my friends. By the time I get back after this unexpected detour I’m once more so over-heated that I just tear my clothes off and let the river cool me down, with unexpectedly homoerotic / rubberducky results, as captured by my gleeful friends.
When I post a pic of me on FB/when I’m tagged in one.
The Klamm itself is gorge-eous. The valley narrows, steep walls looming above us, waterfalls forcing their way ever deeper into the rock beneath us, as we clamber along walkways hewn into the cliff-face or precariously hanging on to the outside of the bare rock. Like a cut into the flesh of Mother Earth, the gorge is so deep that some of it hasn’t seen the sun for two million years. The debris left behind by winter floods bear witness to the brute force of the water: entire trees are lodged between the walls in places, and markers show the water levels sometimes reached, metres above our heads. It’s awe-inspiring.
Since Florian is leaving in the afternoon to visit a friend, Iris and I decide to try something both of us have been itching to do for a long time: tandem paragliding. We’ve signed up to do their longest flight, using the thermals to stay up in the air for up to forty minutes. Unfortunately, the flight school is incredibly badly organised, with numerous reschedulings and one pilot not showing up until an hour and a half too late, by which time it’s so late in the afternoon that the thermals are gone. This in turn means our flight is less than half the length promised, but for all that it’s an incredible experience!
We run off the top of the Nebelhorn and take flight as easy as anything, then go down the valley close to the forest-clad sides, gliding effortlessly and smoothly through the air. It’s such a high I’m just grinning and laughing the whole time. Iris, meanwhile, is screaming at the top of her lungs – something she has forewarned both me and her pilot is a sign of joy. She soon has cause to scream for other reasons, though, because then they start showing off their skills, making us swing around our axes, spinning around in half loops in the best roller-coaster tradition. It’s fantastically good fun, if quite disorienting.
Iris earning her new nickname, with me in the background.
Before we land I’m given the reigns and told to steer towards the village church, which I do as best I can, before finally we come down soft as can be on a field, grinning from ear to ear from the adrenaline high, and me at least more convinced than ever that this is something so want to learn for myself! The rest of the evening is spent in a Biergarten, mulling over the minutest of details, riding the air waves over and over again.
Next day Florian is back, but the worse for wear from last night’s birthday do, so Iris and I ride the Bergbahn to the top of the Nebelhorn on our own. We set out along the ridge together before parting ways, with me attempting the Entchenkopf alone.
It’s sits across from the Rubihorn, but is 300 metres higher, and significantly more difficult going, with several passages being senkrecht climbing. I had been wanting to try the via ferrata, the climbing paths that you traverse with guides and equipment, but nae more. This is worse by far. With no back-up or climbing gear, the ground slippery from last night’s rain, and drops of anything between ten and fifty metres onto sheer rock, any mistake would be my last. It’s no coincidence Todesangst is a German word, I think.
What do we say to Death? Not today.
When I finally reach the summit, my legs are shaking from fear-induced adrenaline, and I don’t dare stand up for quite some time. But fear is good. Fear – if harnessed – makes you more alive, more focused. As I sit there, taking in the never-ending views, the air as clean as can be, I feel like a million bucks.
And then the moment is over, and I slide down the other side of the mountain towards the Hütte where Iris awaits my return, and the best Kaiserschmarren pancakes known to man.
That was Iris’s last day, so next day Florian and I set out on our own to do the Sonnenköpfe, three lower peaks that form the continuation of the Entchenkopf. They looked more like rolling hills from the summit the day before, but as we hike them they turn out to be quite formidable, too, and it’s only the knowledge that there will be even more of the same Kaiserschmarren that spurs us on til the end.
Next we want to try the stony Gottesacker plateau (lit. “God’s plowing field”), but when we get there the lift is under repair, and faced with the prospect of an additional 1,000 vertical metres in full sun – the weather forecast having turned out to be quite wrong yet again – we opt for an alternative route through a Naturschutzgebiet up to another lodge, seated on the Austrian-German border, and down the other side. It turns out to be Florian’s favourite walk of the entire week, but I can’t help feeling a bit wistful about having missed the plateau, especially since it looks just like a sleeping dragon from below…
Climb every mountain!
The very last day the weather forecast is finally correct, and the rain is pouring down. F can’t be bothered to leave the Gasthaus, but I go for a quick run and then a solo hike in the southernmost valley in all of Germany. It’s wet and misty and moist and slippery, but I don’t mind. The low-hanging mist lends the nature here a mystical aura of veiled beauty, and besides it’s reminiscent of the hikes of my youth, when – as I remember it – the alps were always clad in clouds.
And so my travels with Sonnenkopf and Nebelhorn (lit. “Sunny head” and “Fog horn”) are at an end. The lovely Martin and Andrea, who run the Gasthaus Birkenhof where we have been staying, hug and kiss us goodbye and drive us to the railway station, and then all that remains is one more visit to a beer hall in Munich (with succulent Schweinshaxe and Augustiner beer), before finally flying home.
…and it’s time to summarise what’s happened this far 2017. As has been the case these last couple of years, I set myself certain tasks in January, to be completed over the next twelve months, and at the halfway mark it makes sense to take stock, to see what has gone according to plan, and what hasn’t.
Looking back, it’s quite a lot crammed into six months, so I’m pleased with that.
I’ve managed to work out quite a lot (unsurprisingly, what with the races) but not as much as I had set out to do in total – weeks of hiking and skiing and diving have prevented me from reaching the goal of a marathon run and biked every week, and I haven’t done much yoga either. But then there’s still six months left to remedy that.
Have I developed my French, my piano and chess playing, and done more non-fiction reading? I certainly got off to a good start, doing thirty minutes per day of each, but a good friend giving me a Netflix password threw a big spanner in that particular structure. I haven’t completely derailed, but there have been leafs on the tracks, shall we say.
As for taking on new tasks at work, I have, happily. And not least because of this very blog, in fact. Turns out people at work read it and thought I might do good in Internal Communications, so from now on I will spend one day per week as a roving reporter, highlighting goings-on in my work place. Very happy about that.
So what’s next? I will try to make up for lost time in those areas where I haven’t quite managed to reach my targets, obviously.
I’ve still got the mountain ultra X-trail coming up in the beginning of August, and ten days of hiking the Bavarian alps hot on the heels of that. After those ten days I don’t really have any plans for the rest of the year. An acquaintance has invited me to Bilbao, and another to Nepal, so those things might happen. Or not. Readers should feel free to make suggestions.
I still want to try and beat my marathon record before the end of the year – I’ve improved significantly on my personal best for shorter distances, but whether that will translate into a new marathon PB remains to be seen. Time to start looking for a fast race, in any event.
At work I have made a promise to attempt to add Danish to my official language combination, so that should keep me busy for quite some time (maybe there are Danish movies on Netflix?!), and the new job will hopefully continue to present new challenges, as well.
All in all I feel quietly confident that the second half of this journey will be as filled to the brim as the first half was. Come fly with me!
The second half of my month of eating paleo looked like it might be considerably harder than the first. Eating nothing but what our most distant ancestors might have eaten works fine when not exerting oneself utterly, but as my triathlon draws closer that’s not an option. Plus I would be going hiking for five days with my brother, and goodness knows how my body would react to that, paleo or no. This is what happened:
Day 16: 10k bike / 2k swim brick-session (i.e. one follows immediately upon the other). No problem.
Day 17: 18k bike, 8k run, 6k run, all with hour-long pauses in between, and 28C temperatures. By the end of the day I’m exhausted, but somehow I don’t think the diet is to blame. I cheat a little afterwards, drinking half a litre of pure apple juice – it tastes like the nectar of gods!
Day 19: I discover that smoked trout and boiled eggs make a good breakfast, but leaves your mouth smelling like fart. Learn something new every day.
Day 20: New PB on 5k. Wonky reading on the Garmin tho, so won’t count it, but still: clearly paleo isn’t hurting more explosive efforts either.
Day 21: Prepared massive batch of protein cakes to bring on next week’s hike. Tweaked the recipe to include maple syrup and chocolate. All caveman kosher. Biggest problem will be not eating them before actually on the trail…!
Day 23: Hiking all day. 18k in hard terrain in Tiveden. Protein cakes yummy. Freeze-dried food better than expected. Energy levels stable and high.
Day 24: Hiked 20k. Ate big plate of macaroni and cheese in the evening and literally passed out for half an hour afterwards. Just laid down on the ground and fell asleep. Felt hung over on carbs the rest of the evening. Disgusted.
Day 25: Hiked 23k. In the evening an old friend met up with us, and served us cold beers and Brie sandwiches. Couldn’t say no out of politeness. Didn’t want to, either. Paleo regime officially toppled, then. Will mount a counterattack. Tomorrow.
Day 26: Got up at 0400. Hiked 32k over ten hours. Gratefully accepted a beer in the evening from kind strangers, but otherwise toed the line.
Day 27: Last day of hiking. Family reunion. Lots and lots of food. Decided to forgo paleo for the evening.
Day 28: Back in Belgium. Rest day.
Day 29: Rest day.
Day 30: Went running for the first time in over a week; shaved another sec off my PB on 5k. Celebrated daughter’s birthday with huge, distinctly non-paleo cake.
Day 31: 10k bike (PB), 8k run, 7k run. Weighed in: 77.2kg.
So, strictly speaking I stuck with the diet 100% for three weeks. After that circumstances conspired to make things more difficult, as I had predicted. That’s never an excuse tho; I chose to give it up for the sake of convenience.
But that doesn’t change the fact that I was able to work out as hard as I ever have in my life during those three weeks, and it felt great. I lost five kilos during May, without losing any muscle, so it seems the theory holds water – your body will switch to burning body fat if carb intake is significantly reduced, and do so without lowering your performance levels, over either short or long distances.
It will be interesting to see what happens at the Ironman triathlon in three weeks – that will be the real litmus test. I will be writing about that experience too, of course. One thing’s for sure: I’ll be continuing on this prehistoric path.
After Pemba and Mallorca, my island-hopping circumnavigation of Africa has taken me to Madeira, off the northwestern coast of the continent. Unlike no man, Madeira is an island, but also the name of the entire archipelago, somewhat confusingly.
Known as the Isles of the Blessed to the Ancient Romans (although no one knows who the blessed in question were), Madeira has been part of Portugal for most of the last 500 years, but geographically speaking it is a part of Africa – and geographically this is probably the most dramatic landscape I’ve ever seen; the volcanic mountains rise up steeply everywhere, and verdantly lush jungle covers every square metre not claimed by man. This is Sardinia on steroids, a place where Kong might feel at home.
Funchal, the main city, is my base. It rises up the mountainsides in a natural amphitheatre facing out towards the sea. This means the whole town is terraced, with houses literally being built on top of one another – a car parked on the roof of a house, or a house where the entrance is on the topmost floor because it’s perched on an outcrop far below; these are common sights – and traversing it is calf-killing business.
On my first day I want to see the Monte palace gardens, which lie at the top of the town. There’s a funicular that takes people up there, but the asking price is staggeringly high (much like the gardens) so I make my way on foot from downtown. Three kilometres of hiking and over half a vertical kilometre later, I arrive at the gates, legs shaking and dripping with perspiration, questioning my sanity.
The gardens – first created by a British consul – were beautiful and well worth it, however, with bulbous clouds of bougainvilleas spilling out over the paths, palm trees and jacarandas and tulip trees and African lilies and Austin roses and bottlebrush flowers and endless arrays of other plants. Azaleas the size of trees, ferns taller than I am, and water features everywhere. It was a sight to behold, once my breathing and heartbeat were back to normal.
There is a lovely little church next to the gardens, where the last Austro-Hungarian emperor rests (having lived the last few months of his life in exile here after he lost his empire), and his grave was filled with ribbons bearing greetings like “our last emperor” in German and Czech. Some people never learn.
The only other claim to fame for the church (beyond having the best views and the sweatiest congregation of all time) ought to be its altarpiece, which consisted of a printed picture of a painting of Jesus with the words “Jesus, eu confio em Vós” printed in Times New Roman (italics) on it. Why anyone thought this a good idea, I don’t know. It looked like the religious equivalent of the first Christmas card you ever DIY’d online. A far cry from the faux perspective cupola in Gozo, it was.
Pro-empire statements to the left, pro-EU statements to the right…
Below the church are the famous wicker toboggans that tourists are ferried down the mountain in by surprisingly beer-bellied Portugeezers wearing white outfits and jaunty straw hats, nattering away while the tourists shriek with delight. The asphalt is worn silky smooth by their passage. It looks fun, but the prices are as steep as the roads, so having recovered somewhat, I walked back down again.
This was a fitting overture to the main reason for my coming to Madeira. I want to hike the levadas. Levadas are ingenious works of engineering that the Portuguese set about creating immediately upon discovering the island (It was known to the Romans but subsequently lost to history, before Portuguese seafarers “rediscovered” it in 1419, and never mind that it was inhabited by runaway slaves and others when they did.). For five hundred years they have expanded this network of aqueducts hewn out of the cliff-face to channel fresh water from natural sources in the centre of the island out towards more habitable areas.
Today, they make for perfect hiking trails, taking wanderers straight into the laurissilva forests that cover much of the centre of the island – it is literally a walk in prehistoric environs, as this type of laurel trees (many of them a thousand years old) covered large swathes of Europe tens of thousands of years ago, but only continue to exist here nowadays due to the island’s unique climate.
And so I find a company that takes small groups of people into the mountains to hike the most scenic routes. I had initially planned on bringing my tent and thru-hiking the island from one end to the other, but that didn’t seem possible, so here I am, doing the light version, coming home to a bed and breakfast every night instead of camping out.
First off is Levada do Rei, the king’s levada, or the king of levadas, I’m not sure which – my Portuguese being somewhat nonexistent. The hiking is easy as can be, but it’s not for the faint of heart. More often than not there is a ledge no more than fifty centimetres wide between the levadas and a drop-off of dizzying height. Fifty or even a hundred metres below, the roar of the river can be heard, and one false move will send you tumbling. It’s a puckering thought, and the last to go through the mind of many a slave (before the rest of them did) – as they were often forced to work on these projects (a fact that guidebooks find convenient to gloss over).
Trail with built-in shower.
The levada goes six kilometres inland, through the most dramatically inhospitable terrain imaginable – once even inside a waterfall – to finally end in a gully where every leaf and frond is dripping water into the stream. Having left the group far, far behind, I explore the area, have my lunch in a spot that looks like it’s straight out of the Jurassic, and a bit of a rest before setting out again. I finally reencounter them ten minutes away from the gully. Possibly this group hiking thing isn’t for me…
On the way back, the guide drops me five hundred metres from my hotel. Whether it’s punishment for having strayed from the group, or just bad service, I don’t know.
The next day, the pickup is fifty minutes late due to no-shows, and the guide (another one) is in an understandably foul mood. I try to not let it affect me, but he is frankly rude, repeating “I’m sorry but it’s not my fault”, when no one has claimed as much. The drive across the island is breathtaking, climbing up these alp-like jungle-clad mountains that dwarf everything humans can ever hope to create.
We reach today’s levada, and I go on ahead again, leaving the group behind, enjoying the solitude and the different fauna of these higher altitudes. Here, it’s tree heathers and laurels forming a roof over the path, ferns are back to normal size, but blueberry bushes tower above me, and the odd wild geranium brightens the shade, while little trout swim in the levada by my side. It’s lovely.
I reach the halfway point of the “four hour” trail in under an hour, and spend a pleasant while by a beautiful waterfall and rock pool reminiscent of the ones I plunged into in Switzerland when canyoning, sharing my lunch with a chaffinch that happily takes pieces of cheese from my fingers.
Who do you finch took the picture…?
By the time I’m done, the others have arrived, but trundling back the same way doesn’t appeal to me, and after some talking to the guide he grudgingly gives me leave to take a circular path. This is proper hiking – all roots and rocks, not strolling along a concrete sidewalk – and I nearly slip a couple of times, but in the end I’m back by the minibus well before the rest of the group.
By this time the guide’s temperament and the false marketing combined have most of the hikers grumbling, so he takes us on an extra loop of a kilometre through an area destroyed by forest fire last year. It’s difficult to know how to react: on the one hand he is trying to make good on the company’s overblown promise, on the other hand it’s not like we’re just looking to walk any old where just for the sake of it. And he’s clearly pissed off, so that even if he is genuinely looking to do something for us, no one feels inclined to take him up on his offer.
In the end we call it a day, and I say nothing, but a couple of exchanged e-mails later I’m looking at a third day at a third of the original asking price. Seems fair.
Next day couldn’t have been more different: the pickup is on the dot, the guide Duarte is a real Mensch who has me pegged in seconds. “You go on your own, you fast”. And so I do. We go into the mountains proper, to hike between the two highest peaks on the island, Pico do Areeiro and Pico Ruivo, both over 1,800 metres. The path used to take in a third peak, but it’s been closed to hikers since a rockslide obliterated a stretch of it – a stark reminder that geological time is now.
It’s an old path that locals on the north side of the island used to ferry their wares to the south side market place, however unlikely that sounds. Nowadays at least it’s paved, and a good thing too, as the ever-present tufa pebbles make for easy slipping.
It’s hard going but incredibly beautiful: the path snakes its way up and down the sides of mountains, balancing on razor edge crests and burrowing through sheer rock. The fauna here consists of heather trees and broom, and the ground is covered by alpines such as indigenous orchids, buttercups, saxifrage and sedums, with oversized bumblebees brumming about. It’s overwhelming in its splendour.
What’s more, it is all to be a part of the Madeira Island Ultra Trail tomorrow, so every so often there are waymarkers attached to the scant protective wires. I doff my sweaty cap in the direction of the runners: the race is 115 kilometres across the island, and I would not want to try to run many of the metres I cover here today…! (I did 15k today, with 1k elevation loss and 1k ditto gain. The X-trail is four times as much. Lord knows what the MIUT equivalent is!)
I predictably arrive long before the rest of our party, so when they do show, Duarte simply tells me to go on for another hour and then meet them back at the Pico. I happily do, taking in the utter isolation that is the Village of the Nuns way below in the next valley. It’s hard to imagine a more secluded place, and it looks quite magical, nested in between the mountains, but alas, the clouds come in and cover the nuns (and everything else) from my prying eyes, which I take as a signal to turn around and go find my posse, incredibly pleased with my day.
I spoke more to Duarte on the way back, as he was understandably interested in the previous day’s debacle, but he also tipped me off about a longer trek that he recommended I do, even going so far as to find me the right bus to take, so my last day will be spent hiking properly on my own, just as I had originally envisaged.
And so my last morning sees me boarding a local bus that will take me up the Ribeira Brava valley (the same one that blew me away two days ago). It takes its time getting there, but I enjoy every minute of the two hour drive, moving at a stately place down the coast, the driver navigating hairpin bends while I gaze in amazement at the landscape and all the gardens.
The bus stops twice for ten-minute breaks – once to give passengers a chance to take a look at Cabo Girão, a glass-bottomed walkway over a cliff that drops 580m straight down into the ocean, and once, at eleven o’clock sharp, for coffee. My father would have approved – of the latter.
When the driver drops me off, it’s in a place that almost defies description. At 1,500m, its high above the valley floor, offering breathtaking views, but unlike previous hikes, I move along this path in glorious solitude. For the first hour I encounter no one at all. Lizards rustling in the undergrowth, birdsong and the burbling brooks are the only sounds I hear as I walk through the dappled shade of a eucalyptus forest, the warm aroma of the trees’ esoteric oils filling my every breath. Truly, this is forest bathing at its finest.
Jump in at the deep end!
By noon, just as the trail starts ascending, I come upon my first runner. He seems in good shape, considering he’s been running for twelve hours by now, but he’s only done some 50 kilometres, and yesterday’s trail is still ahead of him. We talk a little, and I encourage him in his efforts, offering a few choice tips – I am the author of Seven Tips for a Painful Marathon and a successful ultra marathon runner myself, after all! ?
After that, I overtake more and more runners as I make my way up to Pico Grande, and then steeply down the next valley to the village of Curral das Freiras.
See the people on the trail?
I make it to the village and down two cold beers in quick succession at the local bar (at the very fair price of 1€ per bottle), thankful that I haven’t traversed 65km, nor have 45 left to go. There’s only one problem: the only bus back to Funchal isn’t leaving for another two hours.
I arrived just before the halfway break-off point of the race – any runner who hasn’t made it there by 15:30 isn’t allowed to continue – and this proves to be a stroke of luck for me, as the volunteers begin to pack up and get ready to leave. I start talking to a group of five women all in MIUT sweaters, and they offer me a lift back to Funchal.
I would have been super happy with any ride, but the women turn out to be sweet, chatty and very interesting (children of emigrants to South Africa and Venezuela who have returned to their “homeland”). I simply couldn’t have asked for a better end to my holiday here.
We’re on a mountain top made out of lava rock so perforated and serrated its like a giant cheese grater, and we the cheese.
The path is nowhere to be seen. Everywhere I look there are steep ravines blocking our way down, and there are storm clouds drawing ever closer. If this isn’t being between a rock and a hard place I don’t know what is.
I blame the effing elephant.
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To explain how this happened, we must go back a couple of days, to when we first arrived to Sardinia. The third largest island in the Mediterranean, yet so often overlooked, Sardinia, unlike Corsica to the north, has neither famous sons nor Astérix albums to its name. Like Corsica, it has been invaded over and over again over the millennia, and now it’s our turn.
My good friend Lesli is celebrating her birthday this week, which is as good an excuse as any to go on an adventure, and we decided Sardinia had what it took. We meet up in Cagliari, the regional capital in the south, and drive up the east coast, which is largely still wild and unexploited.
Our destiny is the village of Lotzarai, and the Lemon House, a bed and breakfast that has made its name among hikers, bikers and climbers as an excellent base camp for all kind of excursions. It doesn’t disappoint. We arrive late at night, but Riky, the gentle giant that runs the place, has been waiting up, and has us installed in no time, and even insists on having a midnight drink with us to celebrate our arrival.
Next morning he’s up cooking breakfast for a long table full of adventurers; there’s the British triathletes, the Swiss thruhikers, the Italian climbers, and us. Someone remarks upon the respective amulets we carry around our necks – me a Thorshammer, Lesli a Ganesha, the Indian elephant god – and I make fun of hers, saying how a pachyderm that’s in charge of removing obstacles but sometimes also places them in your path isn’t really worth its mettle. Little did I know…
Soon we’re setting out northwards along the coast on our first hike. The morning hours are exquisite, as the path hugs the coastline on its way to Pedra Longa, a natural rock outcrop, shaped like a pyramid one hundred and fifty metres high. It looms in the distance, marking the mouth of the ravine we’re planning to hike up. The sun shines down upon macchia made up of cistus shrubs and myrtle trees, tufts of thyme and euphorbia, with occasional eucalyptus and olive trees – all making for an impossibly green landscape that offsets the turquoise and sapphire waters of the Mediterranean. Lizards dart across the ocre ground like metallic blue arrows, and here and there are goats and even wild pigs*. It’s a stroll in Arcadia.
Et In Arcadia Ego.
Once past Pedra Longa we continue upwards towards the mouth of the gorge. It’s awe inspiring, like something out of Yellowstone plonked down next to the ocean, and suddenly the path is much more difficult to discern. We clamber up and down the ravine mouth, following every likely-looking goat trail and rockfall in an attempt to find the path again, knowing that it must be there yet infuriatingly failing to recover it. Brambles and spinablanca shred our legs and arms, tear at our clothes, and sliding gravel threatens to turn the slightest misstep into a lethal slide to the bottom of the gully.
In the end, after nearly two hours of searching, Lesli – who knows her Hindu gods – suggest that we give up and go back to Pedra Longa to cool off in the Mediterranean. So Ganesha has his way, and we give up on the hiking for the day to go skinny-dipping instead.
Submerging our scraped and shredded bodies into the sea stings a little, but it sure beats spending the night in a goat-infested grotto lost in the macchia. Maybe the elephant god knows something we don’t?
The second day we take the rental car over winding mountain roads up the coast to Cala Gonone. It’s over an hour’s drive, but well worth it, as from here we rent kayaks and go down the coast along a particularly scenic stretch of the natural reserve, past caves that conjure up the adventures of Tom Sawyer or the Count de Montechristo.
No elephant here. Or is there?
It’s exciting and peaceful in equal measure, if very hot as the sun shines bright. Fortunately the breeze is constantly in our faces – but after four hours that’s too much of a good thing, as well; my eyes are screwed shut from too much light, salt and wind, and smarting as if they too had been lashed by thorns yesterday.
Alas, Lesli doesn’t drive stick shift, so I have to get us home more or less blindly, traversing the winding roads at a snail’s pace, stopping every kilometre or so to bathe my eyes in what little water we have left to cajole them into staying open just a little bit longer.
It’s a desperately dangerous thing to do, but we have no choice. We stop in one lay-by to see if Lesli might manage to drive – she really, really can’t – and in another to see if we might convince the people in the car parked there to help us out. Turns out they weren’t admiring the view, as we thought, and it’s a testament to my desperation that I briefly consider asking the female passenger to give us a hand once she’s done giving the driver head. I don’t. Instead I dab my eyes with a soaked rag for what feels like the hundredth time, and drive on, cross eyed and crying copiously. Goodness knows what the couple must have thought we were up to.
We make it back in just under three hours.
Day three dawns, and after twelve hours in total darkness and plenty of saline solution my eyes have recovered enough that we can venture out again. Riky tells us that the path we searched for in vain on day one is in fact located on a ledge that looks impossibly thin from down at Piedra Longa. We decide to try to hike up the gorge again, and drive there to shorten the hike. Good thing, too, because the trail is so steep in places that we’re climbing rather than hiking it. The term “drop dead gorge-ous” applies here, as it is quite possibly the most beautiful nature I’ve ever seen, but also very unforgiving. The ledge is no more than a metre or two wide in places, and there’s nothing twixt us and a terminal drop.
The ledge. Note Pedra Longa (centre or the picture) for perspective.
We do get all the way to the top of the ravine without misadventures, and it seems as if Ganesha is finally cutting us some slack, but then we set out to the summit of Punta Giradili, the higher one of the two promontories enclosing the gorge, and that’s where it almost goes badly wrong. It’s a difficult hike, as the rock is pure lava, all sharp edges and treacherous holes, and the only way to navigate is by following cairns marking the path in amongst the undergrowth. That’s all well and fine as long as we’re headed upwards, as the little piles of rocks can be seen against the evergreens behind and above them, but coming back down is a different matter. Suddenly the cairns look no different from the million other stones, and before long we are lost.
By now we’ve been out for five hours and fatigue is setting in. One false move and one or both of us could be badly hurt and/or stuck in the cheese grater stones. What’s worse, everywhere looks the same, and we have no way of navigating. Going in a straight line is out of the question, as the dense macchia turns the whole flat summit into a giant labyrinth, and everywhere we look there are steep ravines barring our way, even if we did know where we were going. On top of that, dark, pregnant clouds begin to fill the sky, and there will be no cover to be had if the autumn rains decide to start.
The summit of all fears.
It’s a desperate moment, and I genuinely don’t know what to do. Lesli suggests going further inland in the hopes of circumventing the ravines, and I’m just about to give in to this when I recall that my trusty GPS-watch has a mapping function, which when switched on allows you to retrace your steps. In a manner of minutes we are back on the trail, happy to turn our backs on the wretched mountain. Garmin 1 – Ganesha 0.
The next day we decide we won’t hike at all. Instead we rent mountain bikes and load into the rental car. We drive up even smaller roads than before, deep into the mountains, and I’m having a blast, as these roads remind me of the forest roads my father taught me to drive on. It’s all gravel and hairpin bends of a kind I’ve only ever driven on in computer games, and I only wish I had a car better suited to the terrain.
Then we hop on the bikes and start the decent down towards the sea. Alas, Ganesha doesn’t give up. Three, four kilometres into the ride, my chain snaps clean off, and there’s no tool in the tool kit to repair it. Nothing to do but hike the whole damned uphill slog, pushing the bike, then get in the car and drive all the way back down again to have it fixed.
Once that’s done we decide not to push our luck, but to go for another Cala (sandy cove). Alas, poor map reading leads us astray, and we get on our bikes only to alight upon a gorge that is off limits to bikers. Instead we walk the rest of the way – Lesli wearing slippery bike cleats on a path made up mainly by shale – and finally arrive at the sea after another gruelling hike. The Truncated One might have had a point in getting us here, because it’s another spot of natural perfection, but on a no hiking, biking day, we managed to do a grand total of twenty minutes of biking and several hours’ worth of hiking, so we weren’t exactly over the moon.
There seemed to be nothing for it. We kept the bikes for another day, and set off yet again into the wilderness, and this time – on our last day – we seemed to be getting it right, or maybe I had just atoned for my hubris vis-a-vis Ganesha?
We rode our bikes down a remote gulch of stunning natural beauty down to Cala Sisine, a gorgeous pebble beach in the middle of nowhere. We had it all to ourselves, and I would wish everyone could experience that feeling at least once in their lives – surrounded by sparkling clear turquoise water, deep blue skies, steep cliffs clad in green, and nothing but the wind and the sun on your skin. Heaven.
Eden, a.k.a. Cala Sisine
It lasted all of an hour. Then a taxi boat came and dislodged a horde of tourists, bringing dogs and cigarettes and loudspeakers. It was time to go home.
In the end we didn’t get to go rock climbing, as Sardinia doesn’t have any licensed guides (they have to have ice climbing experience – not something easily gained in Sardinia), and we didn’t have time to go diving, but all in all it was a fantastic holiday, all the better for the mishaps and hiccups that occurred along the way (especially true once we decided (mis)adventure points could be converted into gelato points!). Ganesha came through in spades – even Thor came out and sent us off with the mightiest thunderstorm I have ever experienced on the night before we left – so gods willing I will be back to Sardinia for more of the same before long.
______
* I’d tell you about the wild pigs, but I don’t want to boar you. Things take on such a littoral meaning along the coast.
I figured if I managed to pull off running Ultravasan I would be deserving of some creative rest and recreation. And where could be more restful and restorative than Switzerland? A stay in a Kurhaus hotel in a country that has known peace for 700 years must be the most calm and peaceful experience imaginable, right?
Wrong.
For sure, if you wanted to, hanging out in the World’s Most Scenic Bank Vault ™ could be as coma-inducingly quiet and laid-back a time as you ever had, but since I’m here with my good friend Lauren, chances of that happening are slim to nonexistent.
Canyoning
We start off with canyoning early Saturday morning. For me, this comes as close to outdoor perfection as anything I’ve ever done. The concept is deceptively simple: using whatever means necessary, you make your way down a canyon. Seems straight-forward, but tells you nothing of the exhilarating rappels, jumps, slides and climbs you experience en route. Nor does it give any inkling of the gorgeous gorges, placid pools and wonderful waterfalls we see on our way down.
It’s like entering a lost world, a jungle ravine where plesiosaurs could still lurk in the grottoes and deep pools, and in a sense it is, since you would never be able to do this and live to tell the tale if you didn’t have experienced guides along to tell you where to step, how to jump, when to release the rope and slide down natural water slides that put to shame any amusement park ride you care to mention.
They tell us it’s a canyon for newbies, but that’s only because it progresses perfectly to more and more technical stuff, so – after having started off with easy passages (that seem quite intimidating to a beginner) – by the end of our four hours we are happily jumping off cliff edges as much as eight meters above the water, and rappelling down waterfalls so high you have to let go as you reach the end of the rope and slide the rest of the way, landing in a cascade of water. By the end of the canyon we feel like fully-fledged canyoneers, ready to take on any challenge.
Bungee jumping
It’s a perfect way to spend the morning, and it also builds up quite nicely to the activity of the afternoon, where that theory will be put to a severe test, because we are to bungee jump off the Verzasca Dam in Lucarno. Famous as the dam James Bond jumps off at the beginning of GoldenEye, it’s a tremendously intimidating prospect, and I mean that quite literally; The moment I see the dam my hands tremble, even walking onto it seems a foolhardy notion, let alone jumping off it voluntarily!
I’ve never done anything like this before, and this is the highest bungee jump in Europe – two hundred and twenty meters worth of falling. Suddenly James Bond’s propensity for Dirty Martinis seems quite understandable. We exchange weak smiles and even weaker puns as we wait, try to listen to the instructions as best we can. Contraptions are attached to our ankles – all that we will hang our hopes on- and then it’s time to step up on the launch platform.
I get called first, and walk up, over the edge of the dam, and try desperately not to look down. Bungee cord gets attached without me even noticing, the guys in charge joking, efficient, and good. Doesn’t help. I step onto the edge, manage to get my feet right (toes outside but not too far) without looking down, anything but looking down, spread my arms out in the manner of someone about to be crucified, and they ask me if I’m ready. Could you ever be? “Let’s do it,” I whisper, and then it’s three, two, one, and I dive into the chasm.
Nothing, but nothing prepares you for what comes next. I had vaguely planned to shout “Geronimo” as I jumped, but every cell in my body is crying out in primal fear, and I with them. Tumbling through the air, falling, falling, impossibly still falling, it doesn’t matter the least bit that intellectually your brain knows you’re going to survive this; the rest of the organism is in “FuckFUCKwe’reabouttodie” mode, and the sheer adrenaline rush is so overwhelming screaming at the top of my lungs is all I can do.*
Well, I don’t suppose I’m spoiling the story by telling you I survived. I managed to follow the instructions I had received in a fog, got back up again, shaking and grinning like a fool, wanting to kiss the ground and everyone around me. Then I watched Lauren go trough the same ordeal, and then we went home and went to bed, and – alas, so un-Bond-like – slept like babies even though it was only seven o’clock, our bodies and minds exhausted from sensory overload.
Ridge running
It’s hard to top what we both agreed was one of the best days of our lives, but we both tried hard, each in our own way. So while Lauren spent the Sunday enjoying every conceivable spa treatment the Kurhaus staff has been able to dream up, I set out for the funicolario in the next valley.
The Alps are more imposing here than in Slovenia, where I last encountered them, but I have my eyes on a ridge path that looks like it could be a good run. Monte Lema (1624m) to Monte Magno (1636m) is seven kilometres, making the total a good round trip, I reckon. What I haven’t reckoned with is the first kilometre (all downhill, highly technical), nor the second (all uphill, highly technical). That, plus the fact that I’m three toenails short of a full set, put paid to my ambition.
I still manage to walk just about the full distance, and it’s very pleasant. There are hardly any people about – I spy two runners, but take solace in the thought that they probably weren’t in Sälen last week – but I do encounter a flock of goats, thankfully less evil-looking than their demonic brethren in Mallorca.
It’s a tough slog though, reminiscent of the hikes I did last year in New Hampshire. And because I’m wobbly-kneed as it is after Saturday, and as when ridging the divide (to coin a phrase) between two valleys you really cannot afford to be less than sure-footed, hiking it instead of running feels like a wise decision. And this way I can really take in the views and marvel at the grandeur of the landscape.
Joyriding
When Europe rear-bumpered Africa, it did some severe damage to itself; to whit, the Alps**. The Alps are the most grandiose mountains I know, and walking along the ridge I can really appreciate our insignificance, seeing little villages spilled out among the mountains, tiny playthings left behind by a capricious deity. It’s a wonder anyone made the effort to settle high up on the mountainsides, but I’m thankful that they did, because the impossibly serpentine roads they needed to reach these settlements mean the whole landscape is one big rollercoaster.
I’ve been holding back before out of respect for my co-pilot, but now – on the way to and from the hike – I really let rip, and it’s the most exhilarating drive I’ve had since my dad taught me to drive on the logging roads in the forests of Dalarna. 180-degree turns, hairpin bends, twists and turns, up and down it goes, and the goofy grin never leaves my face. I’m beginning to see why every other car here is a Porsche, Maserati or similar. This is pure petrolhead paradise. Zipping around roads such as these is what driving should be all about.
And so the weekend is over, only too soon. Lauren is going back to D.C. where she will continue to live smack-bang in the world of politics (arguably an adrenaline sport as well), but I’m already eying the map for more. Those downhill mountain bike paths look cool, the guys who had pitched tents along the ridge were probably thru-hiking the Alps, that would be awesome, and there’s base jumping, and those canyons you have to be heli-dropped into, and, and, and… You can keep your Bolivian cocaine – I’m hooked on Swiss adrenaline.
—–
*I believe my exact choice of words was “WAaaAArrggHHooouuuaaAArrraaarggHH.”
**Geologically speaking, Africa has just begun driving off after the collision, and an onlooker (it would admittedly have to be someone watching in Deep Time) could be viewing in horror the way the continental body had crumbled up in the crash, with Italy and Greece barely hanging on, like a mangled hood ornament and a smashed headlight, respectively. It’s a wonder no one has tried suing for damages. But I digress.
Remember New Year’s Eve? And the resolutions you made way back then? It’s hard to believe, but the year is more than halfway over already, so it’s high time to have a look at how you’re fairing in regard to these promises – most likely they have fallen by the wayside already, long forgotten – but since I made a commitment to myself (and you) to report back occasionally on how I’m fairing, I will do so, even though – or perhaps precisely because – the results are less than fantastic.
I set out to improve intellectually and physically, and to go on adventures and challenge myself. To ensure that I did so I set myself clear, measurable targets, so how am I doing in relation to those?
In a word: poorly. At least on the intellectual side of things. I haven’t read more than very few books, my attempts at taking piano lessons were foiled by too much travelling, my efforts learning French came to a halt after two months (during which I did learn rather more words and phrases than I had thought possible, but still).
Improving my general fitness level is an area where I have been a lot more successful. Even though I have cycled nothing like as much as I thought I would do, and swum less, I have managed to work out a lot (as evidenced by a nice lady doctor asking spontaneously if I was an athlete of some sort only yesterday(!)). I’ve logged 160 workouts in the first six months of the year, or slightly below one workout per day nine days out of ten. I’ve run two marathons, both well below four hours, and I’m hopeful I will manage Ultravasan and its 90 kilometres come August. Who knows? I might even be reduced to swimming and biking afterwards instead of running, as a result…
On the other hand, my diet hasn’t been anywhere near as strict as I had planned – perhaps precisely because I had no concrete target in mind there. If anything I have been too indulgent, especially in allowing myself too much alcohol, so that’s something to improve upon in the second half of the year, as well.
So far, so-so impressive. Travels, adventures and challenges, then? Well, I did go for a refresher dive at Nemo33 in January, then went skiing in Sweden in February, and to Thailand to dive in March. April I got a new job part time, which wasn’t planned but must count as a new adventure, and May saw me hike Mallorca with my brother, which was quite the challenge – not because of him, I hasten to add! Then in June I explored Luxembourg, and this month I’ve taken the kids kayaking in the Ardennes, and gone to Edinburgh for a quick visit, so overall my track record isn’t too bad, even though I feel it lacks in challenges.
So what to make of all this? Reinforced efforts in terms of reading, playing the piano and learning French; more diverse workout schedule; better food and drink habits; more adventurous adventures and challenging challenges (and trippy trips? No.).
Lined up next: London with the kids, then two weeks without them (good time to improve diet and spend time playing piano/reading/studying, putting good habits in place) before going to Sweden and making final preparations for Ultravasan. After that I’ve got nothing planned apart from a few days in Lugano, as a post-race (re)treat, and then school starts and the rat race recommences. If experience shows anything, it’s that it’s time to start planning autumn now. Maybe that Ironman? Or a climbing course? Or something else entirely…?
So there is this country that I’ve been to dozens of times for work, and never really saw, even though it’s tiny, and right next door. Or rather, I never bothered, because it was tiny and right next door. And I associate it with work. How interesting could it be?
Luxembourg was one of the founding countries of the E.C., and as a thank you for that – and for being small and inoffensive and neither Germany nor France – it was rewarded the seat of several institutions, amongst them the Council of Ministers, so I’ve been here more times than I care to remember, but this weekend I finally decided to make a visit memorable, so after two days of the usual minstrel show, I drove away from the wind-swept Kirschberg plateau, to Esch-sur-Sûre.
It’s a tiny town in the Luxembourgian part of the Ardennes, situated on a bend of the river Sûre, snugly nestled against a mighty outcrop of sheer rock on which the oldest castle in the country still stands, eleven hundred years after it was built. The town is surrounded by lush forests on all sides, and it’s easy to see why people would have chosen to settle here – the river teeming with fish, the forest full of game, plus it’s a natural fortress to begin with, and with the streets spiralling upwards and houses built with massive walls of local rock, the whole village becomes part of the ramparts, easily defensible from Viking marauders and rival knights and robber barons down the ages. The inhabitants must have felt very Sûre of themselves. In this regard as in many others, Eche is a microcosm of the microcosm that is Luxembourg (a nanocosm then, perhaps?).
The landscape around the town, up and down the meandering river, is exceedingly pretty, wealthy and clean. This is what southern Belgium would look like if it were run by the Swiss. My one gripe is with the (more modern) houses, which look like a Belgian imitation of Swiss architecture. But there’s not too many of them – mostly it’s small-scale farms and forests, and perfect, undulating roads that attract swarms of bikers.
Unlike Mallorca, however, it’s motorbikes only, which means that when I rent a mountain bike I have the wooden paths and back roads entirely to myself. I spend several happy hours pedalling upriver, through a nature reserve that also holds the main water reservoir of the country, and then run downriver for another hour, past fly fishers and through a valley so steep and narrow that there is only room for one row of cottages in the village therein. It’s like stepping onto the stage of a Grimm fairytale.
After that, it’s back to the hotel for the long awaited spa visit, and – after goodness knows how many visits to different saunas, plus a hearty dinner (Luxembourgers pride themselves on having a French kitchen with German-sized portions) – to bed, jolly well pleased with my discovery.
Sunday is spent driving around the countryside. It’s not unlike Mosel, in that there are fertile plateaus above the river valleys, and just like Mosel there are castles by every strategic bend in the rivers. I visit two. The first one is something of a disappointment, as it has been turned into a renaissance chateau, and is closed to visitors – the only redeeming factor being the Sorceresses’ Tower, a remnant of the older burg, and last residence of medieval women suspected of whichcraft.
Apparently they were allowed only one window, which showed them the place of their execution-to-be. Today, modern wrought-iron art depicting dancing flames marks the spot where the women met their fate. It’s creepy.
Oppressive? Me? Never…
The second castle is the real deal. Vianden, located just on the border with Germany, has been a stronghold since the days of the Romans, and the counts of Vianden didn’t mince about – the castle is an impenetrable fortress that was never taken, but fell into disrepair after the last Count moved elsewhere – the family sprouted several branches, two of which form today’s Grand Dutchy and the also grand Dutch royal family, so it’s not as if they didn’t have other places to hang out. It’s been lovingly restored, but I can’t help but think it would have been even more grandiose as a ruin.
I spend a couple of hours pottering about the castle and the walled town, and then finish off the weekend by having an enormous Angus entrecôte in nearby Diekirsch – cooked on a sizzling stone at the table – before finally turning the car back to Belgium once more. This is the way to experience Luxembourg properly, I think.
I’ve come to Mallorca on holiday with my brother. It’s with some reluctance I admit this: The place has always been a byword for package holidays of the kind up with which I will not put. Back in the days of socialist Sweden this was where people escaped the state monopoly on booze and sunshine to pig out on an abundance of both – but there is more to the island than its bad reputation would have you believe.
For me, this marks my second visit to Spain in as many months. It’s a country I hadn’t hitherto considered as very interesting, but I’m very pleased to admit I was wrong.
I know of course that I should tread carefully here, in every sense of the word; only non-Spanish people talk of Spain as a unified country – to a Catalan their homeland is Catalonia, and a Basque or a Mallorquin are equally fiercely proud of their respective regions. Without commenting on the respective merits of various other separatist movements, I think it’s fair to say that the Mallorquins’ case has more merit than most; like all islanders, their history is the result of all manner of foreign influences. Long before the British invasion of binge-drinkers or the colonies of German nudists, indeed long before Spain was an entity, the Balears were part of the Califate. The name of the isle itself is a bastardisation of Al Malorq, which in turn is an approximation of the Latin Isola Major (the big island), and before the Romans there were the Phoenicians, and so on. But I digress.
We’ve come to hike the Tremontana region that spans the entire northwest coast of the island. We did a hiking holiday together a year and a half ago in Slovenia, and we’ve been looking to find something that could match that experience. This certainly fits the bill: the Tremontana is home to the GR221, Ruta de Pedra en sec, or drystone route, all 161km of it, and it traverses some of the most impressive landscapes I’ve seen in Europe.
It’s still a work in progress tho, with some landowners contesting the right of the hoi polloi to cross their lands, so I’ve reluctantly decided against using the refugios, for fear of having the itinerary thrown into disarray by some trigger-happy estancia-owner with a hatred of hikers*. Instead we found an agretourisme, Finca d’Olivar, near Estellencs, which became our base. Formerly the home of a hermit, it’s a cluster of little stone houses built into the cliff side, nestled above orange groves, hidden away from sight but still offering wide-reaching views; small wonder stray cats like it!
Our finca is nothing out of the ordinary, however. The whole coast is littered with beautiful honey-coloured villages, houses huddled together on cliffs and outcrops like swallows’ nests, built one on top of another in a jumble with not a right angle in sight**. The dramatic road serpentines its way between them like a never ending snake, never straight, never horizontal, imbued with a steady stream of bikers swooping down the slopes or sweating their way up the mountain side.
The GR221 is a different proposition altogether: just as vertiginous, but almost completely devoid of people, we stroll for hours without meeting a single hiker. The first day sees us scale the heights of the nearest mountain, which we have all to ourselves with the exception of some wild goats, and from whence we can see the entire island. The second day we set out along the coast, and hike for seven hours straight through fishing villages and almond groves, past vineyards and poppy fields and watchtower ruins, before taking the bus back from Bayalbufar, a very bijoux bayou. The third day, we drive high into the mountains north of Sóller for a final excursion in the remotest part of the Tremontana. Everywhere we go the landscape is stunning, the sky and sea deepest azure blue, the air so crisp that individual leaves on trees hundreds of metres away are clearly visible, and the stillness such that the slightest sound carries for kilometres. Flowers are in bloom everywhere, birdsong and fluttering butterflies fill the air. It really is paradisiacal.
In fact, the term paradise is particularly apt here, since pairi daiza in Persian originally meant “walled garden”, and the most distinguishing feature of the island is the abundance of terraced walls. They are literally everywhere, even in the remotest areas, and I am reminded of a comment by a forester friend (who said apropos the Blue forest): “If you think the woods are beautiful, thank the foresters.” This is brought home to us again and again: all this is cultivated land, used for millennia. Olives were a source of wealth to the islanders even before Carthage lost it to the Romans, and the trees are still there today, their centuries-old trunks contorted like souls tormented in a Dante-esque inferno, impossibly alive in spite of looking like they should have died a dozen deaths. Intricate systems for water collection – aljab cisterns – help funnel the winter rains down to the fertile soil down in the valleys, often using canals built into roads and walls to get to the staircase gardens below. Even higher up, where nothing but pine and holly grow, there’s still evidence of charcoal burning sites, and as you reach the crest of a mountain, more often than not you will find a drystone wall, erected to avoid flocks of goats escaping.
It really is a walk through a pastoral idyll, and it’s easy to imagine fauns and nymphs cavorting in the valleys, where rosemary and sage grow wild in the dappled shade. In reality, any attempt at cavorting would result in sprained ankles or worse, as the ground is extremely unforgiving – think rock, rock, rock around the clock – but we manage to make it unscathed, which is more than can probably be said for the passengers of the helicopter wreck we come upon the last hour of our last day. There’s no telling how long it’s been there, but discovering it changes our mood. Even the skies begin to darken, and it seems right to end our adventures here.
I spend one more day in Mallorca, getting lost in the labyrinth of Palma’s old town, dodging raindrops and dodgy tourist traps, meeting interesting people and finding hidden gems. The island still has more to offer though. There’s canyoning, rock climbing, diving, even biking – if I can overcome my dislike for spandex. I leave thinking I should come back for more – and what better way is there?
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*At one refugio we find ourselves seated next to a Swedish woman and her ten-year-old daughter, who have elected to do a through-hike of the kind I originally envisaged, – as a birthday gift for the girl. Food for thought, that.
**The result of hundreds of generations of husbands succumbing to their wives’ pleas for “just one more room”, perhaps?
After a hectic week at work, is there anything better than getting out in nature?
It was a typical April weekend, with clouds, rain, sun, blue skies, hail and snow, all mixed up good, but I managed to spend hours and hours in the garden, weeding my way through the borders until my fingertips ached at the merest touch. It’s a tough job, but satisfying, especially since the difference is immediately noticeable, and besides, this is my favourite time of the year to be in the garden: everything is in bloom, and birds are chirping everywhere.
From a distance the weeds are invisible. Up close, invincible.
Speaking of blooms, this is also the season for bluebells, and nowhere are they more impressive than in the Blue Forest Hallerbos, near Waterloo, where Mother Nature has seen fit to put on a real extravaganza for about two weeks every spring, when gazillions of the dainty hyacinths turn the forest floor into a carpet of the deepest purple blue imaginable.
We braved the dark skies and went late in the afternoon on Saturday, eyeing the clouds as we drove, but by the time we got there the clouds (and the crowds) had dispersed, and we had the whole glorious display almost to ourselves (Relatively speaking. It’s so popular, and the time of flowering so brief, that there are always people around, but at least we didn’t outnumber the bluebells, which apparently sometimes happens…).
Why it’s called the Blue Forest is anyone’s guess.
Sunday brought more of the same weather – a perfect setting for my first duathlon, a local race in the English park of Chateau La Hulpe in the neighbouring village, and the stately forest behind it that is my playground par preference. A duathlon combines running and biking, and in this case the set-up was two loops of 2k running, followed by two loops of 11k biking and ending with one final 2k loop on foot.
Vertigo is normal at dizzying heights, right?
It was a fun way to switch up my long workout of the week, and my experience left me with a newfound respect for mountain bikers – I don’t recall ever having scared when running, but whilst rocketing down steep, narrow slopes on my bike, with other bikers trying to overtake me, I did consider my mortality, and how the impact of an unseen root or a false move could affect me in that regard. Thankfully neither occurred, and I made it through without incident, although getting off the bike to run the last lap was hard, stiff legs and numb bum and all.
This was my first official foray into combined sports, and although it was hard it certainly wasn’t impossible, so it did whet my appetite for more. A quarter ironman triathlon is 1k swimming, 40k biking (not mountain biking tho!) and 10k running – something to ponder, that.
All in all, not a bad weekend of outdoor adventures – both peaceful and less so – right on my doorstep!
One year ago today I found myself in Antibes, on the French Riviera. I was there to run the Nice-Cannes marathon. Instead of the sunny, lovely experience I was expecting, however, the race turned into a harrowing trial when a freak rain storm hit the coast, turning the marathon into a 26.2 mile gruelling gauntlet. In short, the race turned into an allegory of my life.
Crucified in Cannes.
You see, six months earlier the woman I thought I had partnered with for life came home one day and announced she wanted to separate. The mother of my children had fallen in love with another man and that, apparently, was that. We had been together for eighteen years, and not all of them were good, but to my mind we had made the ultimate commitment to each other – having brought new lives into the world that we were now responsible for together – and I thought it would be us ’til the end.
I was wrong.
And so it was that my life was instantaneously changed from the long slog I was counting on – not always great, perhaps, sometimes a downright struggle, but always enjoyable – to a hellish fight for survival, the downpour threatening to drown me at any moment. This wasn’t the cold, quiet rain lamenting a summer coming to its end, it was torrential torture, a vivid, livid, thrashing cat o’ nine tails trying to wear me down to the bone by sheer force, and I raged against it, hating it for doing this to me, for ruining everything I had envisioned. It was by far the most horrific thing ever to happen to me, a sense of falling only to realise that the floor underneath my feet was gone, and I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.
And yet here I am today, back in Antibes. I’ve gone down here on a whim. I briefly considered enrolling in this year’s edition of the marathon (under way even as I write these words), but I’ve realised you cannot rerun a race. What’s past is past. Instead I enjoy a weekend sampling of what the Riviera has to offer: hiking the sentier littoral, eating astonishingly good sea food at the fishmonger’s, getting lost in Old Antibes’s labyrinthine alleys, going to piano bars, drinking absinthe in vaulted cellars and flirting with yachties – the always young and beautiful crews of the billionaires’ boats that are moored in the harbour.
“So this is absinthe? I don’t feel a frglgnphprrrt…”
It’s sunny and warm, the Alps clearly visible in the background, the sky and sea competing for bluest hue, and I thoroughly enjoy my time here. Is it still an allegory of my life? I’d like to think so.
It’s been an interesting year. I’ve launched this web site, gone on well over a dozen trips abroad, and I’ve met and befriended some wonderful people.
I’ve tried surfing and kiteboarding for the first time, I’ve gone rock climbing and diving again for the first time in ages, I’ve run an ultra; at 44 I am probably in better shape than ever before.
So far, so good – at hiding the fact that half the time I cannot be with my children, the two people that mean more to me than life itself. I sit in my house, staring at nothing, doing nothing, waiting for Sunday evening to finally arrive so that I can welcome them through the door and have a sense of purpose once more.
There is nothing I can do to change that. All I can do is run the race as best I can, accept the freak storms of life and hope for sun again further down the path. So as the runners go by the marina, sweating in the heat, I applaud them without envy. All races are different, but all must come to an end.
October 21st, 2015. To some people this was the day Marty McFly arrived in the future, but I find myself celebrating an event fifty years in the past, namely one of my dearest friend’s birthday. Instead of opting for a more traditional party, he has gathered a group of friends in the Mosel valley to walk the Moselsteig with him. This party of friends fluctuates in size and composition, but the core group is made up of myself, the birthday boy, and four German female friends of his.
Thus I’m immersed in German from sunrise until sundown, and I become painfully aware how poor my active German is. Looking at it from the bright side, I provide my new acquaintances with some good laughs, as when I refer to Thor as the Donnerwettergott instead of Donnergott (the “Goddammit” rather than the God of Thunder), or accidentally reduce a complete stranger to giggles when he overhears me referring to the breakfast müsli as Vögelfutter rather than Vogelfutter (that one umlaut being the difference between bird feed and f**k feed).
On the other hand the five Germans aren’t spared either. Every five minutes or so they find a word that has at least as many regional variations as there are native speakers present. It is a very telling indication of just how recently Germany was created from a mishmash of little fiefdoms, and how rich and diverse their language remains as a result of all those centuries of relative regional independence.
In fact, hiking along the Mosel you’d be excused for thinking you were transported back in time to The Middle Ages. The river itself is used for transportation the way it has been since times immemorial, Fachwerk houses still huddle together in labyrinthine villages close to the riverside, always with a church in the middle and a castle or ruin typically perched on a rocky outcrop above. Legions of vineyards, brought here by the Romans, march up the mountainsides in straight lines only to meet fierce resistance from the unruly, wild Teutonic forests that still hold sway on higher ground.
Our merry band, too, march up and down the steep slopes. The paths wind their way along the sides of the valley, and it’s hard going, something which the less experienced hikers among us discover to their chagrin. For thirty million years the Mosel has been carving its way into the slate (which itself consists of sediment deposited here at a time before the dinosaurs, when all this was the bottom of a primordial ocean), and the valley runs deep, which means the slopes are very unforgiving indeed, and a fall would oftentimes be fatal.
The fall flora on the other hand is beautiful; beyond the vines are wild cherries, mountain ashes, red oaks, French maples and other trees and shrubs that compete with the river itself for attention. According to our host there’s even something called “Kruppel-leichen” out there (It seems even native speakers can’t always cope with the German language’s propensity for combining words into new words, as one “L” too many here changes the word “dwarf oaks” into “crippled corpses” – not an easy mistake to make in most languages!).
Luckily we don’t see any of those, and avoid adding to their numbers, too, in spite of the treacherous terrain*. Possibly this is due to the fortifying sustenance we are able to avail ourselves of. This being Germany there is plenty of hearty food to be had: schmaltz (rendered fat), blutwurst (blood sausage) and bratkartoffeln (fried potatoes) being a favourite for lunch, especially when washed down with plenty of Federweizen (still fermenting grape juice) – a delicacy often only found in the vineyards, as it doesn’t travel well. But then to be fair, nor does the drinker after a few glasses.
Speaking of that particular lunch menu, one German word that I had never encountered before this trip is Bratkartoffelnverhältnis (fried potatoes relationship). After the Second World War as men were returning home from the front there were a great many widows around that might need the help of a man with this or that, and who in return for this and other services rendered might offer the hungry ex soldier a warm meal. Well, it seems that often enough the men and women found this arrangement to their liking, and prolonged it indefinitely (if unofficially), and this type of relationship became known under that particular moniker.
I should point out that no such relationship was formed during our brief sojourn together (none that I know of, at least!), but one of the women did ask if I was perhaps in love with our host. This after I had opted to serenade him rather than give a speech at the official birthday dinner – she couldn’t know it of course, but the song I had elected to sing was Helan Går, a Swedish drinking song that most Swedes know better than their national anthem. This proved more useful than real serenades, as the wine flowed freely during our nights together. Our demi-centarian is a lover of fine wines, so Bacchus was properly worshipped every evening, with the local Rieslings proving to be mostly excellent choices for our libations**, always accompanied by calls of “Prost!”, the most German of toasts***.
So there you have it. A celebration that included wine, (wo)men and song. Oh, and some wandering. I’ll drink to that. Prost! Whenever you want to do it again, Alter Freund, I’ll be back. To your future!
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* Although one late addition to the troupe barely makes it here before a shot back had him limping to the nearest train station, poor soul.
**Even more fittingly, one of the local villages we hiked through was called Pommern, a bastardised version of the Latin name Pomona, goddess of fruit. Not too difficult to imagine which fruit they had in mind.
***Prost itself is a germanised form of the Latin Prosit (“may it be good”).
Ever since I read Last of the Mohicans as a boy I have wanted to experience New England’s wilderness. This is where Hawkeye Leatherstockings fought the sly fox Magua to the death, and Uncas and Cora Munro were the first believably star-crossed lovers I ever encountered in literature, so this was clearly a happening place, my ten-year-old self reckoned.
Fast forward 25 years and I’m still inspired by literature, only now it’s Bill Bryson and A Walk In the Woods that have me pining for the Appalachian Trail, that runs along the Eastern seaboard for 3,500km from Georgia to Maine. His story about hiking along the AT – and in particular his description of the White mountains in New Hampshire and the 100-mile-wilderness in Maine – was what got me interested in hiking in the first place, so there are several reasons I’m giddy as a schoolboy as my native guide (gotta have a native guide when exploring the unknown) guns the car down Kankamagus Highway into the Pemegawasset Wilderness, where the White Mountains are.
We’ve come not only for to hike, but to leaf peep as well. This is an actual thing, as the autumnal colours of these forests are so spectacular that tourists come to just marvel at the russet reds and fiery oranges of the sugar maples and moosewoods and beeches and birches and rowans and other deciduous trees. Even though I know what to expect I run out of synonyms for “gorgeous” long before we’ve even reached our base camp, a friend’s skiing lodge. The colours are those of a Japanese garden lit up by fire.
There’s a natural order of things, however. Down on the valley floor the deciduous trees reign supreme, but as you set off up the mountain on ever more bouldery paths, conifers begin to appear and grow in number until the leafy trees give up altogether, and you are left with something best described as an army of undead Christmas trees, the tortured, gnarled branches of which reach for you, wanting to snag your clothes. Then these, too, give up the ghost and you enter truly alpine heights, where nothing but bonsai shrubs cling to what little topsoil remains.
Having read Bryson’s accounts I’m a little apprehensive about the difficulty level of some of these trails – New Hampshire styles itself “the Granite State”, and the paths certainly bear witness to this; they are essentially just boulders that you have to hop, skip and clamber over and around, up and down. My faith in my own Pochahontas is absolute however, or rather it was until about an hour or so into the first day’s hiking when she suddenly stopped and swore. I naturally asked what was the matter, and got the undying answer “my foot is stuck underneath my other foot”.*
The undead Christnas trees are closing in…
Yet in spite of this we manage admirably. The first three days follow the same pattern. We set out at ungodly hours (at least jet lag helps you Get Up Very Early), hike from different trailheads up ravines and past waterfalls unto ledges and crests where we eat our packed lunches and marvel at the panoramas unfolding before us.
Visibility is nothing short of incredible; from atop Franconia ridge (which saw us bag three 4,000-footers in an afternoon) and Frankenstein cliffs (sadly not named after the Doctor and his monster but after a local painter) you can see over one hundred miles, and what you see is nature putting on a spectacle to rival any I have ever seen. And in spite of it being peak season we encounter no more than a handful of other hikers every day, one or two birds of prey high in the sky, and the ever present silver grey and red squirrels, whose territorial challenges follow us along the paths.
Make no mistake, however: the wildlife of these deep woods is impressive. Black bears roam the land, as do coyotes, bobcats and possibly even wolves. Less deadly animals abound as well, such as deer, jackrabbits and wild turkeys, which we would see peacefully pecking their way along the roadside. On one hike we set off on a trail that passed several beaver ponds, where moose sometimes come to eat and drink. The guidebook says to listen out for frogs at these ponds, the sounds of which are “remarkably like someone plunking the strings of a banjo”.
“Dadadumdimdum”, Frog.
We didn’t hear any frogs, but that passage got me thinking about the movie Deliverance, and the decidedly backward (and banjo-plunking) people the city-dwelling protagonists encounter. This place, too, has its share of colourful locals who go by hillbilly names such as Zeke, Cletus and Bubba, and they certainly do live off of tourists, but only strictly financially speaking – cannibalism no longer being in vogue.
Outdoor tourism is huge here all year around, so it’s not surprising that the locals are keen to reap the rewards. For our day of rock climbing we engage a specialist guide named Zebulon Jakub, who takes people rock climbing in summer, ice climbing in winter and kite boarding and para-gliding all year around. He is clearly a latter-day incarnation of Hawkeye. Add to that the fact that he looked like a young Zeb Macahan, and you see how the border between fiction and reality blurs up here.
The climbing itself is brilliant: just hard enough to be a real challenge without completely crushing you. We hike up to Square Ledge, facing Mount Washington, and as the sun climbs in the sky so we climb up the sheer cliff, thirty vertical, vertigo-ous metres straight up to the summit, from which we then rappel down to do other routes, including a chimney-like crack that sported a long dead bird as a special treat near the top. I surprise myself by how strong I feel – clearly all the workouts are starting to pay off – and lunch has rarely tasted as good; adrenaline and vistas make for excellent condiments, it seems.
“Can I have some more view on my sandwich, please?”
It’s a perfect holiday, in short, if only too short. Luckily, on our last day the weather changes completely, and as we set off for Maine and its lobster shacks and outlet malls, the rain is pouring down, turning bouldery trails into babbling brooks and crests and ledges into slippery death traps, so it seems ordained that this adventure should be at an end. I have ticked off two or three more items on my bucket list in a matter of days – it simply doesn’t get much better than that.
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*Credit where credit is due, however. She personally diverted a hurricane that was threatening to cancel the whole endeavour, sped up the leaf ageing process by sheer willpower, and held torrential downpours at bay that would otherwise have made hiking utterly impossible. On top of that she also introduced me to the marvels of local cuisine, to wit: cider donuts, hoagies, dark chocolate peanut buttercups, pumpkin bread, blueberry syrup and republican pasta(!) – made with no taxes whatsoever.
I’ve come here ill prepared. I realise this very quickly after having sat down behind the steering wheel of my rental car.
There’s just one road leading across the island from the south coast to Las Terrenas in the north, a fine toll road that will take me straight where I need to go. Should be easy, right? Only the motorway from the airport to Santo Domingo doesn’t connect with the toll road. Between the two lies the old road, and between that and the motorway are concrete walls, preventing me from getting where I want to go.
After an exasperating hour of trying in vain to reach it via back roads I return to where I started (guided by a car full of giggly, drunken, grotesquely overweight young women), and resort to reversing off the motorway via an entrance ramp to get onto the old road. I only execute this desperate manoeuvre because I’m now safe in the knowledge that my fellow road users would approve, as they all seem to be treating basic driving rules as laughably restrictive.
The ride across the island is beautiful, over lush green hills and through verdant fields, but the Department of Transport has another surprise for me; there are no less than four tolls to be paid along the way. Now, just as there seemingly was no way to get on it, there is really no way to get off the road either, so why they feel they have to get you to pay in incremental steps I don’t know, but pay I do, thanking the stars that I got enough pesos to get me all the way.
Once off the toll road I again get immediately, frustratingly lost as tropical darkness descends upon me (and what precious few signposts there may have been), and it’s only with the help of a local woman – who actually gets in the car and guides me the last seven kilometres through labyrinthine village roads – that I finally arrive at my destination.
Buenas noches.
Day 1
The first thing that strikes you here is how familiar the scenery is. I’ve seen this beach in a hundred movies and a thousand pictures, the palm trees hanging out over white sand in the water’s edge, the waves rolling in to lap at your feet. I half expect Captain Sparrow to careen around the corner at any moment, cannibals in hot pursuit.
The second thing that hits you is the technicolor quality of the landscape; the turquoise sea and azure sky, the crystalline salty white beaches, the cascades of colour exploding from the rampant vegetation – fleshly purple hibiscuses, translucently pink grasses, ripe red mangoes.
Not to be outdone, the Dominicans adorn their houses with colours seldom found outside of Italian ice cream vendors’ counters: electric blue, acid yellow, poison green and countless other outlandish nuances jostle for position, making me feel as if I’m the last spot of white on a child’s painting, waiting to be coloured in.
It’s an odd sensation, expectant and abandoned in equal measure, and yet it sums up my first day here perfectly.
Day 2
Remember how I said I didn’t feel well prepared coming here? Well, I’ve been swatting – as well as sweating – and now I know that I’ve landed on the great island of Hispaniola, so named by my namesake C Columbus, who did likewise in 1492, bringing the local Tainó people the traditional gifts of trinkets, baubles and measles, and changed the world forever.
Christopher’s brother Bartholemew went on to found Santo Domingo, the oldest colonial settlement still in existence, but after that the Spanish pretty much forgot about Hispaniola as they went on to conquer the Incas and the Aztecs. The French were thus able to promptly snatch it up and turned it into Haiti (after a Tainò word meaning “land of many hills”). Some time later people in the east of the island rebelled against their French masters’ rule and formed the Dominican Republic.
The name means something like the Sunday Republic, and if it conjures up images of amateurism (e.g. Sunday drivers) you aren’t far wrong, since the fledgling republic has had a long and onerous journey to democracy. It holds the distinction of being the only country in the Caribbean that voluntarily returned to its colonial masters once the yoke had been cast off, it was occupied by the US in the 1920’s, then run as a dictatorship for thirty years (the original banana republic) and was torn by civil war as late as in the 60’s(!).
On top of that, the relationship with their co-habitants the Haitians has always been fraught – in the 30’s they even engaged in a spot of genocide of ethnic Haitians, which I feel is a bit short-sighted when you consider that more than half the island’s population is made up of the brethren of their victims. Suffice to say that even today locally produced maps of the DR depict it as being an island unto itself, completely ignoring the existence of their neighbours.
Trouble in Paradise? You betcha.
Day 3 and 4
I’m finally getting acclimatised. The jet lag has eased, the heat is becoming bearable (though still oppressive) and I’m beginning to come to grips with this alien society.
Houses here are small, mostly one or two rooms, rickety things constructed of wood or concrete, shockingly colourful, with a covered veranda in front if the owners can afford it – always protected with wrought iron bars, because shade is a valuable commodity here.
Mostly though, life is lived outdoors, in the cornucopia the jungle provides; mango, avocado, guava, papaya, cocoa, coconuts all grow in abundance. The climate is such that if a Dominican wants to make a fence she simply sticks branches in the ground, which take root, turning it from fence into hedge in a season. It works both ways though: the jungle will reclaim anything, and fast.
The car isn’t the mode of transport of choice – the moped is, and it will have 2,5 people on it on average (sometimes literally, as the aforementioned cavalier approach to road safety takes its toll). In the mountains mopeds face stiff competition from horses – all of them steeped in the same mould as Rosinante (of Quixotic fame) and ridden in vaquero style – and for longer journeys there are hua huas, the 50’s Jetsons buses that my friend Laura claims you can “flag down and ride for a peso, often seated next to a rooster”.
The police aren’t much trusted – a memory of the bad old days – so instead there are people who provide private security for homeowners, banks, gas stations et cetera by means of a sawed off pump-action shotgun. That, combined with the odd guy sauntering through the streets with a machete in his hand, makes it a bit unnerving to move
about, but at the same time I have never encountered a more laid-back society. They even measure time in Dominican minutes, which of course are slightly longer than ours.
It’s life, Jim, but not as we know it.
Days 5 to 7
Tourism is by far the largest sector of the local economy here, and it’s easy to see why: the Dominicans are blessed with a climate that rivals just about anything I’ve experienced, and tourists are coming here in great herds, like wildebeest crossing the savannah (and often with the same delicate approach). How tempting it must be for the locals then to make a quick buck – especially when domestic monthly salaries are a fraction of what an average tourist is happy to dispense with over a week.
Unfortunately, this means that you’re constantly running the risk of getting ripped off, if not worse. 3,000 police and military personnel were recently dismissed as they had all been involved in armed robberies. That’s coppers and grunts threatening to kill you if you don’t hand over your money! To continue the metaphor, it’s as if zebras and giraffes suddenly turned out to be lions and crocodiles in disguise. Not a happy thought, that.
Even legit operations seem to be geared towards extracting the maximum amount of dollars with a minimum of effort, so every excursion I’ve made has turned into a gauntlet, negotiating with or just plain dodging locals who are hawking their trinkets and services, often making completely bogus claims in the process. “Wanna see famous waterfall, señor? You need horse and guide, esta impossibile otherwise. Forty dollars US.” No horse required, nor guide. Entrance fee? One hundred pesos, or about two dollars. And on it goes.
On a larger scale, money speaks even louder. Anything is for sale, without regard for the public good. So for instance the village I’m staying in is effectively divided into two valleys because a local politico owns the land in between and won’t allow a road to cross his dominion. Foreigners are buying more and more properties along the coast, making it impossible to access the sea for locals and tourists alike. And with the new toll road, the time it takes to get here from the capital has been reduced by two thirds, which I fear will only exacerbate the situation.
For now, woodpeckers are the only ones enjoying high rise condos, as they make their nests in the coconut palms, but give it another five years and I am convinced that las Terrenas will be another Punta Cana or Costa del Sol – a concrete tourist ghetto with not a hint of authenticity.
Paradise Found equals Paradise Lost, seems to be the inevitable conclusion.
Outro
They say travel writing is the most self-indulgent form of writing bar autobiography, and so in self-defence I stay away from what I think of as “and then I did this”-writing if I don’t feel it has some general interest.
However, someone pointed out that this has the effect of making it sound as if I don’t do anything much at all on my holidays sometimes, and so to debunk that, here are some of my top experiences in the Dominican Republic, big and small:
– Hiking through the jungle to a 50 metre high waterfall and swimming in the water right underneath it,
– Watching a gazillion stars at night uninhibited by electric lights during one of several black-outs,
– Having a humpback cow and calf surface right next to our speedboat and watching them splash about for half an hour,
– Having another whale appear just as I was about to go scuba diving for the first time in well over a decade (even though it made me hyperventilate),
– Learning how to surf, and feeling on top of the world when I rode my first wave (and my second, and my third…),
– Exploring Tainò cave paintings deep in the mangrove labyrinth of Los Haitises,
– Watching the setting sun set the ocean on fire, calming the waves and turning them into something akin to molten mercury every evening.
Not too shoddy. But now the trip is at an end, and as the flight takes me across the Caribbean (named after an extinguished tribe) and the Atlantic (home of the fabled lost continent) I can’t help but ponder the inevitable demise of everything. In the end all you can do is keep on travelling, keep on moving forward.
Moving across time zones is a strange experience. You effectively displace yourself so fast as to end up time travelling. This I did yesterday, setting out at ten am from Brussels and landing in Boston at three pm, eleven hours later.
Of course, the price you pay for this sci-fi experience is jet lag. In an attempt to fight it I stayed up until 0430 in the morning my time, which is a decidedly less impressive 2230 local time – as evidenced by the cocktail waitress’s look of disbelief when I was going cross eyed after half a beer – and then slept like a log jam until dawn.
Now, traditionally, Easter is the time when witches are abroad, so where better to spend my first day in Massachusetts than in Salem, scene of the most famous witch trials in history?
I didn’t see any witches (maybe the competitions were held elsewhere?), but the city certainly capitalises on the old madness. Wiccan shops, haunted houses and the like abound, and tourists come from afar to revel in the gruesome history of the place.
Me? I was blown away. Literally. The gale force winds forced me inside at regular intervals, even though the sun did lure me back out, time after time. And I shouldn’t complain – turns out they had seven feet or snow here until only a couple of weeks ago!
Eventually though, my body had had enough. Several hours’ worth of siesta was required to bring me back on my feet just long enough to enjoy my first Maine lobster, but now midnight (the local one) is approaching, and I’m about to leave the state of Massachusetts for the state of unconsciousness once more…
Massachusetts, day 2
The US is a land of extreme contrasts; the unsightly hangar-like superstores along the roads on the one hand, the beautiful New England clapboard houses on the other, the ever-present Dunkin Donuts drivethrus next door to organic eco-eateries/yoga centres, colonial historic sites encroached upon by modern skyscrapers and so on.
Similarly, people are diametrically different; I visited Trinity church in downtown Boston which was packed to the rafters for the Easter sermon, and went outside only to find several women cosplayers climbing on the church building in an attempt to look more like the Assassin’s Creed characters they were dressed up as*.
And yet this is what makes it such a wonderful place, I think. There’s room here for all kinds. So when a bold eagle appears high in the sky above the highway on the way home, it feels symbolically quite fitting.
Land of the free, home of the brave indeed.
______
*One creed is as good as the next, I guess…
Massachusetts, day 3
There are places in the world that seem to act as magnets to forces other than normal natural forces (gravity and whatnot). So for instance Jerusalem is a black hole to religions and New York exudes a force field of capital.
In Boston, there is a higher than usual background radiation of learning, and I spent the day trying to expose myself to as much of it as possible (in the vague hope of turning into the intellectual equivalent of the Incredible Hulk). So the morning saw me visiting Walden, the pond in the forest where Henry Thoreau spent two years in splendid isolation contemplating the beauty of nature and a simpler life (except for when he went over to mum’s for pancakes and a change of clothes on Sundays), and in the afternoon I went to Harvard and MIT – not many people have done both, and certainly not in the course of a day, so maybe I was turning into a green intellectual giant after all?
Regardless of colour, it is certainly easy to grow too large here, but in the evening I threw caution to the wind and fulfilled a life-long dream by eating in a Worcester diner, a wonderfully retro institution with table jukeboxes, busty waitresses calling you “honey”, a menu (made) out of Grease and a clientele that between them must have weighed like a whale. My arteries contracted as soon as I stepped inside, and I didn’t give in until I had gulped down a load of blueberry pancakes with maple syrup and a wedge of lemon merengue pie (that could have held the door open), the effects of which had me eying the walls for a defilibrator. Bliss!
Massachusetts, days 4 and 5
I’ve spent much of my time here roaming up and down the coast, exploring capes and coves, taking in the quaint little fishing villages and their typical New England architecture.
I freely admit I am in love with the colonial style, which seems to consist of taking Edwardian houses as your starting point and making sure that the architect has the blueprints confused with a recipe for wedding cakes. All of them have an abundance of turrets, pilasters, ornate gables, Roman pillars, covered porches, outside staircases, nooks and crannies, which gives them a stately but very organic look.
The nicest ones are old sea captains’ houses, built by wealthy skippers and traders gone ashore, but not willing to give up the sea – built along the coastline, often right on the water’s edge, with balconies and lookout points where their original owners could spy their ships come in from the Caribbean, where their cargo of slaves had been offloaded, and molasses taken onboard, to be processed to rum in New England and sold on to slave traders back in Africa. (This last detail is oft overlooked by Ralph Lauren and others selling the New England lifestyle for some reason…).
White dominates, but a whole spectrum of muted greys, blues, and beiges exist, mirroring the colour of the weather-beaten landscape and the ever-changing ocean in a way not dissimilar to the buildings in the Dominican Republic, although diametrically opposite its palette.
As always I leave taking something with me. This time, it’s an irrepressible urge to add a covered colonnade to my house…
Arrived at Ljubljana airport only to find that Visa apparently has no love for Slovenia. Not only was my card denied when trying to pay for my rental car, but the ATM told me I had “insufficient funds” (somewhat oxymoronically, since it was a CREDIT card, but never mind.), so there I was, stranded with 50€ to my name, but the lovely Anja at the rental car company didn’t only find me a bus that could take me to my final destination, but actually drove me herself the 12 kilometres to the village from which the bus left. Gob? Smacked.
So I got to Karjanska Gora in the end, but of course I still had virtually no money, and was unsure how hotel management would react. I needn’t have worried. The receptionist didn’t even let me finish before insisting that I get myself to the restaurant and have a hot meal, and not concern myself with such trivialities as payment.
At first glance, not the best of experiences, but on the other hand my faith in people has been given a real boost, and that can’t be bad, right?
Day 1
Travelling up through the country yesterday I had the impression of immense natural beauty paired with a run-down, slightly decrepit society, as if Austria had its own East German equivalent in Slovenia, which I guess is essentially the case. Waking this morning in picturesque Karjanska Gora, that picture was reinforced by the low hanging clouds that shrouded the already muted colour palette in their grey mist, and the eerie stillness of the place, with not a movement to be seen. It was as if I had stepped onto the scene in a horror movie.
As I fiddled with my Garmin to at least let some anonymous satellites know where I were (ok, I know that’s not how it works, but that’s how it felt), a low voice right next to me mumbled something guttural, and I looked up and straight into the face of a gaunt being that shuffled towards me. I fair jumped out of my skin, and it wasn’t at all fair on the poor mailman who only wished me a good morning.
I hurried out of the village and up the valley floor, muttering at the clouds that the forecast for today had read sunny, and didn’t they have places to go? My bad mood (and the clouds) soon dispersed, however, as I walked through a landscape so still and pretty that it felt like moving through a series of post cards.
I had set myself two goals for this first day of hiking. First, following in the footsteps of all intrepid explorers, I would seek to find the source of a great body of water. Here I was in luck, because the great Slovene river Sava – which forms the geography of more that half the country, and is itself a contributory to the Danube, greatest of European rivers – has its source right up the valley, in the shape of a series of natural springs known locally as “toomphs”*.
I made my discovery quite easily by following the many signposts (all intrepid explorers know that the fact that locals have known about the existence of something for millennia doesn’t count), and found myself in the most enchanted setting imaginable. Rainwater flows down the mountains and seeps into the ground only to be forced upwards here, making the bottom of the pools resemble a landscape of miniature volcanos, easily visible through the impossibly clear water. Also, since the water comes from deep underground it remains a steady five degrees all year around, and so the ponds never freeze, but remain azure blue (and full of trout) even in the dead of winter. I lingered here, all alone, pondering how prehistoric man must have marvelled at this natural phenomenon. It was all rather splendid.
Wanting to contribute to this great marvel of nature’s complexity somehow, I added my own little natural contributory before moving on.
My second goal for the day took me past the last village in the valley, which due to the microclimate there is known as the Siberia of Corinthia. Needless to say I didn’t linger, but started my ascent towards Tromeja (“three-borders”), where, you might have guessed, the borders of Italy, Austria and Slovenia as well as the linguistic borders of the three main language blocs – Germanic, Romance and Slavic – all meet. And here my leisurely stroll ended.
The ascent was gruelling. I ran a half marathon three days ago. Clearly the training that went into that was good for nothing here. The trail and I staggered on drunkenly, stubbornly for a solid hour, ever upwards. My legs leaden, my vision foggy, I was close to giving up when finally the summit revealed itself, only…
Every cloud in existence had apparently decided today was a good day to hang out at Tromeja! Possibly vexed by my rumblings that morning, the clouds had beaten me there and lay in ambush on the other side of the mountain. Italy and Austria were probably there somewhere, but of the fabulous view I could see nothing. I was heart-broken, despondent.
What to do? Having this unique opportunity, I went for a game of International Twister with myself. It ended badly. With a solid foothold in Italy I made a grab for Slovenia only to fall flat on my face in Austria. Having thus performed a haiku reenactment of every war in the region from Roman times to World War II, I sat down with my meagre lunch to ponder the invisible and ultimately futile nature of borders. They move like amoebas across maps, crushing people with their impact, and yet up here, they are as nothing.
Looking around me I found a monument with a rather nice inscription, summing up my thoughts: “Finding one’s inner peace is man’s greatest need. Peace does not only mean no war, peace means the rule of harmony, love, satisfaction and unity.”
Yet something was lacking. I thought for a moment, and then got out a magic marker, adding “…and a functioning Visa card!”
And on that somber note, I began my descent.
—–
*This is a fine example of the Slovene language’s propensity to include words that resemble sound effects from the Marvel universe. The Toomphs are located between the villages of Kablowie and Pow…
Day 2
I sorted out my visa troubles and finally got my rental car yesterday afternoon, so it was with a sense of satisfaction I sat down to have the hotel’s speciality for dinner, a huge plate of assorted grilled animals. The Miklič family and their oft-returning English guests, the self-proclaimed redhead Helen, a cycling champion, her son and mum, really took me to their hearts, and as the conversation and the pils flowed, I let myself sink into the warm glow of heir embrace.
So it was with some reluctance I left this morning, weak-kneed and wobbly-legged, but the sun was out, the air was crisp, and… my personal weather-affront was back again, lurking further down the valley. I had foreseen such an eventuality however, and had planned two alternative (escape) routes for the day. The first would take me up an adjacent valley to the fifty hairpin bends constituting the Vilcič pass road built by Russian POWs at a cost of on average two dead Russians per bend. (This was some time before Slovenia ratified the Workers’ Health and Safety directive). There was a very real risk of the cloud catching up with me that way, though, and I didn’t feel like adding to the statistics by bing mown down unseen by a lorry, so elected instead to move down the valley, flanking the fluffy f****r and hopefully circumventing it altogether in an attempt to reach the double waterfalls (known as Slap* in Slovene) in the gorge near the next village.
It worked like a charm. I strolled through sunlit pastures and forests, watching the cloud bank move slowly in the other direction. So pleased was I with having outsmarted the weather that it wasn’t until I heard what sounded like a calypso-orchestra in disarray up ahead that I recalled the many warning signs I had passed (they had all been in Slovene, so naturally I had assumed that they didn’t concern me). Up ahead on the road were a thirty-head heard of steers, the Milka gel’s grumpy uncles, and they weren’t happy to see me. As the last Glocken came to a clonking end not dissimilar to the “Duelling Banjos” song, they stared in sullen, sour-eyed silence at me, and it was clear that I risked being gorged in a manner quite different from what I had planned. In the end they didn’t gore me to death, taking pity on the two weak calves to suddenly appear in their midst (Bulls having an acute – if underrated – appreciation of puns.).
And so it was that I reached the ravine after all. It was simply marvellous. Entering the canyon the sheer rock rose high above a narrow passage through which flowed not only a lively brook, but the air was filled with water particles from the falls higher up, and as they caught the sunlight they turned to pixie dust, turning the landscape into a golden, enchanted forest. Alas, the same fine mist rendered every root, leaf and stone in the cleft slick with moisture, slippery to the touch, and turned my progress into a series of involuntary tap-dancing solos, as I fought for traction and lost. It also soon became clear that the Russians had been sent here first to weed out the weaker builders, as the rickety structures placed along the way to help visitors did nothing but add to the danger.
The first Slap marked the end of my progress through the gorge. From there it was a mad scramble up the cliffs and into the surrounding aspen forest. How different it was! From the pale golden birches and moss-green firn trees of the ravine to this shadowy realm of Mithril-grey trees like a thousand-pillared great hall, all having shed their russet leaves in a thick carpet on the ground, rendering the path all but invisible. The only way to go was up, of course, but the copper carpet effectively hid all manner of roots and milky-white stones, so the tap dancing continued unabated.
At last the path returned to the gully to find the upper Slap, all 130 metres of it, and finally there were steel wires and the odd crampon to help the weary traveller. They were dearly needed, too, as the final ascent was up a crevice that went straight up, parallel to the waterfall itself. At this height the metal was bitter cold, however, and I began to fear my numbed hands would lose their grip. Icicles adorned the cliff face. Falling here would be fatal. The best I could hope for would be landing in the water – not that I would survive that either, but at least I might be rediscovered in a few millennia as a latter-day Ötzi, and archeologists could make amusingly incorrect assumptions about my life in pre-historic times.
Well, I won’t keep you in suspense any longer. I did make it, and rarely has tea and strudel tasted as good as it did just now.
*See previous attempt at etymological explanation.
Day 3
So last night I went across the border to pick up my brother who, unbeknownst to me while I was planning this trip, had got himself a job as an apprentice carpenter a stone’s throw from where I was, thus allowing me to use the term “serendipitous”, a word – and indeed a concept – which doesn’t get enough mileage.
We then set off into the night for the village of Bled*, and arrived at the gingerbread cottage of Dom Berc in absolute darkness. The only thing that could be seen was the medieval castle, perched high above the village on an enormous crag and lit up by hidden lights. The door was opened by a hunched man of very Slavic stock who got us inside briskly, showed us our room and left with the words “the master vill vant to visit you… later.” It was time to take stock of the garlic stores!
The night passed without incident, however, and today we learnt just how pretty Slovenia can be. The area of Lake Bled has attracted tourists for hundreds of years, and it was here that all the apparatchiks – who presumably enjoyed a nice holiday as much as the next comrade – would come as well, so the village wasn’t subjected to the standard communist treatment, but remained pristine throughout the Soviet era.
We toured the lake in the morning, taking endless pictures of the little fairy tale island with its perfect little composition of houses and an onion-spired church, and the wooden swan-boats being rowed around it. It was idyllic. Even the castle lost its menacing Hammer-film-prop air in broad daylight.
In the afternoon we drove to a gorge and hiked down its troubled waters on wooden walkways. It was very impressive, but lacked the intensity of yesterday’s adventures. We even had to pay admission, which made it feel more like a amusement park ride than anything else. The whole of Bled, in fact, is a little too cutesy, too boutique, so tomorrow we’re off further into the wilderness in search for the true spirit of Triglav.
*Another peculiarity of the Slovene language is its affinity for words that also exist in English, albeit with a completely different meaning. So for instance “pot” is everywhere to be found, and lake Bled lies in the five o’clock shadow of mount Razor. It’s uncanny.
Day 4
After breakfast we took the car up the curvaceous little road that led into the heartland of the park. We past Lake Bohinj and continued straight up through the beech forest until we reached the Dom Savica, gateway to the most famous waterfalls in Slovenia.
The path wound its way up stairs hewn into the rock, and I was struck by the difference the choice of materials made. Instead of the amusement park feeling of yesterday’s gangways, ascending this stairway felt like entering the kingdom of Rivendell, with wood elves hidden just put of sight. The falls themselves were predictably impressive even without Elrond and his posse, and like the Fellowship we lingered there (if not for three hundred pages), unwilling to face the decent into Orkanc, the suitably orcish-sounding hamlet* where we would stay the rest of the week.
Quite apart from the intricacies of Slovene, I have realised that I came unprepared for mountaineering in a linguistic sense, as there are so many terms I am unfamiliar with. This is of course wholly my own fault**.
So for instance a gorge is a narrow valley between hills or mountains, typically with steep rocky walls and a stream running through it, but a gully is a ravine formed by the action of water – not the same thing. Also, Urban Dictionary adds to he confusion by asserting that the latter term is slang for “gangsta”, as in “I’m so gully”, which only a criminal mountain troll by the name of Scarpface*** could possibly hope to get away with.
But I digress. We eventually made it down to Orkanc, past a hidden farm where the neo-liberal farmer had obviously taken GMO into his heart, and – more importantly – into the hearts of his herd, since the cattle looked more like bear-pigs than anything bovine, and thence to the ski lift of Vogel.
The ski lift took us 1,000 metres straight up, and to the second hike of the day. We arrived at two in the afternoon, and since the last lift down was at six we figured we could go two hours in one direction before having to turn around, which would give us enough time to reach the first of two summits.
Up here the same beech trees dominated the steep slopes, only every single one of them was J-shaped. Brother Carpenter pointed out that the trees looked that way since they were bent down by snow until reaching a certain age, and only then could they begin to grow as they were meant to. I think we can all relate to that. It seems life is a beech, after all.
The beech soon gave way to scree and bonsai and what little soil there had been was replaced by rubble, but we were making good time – or so we thought until we turned around to admire the view and realised that the sun was rapidly disappearing. Only now did it dawn on us that dusk effectively happens around five in the afternoon! The thought of having to get back in pitch blackness didn’t appeal, so down the rubble slope we went like Fred and Ginger, playing catchup with the speed of light.
It was two very tired but relieved wanderers who stepped onto the ski lift back down to Bohinj at a quarter to five.
* It’s not just me saying it, either. Tolkien was first and foremost a linguist and found inspiration in the Slavic languages when creating the Dark tongue of Mordor.
** Fault, n., a crack in the earth’s crust resulting from the displacement of one side with respect to the other.
*** Scarp face, n., the surface of a steep slope just below an escarpment or mountain ridge. Also, a given character in the next Pratchett novel.
Day 5
The day started well enough. Our cottage is built on a scale and in a style that makes me feel like Snow White at the seven dwarves’, and as I went down the stairs to our miniature kitchen / living room and peered out into the fog, what did I see? Three roe deer came galloping out of the mist (possibly chased by the bear-pigs from yesterday). They stopped in front of me, almost posing, but when I tried to get my camera out to take pictures of them they slipped away into the wisps.
This set the tone for the day. We went to the village of Stara Fuzina at the other end of the lake – as beautiful a hamlet as you can hope to find in Slovenia – and from there set out to explore yet another vale. We followed the path upwards, marvelling at how the frothing waterfalls of the gorge cut deep, deep into the bedrock – as much as thirty metres in places – and at the emerald green pools further upstream, so lucid that you sometimes had to look twice to believe there was water there at all. And yet there was a mood of melancholy in the crisp autumnal air, a sense of having but a little time to appreciate all this beauty before it was too late (the fact that we got lost and spent an hour and a half following the wrong arm of the stream might have contributed, too…).
I guess it is inevitable towards the end of a holiday, knowing you will have to get back to the daily grind, but here, with accumulated fatigue combined with the swiftly disappearing sun rendering the beech bronze and the larch a russet gold, it was all I could do not to cry.
To distract myself – and you – from this sorry state of affairs, I thought of one last peculiarity of the Slovene language: They seem to have disavowed vowels. You know how certain letters have to seek refuge in particular countries, like the “X” in Spain, where it still finds employment, or the “Z”, which is found roaming free in great herds in Poland? Well, the Slovenes have decided vowels have no place in their society, at least not in shorter words. So Pr is a cottage, Vrh means summit, and so on. I have no idea how these words sound, but I find it quite innovative, dnt u thnk?
Day 6
And so we entered the kingdom of Zlatorog for the last time. According to the legends Zlatorog, the golden-horned chamois, lived high up in the mountains with the White Women (the Fates) and their white mountain goats on pastures like Paradise, but when a greedy hunter shot Zlatorog in order to obtain his horns, Zlatorog in his fury hurled the hunter into the abyss and destroyed the pastures until nothing but bare rock remained.
I like this story, as it is clearly an ancient tale of caution not to use the natural resources of the region in an unsustainable manner, or suffer the consequences. It seems particularly poignant when hiking up ski slopes, where man has raked the mountain sides clean of all that stands in his way. This we did now, as we were going to make a second attempt on Vogel. So far we hadn’t really made it up the alps proper, but that was about to change.
Up we went, and bonsai and scree gave way to wilted grass, the incline went from unfriendly to murderous to downright psychotic, patches of snow began appearing on the ground, and oxygen started to feel like a distinctly rare commodity. At last there was nothing but the ever-present rubble left on the ground – causing us to take one step forward and two steps back – and the ravens in the sky above us (the Vogel flipping us the bird?), when we reached a cop in the crest, and suddenly it was all worth it! Ahead of us were ridge upon ridge of forest-clad mountains, swept in blueish mist as far as the eye could see.
Swollen feet and howling tendons seemed small and insignificant, indeed, everything was dwarfed in the presence of such grandeur. You could take the great pyramids at Gize and plonk them into the smallest of these vales and they would disappear from sight. It is an awe-inspiring sight if ever there was one. We lunched on top of the world today.
From there it was another three quarters of stomach-curdling climbing up to the top of mount Vogel, along a crest where one false step in one direction would send you down one valley, and a step in the other into another. It was a suitable finale to the week, with views all the way to the Adriatic, 100 km away and 1,922m underneath us. It felt right to end on a high, but just as we congratulated ourselves on our prowess we noticed sheep pellets on the ground, as if Zlatorog himself had left a calling card, saying, in essence: you’re visitors in my world, and while you pride yourself with making it up here I come down to these puny heights to take a dump. Your achievement is my toilet.
After having thus been suitably humbled, all that remained was the three-hour hike back down, negotiating the perennial conundrum of wanting to admire the scenery while avoiding becoming part of it.
First day of hiking. Getting out of Falmouth proved more difficult than expected, as gale force winds meant ferries didn’t run as scheduled (and made the ride all that more interesting once on board, with coast guard helicopters suspended in the air above us).
The path, once we got on it at Place (the place is actually called Place, and I’ll leave it with you to imagine how bored a city planner has to be before naming a place Place), wounds its way along the coast, hugging that thin strip of land between the fields and the rocks below. The vegetation is surprisingly lush, with brambles, ferns, nettles, sloe and strangle weed forming a dense thicket on both sides, scrambling over each other and intertwining, sometimes closing over the path. Thorns snag you, nettles sting you and brambles trip you up, and you feel resentful towards the vegetation – the National Trust would be well advised to rename the path Sleeping Beauty’s Castle Gardens, I muttered – but then suddenly you come upon a clearing, and you realise that you’ve been walking next to a sheer drop of fifty metres or more, and that yon vegetation has been the only thing between you and becoming as one with nature. 27 kilometres of that today. More tomorrow.
Day 2
Set off from Portcoe into a sun-kissed and decidedly surreal landscape. Normal rules don’t apply: Gulls sailing on the thermals quite some distance beneath you, long abandoned mines right on the water’s edge (They mined for tin here, and the seams apparently often ran out underneath the seaboard. I can all too easily imagine the strange and above all short-lived moments when a gallery suddenly turned into a giant lobster tine.), and sometimes when you round a bend a whole stretch of the path will suddenly be gone, replaced by nothing but vertigo.
They say it’s due to flood damage and erosion, but sometimes the trail cuts so deep into the top soil as to create a virtual fault line (Nature gently reminding us it’s important to deviate from the norm on occasion, since if you just follow the beaten path and perish it will be your own fault…).
Add to that the soundtrack to my journey, as belted out by the Teutonic Titan trailing behind me (a medley of Sarah Bernardt and Meatloaf), and you will understand why I started to look for Alice in every rabbit hole we passed. Or maybe it’s just dehydration. Well, that’s nothing the publicans around here can’t rectify.
More ramblings anon.
Day 3
Someone pointed out to me that I was a tad harsh when describing the landscape yesterday. I still maintain that the downs are deceptive – it’s easy to think that those gently undulating hills are gentle, but all that means is that you are constantly ascending or descending. Add to that a never-ending supply of stiles (in a nearly endless variety of styles) and you have the mother of all obstacle courses.
But I’m happy to concede that the climate is heavenly. It is surely no coincidence that Project Eden is located in Cornwall – we missed it by a mere four kilometres today – but there is also the rather older endeavour of a similar ilk, which we passed yesterday, namely Caerhay, the 150-year old Williams family estate that harbours one of the greatest magnolia collections in the world (we missed the display by a mere four months).
You can understand why the Williamses got hooked. Magnolias – flowering trees so old they were around in the Jurassic – thrive here, and it’s easy to see why. When you descend into one of the hidden vales, wedged in between steep rocks, as I have just done, the air is thick with chlorophyll, dappled sun light makes the mist rise and palm trees and outsized bracken make it even more primeval, to the point where you might even believe that those rather large chicken are in fact velociraaaaAAARRGHH—–
Day 4
Ok, so I fibbed yesterday. I wasn’t devoured by dinosaurs, but I had a close encounter with a chicken Tikka Masala (ancient Hindi for Innards Wrenching) that Spielberg wouldn’t have managed a PG-13 rating on. Interestingly though, apart from that most British of institutions, the Indian curry, there is very little sense of Cornwall feeling British. The Cornish are a proud old people who had their own kings long before the Normans and the Saxons came along, and the Cornish flag (silver cross on a black field, since you ask) is prominently displayed most everywhere. The Union Jack is conspicuous only by its absence.
The Cornish have their own culture, as evidenced by their cooking – we live on Cornish pasties (not a derogatory term for sunbathers but a kind of meat pie) and Cornish ice cream – and their own language, which makes place names utterly incomprehensible, and which is spoken by the locals. “I speak it well enough when I’m drunk and mad” as one meaty fellow put it.
Against this background you’d be excused if you suspected the authorities of being a tad nervous. In fact, from Henry VIII’s buttered fortresses to the contemporary artillery firing range which we will pass through in a day or so, the subtle message may well be, look, we’re good guys, protecting you from the Roman Catholics/Romanian plumbers, but these cannons pivot, see, we can turn them around too, nifty, eh?
So far it seems to have worked, but if the Scottish secede, I wouldn’t be surprised if the Cornish were hot on their heels.
Day 5
Today we were going to hike through the Cornwall Army Range, Propelled Artillery and Rocketry, Cornwall. Those who have been following my slog log will understand that this held no fears for me; at least British officers and gentlemen will signal before trying to blow you away so as not to inconvenience you unduly.
The same cannot be said for the weather, which is notoriously fickle. I have an uncanny ability to get it wrong, too. Once I suggested we sit down and enjoy the sun only to have to make a mad dash through the brambles to seek cover from a thunderstorm under a rocky outcrop (which we then promptly discovered had been split asunder by lightning at some point), another time I hadn’t finished the sentence “I think it’s going to rain all afteno—” before it was sunny again. But I digress.
The reason I was keen to see the C.A.R.P.A.R.C. was that oftentimes no man’s lands of this kind become a haven for wildlife, and I was looking forward to seeing an abundant – if slightly shell-shocked – fauna. Imagine my disappointment when it turned out to look remarkably like the many golf courses we have passed on the way. (“Look, links!” I would cry each time, to which my German companion would reply “…und Rechts!” Oh, how we laughed. Entertainment is scant on the trail.)
It is to be hoped the armed forces perform better than the golfers we have seen, though. A thousand years from now marine archaeologists trying to piece together clues from our long-lost civilisation will gather that these golf courses were cult places where Nimby, the god of denial, and Exxon, the vengeful god of greenhouse gasses were appeased with gifts of small, white spherical objects placed in sand pits in their hundreds.
Day 6
We arrived in Plymouth last night, and after the idyllic scenery of the last five days it’s vast urban sprawl was a shock to the system (although the gin helped), so we couldn’t wait to get out of there. Even so, it took us the whole morning to traverse the harbours and docks – the best thing to be said for it is that it’s easier on the feet than on the eyes.
Plymouth is otherwise best known for another group of people keen to leave it; the Pilgrims set off from Plymouth on the Mayflower over 350 years ago. Their importance is vastly overrated – in fact they only became known to the general public through the publication of a poem that got most of the facts wrong – but whatever else they were, they were comically inept. They didn’t pack a single plough but several tea cosies, and between them they had neither a doctor nor a carpenter. (The one important – but oft overlooked – thing the Founding Fathers did right was to bring along Founding Mothers… At least they realised women would be necessary to found a colony!) They would have been well advised to take a leaf from the book of Francis Drake, who was not only a privateer and swashbuckler extraordinaire, but also mayor of Plymouth. It was from here he set out to vanquish the Spanish Armada, but when he got knighted for services to the crown (the aforementioned armada and – allegedly – buckling the royal swash) he got out double-quick, headed for balmy Devon. And so do we.
Day 7
Two features of the coastal landscape strike me as almost magical; rivers around here are all tidal, meaning that twice a day they simply disappear, leaving a natural causeway that extends for kilometres inland. If you arrive at one, as we did today, you have only to wait, watching the water drain away as if someone had pulled the plug on the world’s greatest (and grimiest) bath tub before you can ford it. Or you plough through the stream long before it’s safe (why yes, we ARE quite gung-ho, thank you for noticing!).
Islands on the other hand are easy to imagine as little paradisiacal microcosms, untouched by the rest of the world. Of course estuary islands are sometimes reachable by foot at low tide, such as Burgh island at the end of today’s hike, which is also a.k.a. Agatha Christie’s inspiration for the setting of And Then There Were None (formerly Ten Little Niggers), her best murder mystery.
Mewstone island, just off the coast of Devon, which we passed yesterday, is much more inaccessible, in spite of being just off the coast. In 1744, a peasant convicted of a petty crime was sentenced to deportation to the island for seven years(!). One imagines the local magistrates may have favoured another bestseller, namely Daniel Defoe, whose eponymic hero’s exploits had been published in 1719 to huge popular acclaim.
So much for islands being idyllic!
Outro
And so my journey’s at an end. Instead of lacing op my boots and setting out on the trail, I find myself on a train bound for London.
Having never tried sustained hiking before, I didn’t know what to expect, but I’m glad to say that it has been a great and very meditative experience. In total we did 200 km this week, and climbed up 8,800 m and down again, or the equivalent of 25 Empire State Buildings. Now, the South West Coast path is 1,050 km altogether, so I haven’t done more than a fraction of it, but – to paraphrase the ebullient Bill Bryson – I hiked it in rain and sun, I hiked it on the beaches and on the cliffs, I hiked it laughing, I hiked it crying, I HIKED the SWC.
The lasting impression of the coastal path is one of great natural beauty, and it’s surprising to me that there were so few hikers on it. (Don’t get me wrong, I’m happy we were alone most of the time, as the experience wouldn’t have been the same otherwise!)
The one person I couldn’t have done it without, whose adventure this really is, who was on the trail two weeks before I arrived and still will be for two more after I’ve gone, is my staunch hiking companion Florian. You set me on the path and pointed me in the right direction and for that I owe you. Happy trails!
At the outset of every year I pause and think about what I want to achieve. This year was different.
I got L for fall break this year. The children’s mom and I decided to split the kidlets for the first time. And now I was nervous.
I was thinking about what I want to try to achieve in 2018 when I came across 
It’s fair to say the year ended on 
Remember New Year’s Eve? And the 
So there is this country that I’ve been to dozens of times for work, and never really saw, even though it’s tiny, and right next door. Or rather, I never bothered, because it was tiny and right next door. And I associate it with work. How interesting could it be?
I’ve come to Mallorca on holiday with my brother. It’s with some reluctance I admit this: The place has always been a byword for package holidays of the kind up with which I will not put. Back in the days of socialist Sweden this was where people escaped the state monopoly on booze and sunshine to pig out on an abundance of both – but there is more to the island than its bad reputation would have you believe.
