Temporary bloglessness
7 June, Ian
Tomorrow we set off on the GR20. It's just under
200 km of walking but the difficulty is in the mountains and the terrain rather
than the distance: the first day, for example, kicks off with ~1,500m of ascent
- about 4 times the height of England's highest "mountain". Last time I did it
in cheap boots and they were quickly torn to shreds by the granite - every day
Pete had to help me apply second skin to my blisters. Also I took a fall quite
early on and was chewing Solpadeine (which quickly lost effectiveness) for the
rest of the walk. This time I'd like to think that we're better prepared. At
least we have better boots.
In honesty, we're both a little apprehensive. The three main factors that affect how hard we'll find it are our fitness, the weather and our pack weight. Since we can't do anything about the first two of these now, we're concentrating on the third. I packed my rucsac last night, starting with the 2 kg of water with which we'll set off every day. Then I tried to strip everything to a minimum, taking out some of the gear I'd originally planned to carry (most of first aid kit, half of the clothes). Given that we each have to take a sleeping bag, a sleeping mat and a bivvy bag I think I'm down to the essentials. Or I did until I picked up Paula's sac. As usual, she's managed to get her sac down to the weight of a moderately heavy t-shirt - much less than, say, the normal weight of her make-up bag. (This may be literally true if Paula's make-up kit is weighed when she's carrying one around professionally.) Anyhow, I think we've both minimised as much as we can.
When I returned from the walk with Pete I was, I lost a load of weight (I'm guessing I was about 20lb lighter than I am now), largely because we hardly ate. Strangely, I think I'm as fit now as I was when we set off the first time, though I wish that I'd been doing the regular running that I was up until a year or two ago. Hanging out in Calvi anticipating the walk has led me to reflect on several aspects of my condition now relative to then. I feel surprisingly unchanged. Life events since then have been good; I guess I might question whether my career choices have always met the highest fairy-tale standard, but I've met some great people and get to take this year away so they can't have been too far off. Zoe and Heidi didn't exist then, of course, and I can't and don't want to remember life without them.
My last, as yet unresolved, packing choice concerns what book to take. I frittered away all of my time at Gatwick doing web stuff (ordering a new photo album - family have to endure more than 5 times as many photographs as web followers, posting the girls' newsletters on line, updating my mac software etc) and didn't get myself any new books. By the way, if you bookmark the blog rather than navigating here through our homepage you may care to check out the Morocco snaps that I posted at the weekend.
Don't know why but I really would like to take one of Patricia Highsmith's Mr Ripley novels. I read The Talented Mr Ripley many years ago and found it very unsettling - I haven't read another one since but now I want to. Failing that, I'd like to read one of the few John Updike novels that I haven't read, or one of the better Philip Roth novels (the half dozen that I've read divide evenly between the brilliant - such as The Human Stain - and the borderline unreadable - such as American Pastoral). At the local bookstores they do have some English-language books but nothing that I really want. There's a predictable selection of middle-brow north London novelists (I don't know if they actually live there but you probably know what I mean - Julian Barnes, Nick Hornby, Zadie Smith, Nikki Richie, Tim Lott) who hold no appeal to me at the moment. There's also a pre-Bram Stokes vampire novel that I'm quite tempted by in one of the stores, which has the bonus of being appealingly slim, and some Barbara Vine books, which I suppose I'd enjoy. But no Highsmith, Updike or Roth. My likely fall-back is to take The Beak of the Finch, which I was planning to read in the US just prior to flying to The Galapagos.
Of course, we wont be on line and since the walk runs through the remote mountains we wont get a phone signal for most of it. Last night we finally decided to ask Paula's parents and the girls to bring my mac with them when they meet us in Vizzavona, so at the end of next week I may be able to post a blog and check email. We're spending a couple of days at Vizzavona - 9 days into the walk - to recuperate. If you ever do the walk I'd advise that you do this and take a day off somewhere in the first week. Although the walk itself only crosses one or two roads (literally), there are some attractive-looking detours that you can take to the mountain villages.
Yesterday we went down to the beach again in the afternoon. If you asked me to choose how I wanted my sea I'd probably ask for it to be at this temperature so you can easily walk in and swim and float around. But this is a sign of mental softness. The sea that I most enjoy is the cold sea off the Dorset's Hive Beach. It takes an effort of will to get in but once you do you get an endorphin rush and there's nothing finer than to be be looking back over the superb Dorset landscape of green hills and golden cliffs. Hive Beach shelves off very aggressively, which is ideal for swimming, though much less safe - people die there occasionally, sometimes after being swept in while walking along the shore. Also at the right time of year if you dive down you find that the sea bed is thick with huge spider crabs whose shells wash up onto the beach. There are, though, some days when Hive Beach is just too cold - my threshold is marked by a freezing sensation in my eyeballs that no amount of energetic front crawl will shake off. There's none of this in the main beach at Calvi - you can walk out for a couple of hundred yards before the water rises above your waist, so the girls can play unsupervised. And while they may be there I've not yet seen one of these at the Hive Beach:
And the view back from the sea here is as beautiful in Dorset.
I wonder who we'll meet on the walk. The majority of walkers are French followed by Belgians and Germans; less than 5% of those doing the GR20 are English and only about 2% are from Corsica! Only about 35% of those walking the GR20 complete it, with the majority either only intending to do parts of it or simply dropping out. On the beach this afternoon I met 3 guys who have flown over from Belfast via Nice today to start the walk tomorrow - they plan to go as far as Vizzavona. And I saw three French girls who were evidently about to start too, judging from their kit (they look far too fresh to have just finished it). If there are very many people doing it we wont get sleeping space in the refuges - they typically have space for up to 30 but the smallest can only accommodate 14. At any that are full we'll have to use our bivvy bags - these are goretex bags that fit over a sleeping bag to give you protection if you sleep outside. They're supposedly breathable so you can zip yourself right in if it rains, but it would be too much like being in a body bag for me to want to do this. They save us having to pack a tent.
Wish us luck. If you hear from us in the next week something went wrong. If you haven't heard from us by next Sunday the telecoms let us down at Vizzavona and it'll be another week after that before the next entry.
In honesty, we're both a little apprehensive. The three main factors that affect how hard we'll find it are our fitness, the weather and our pack weight. Since we can't do anything about the first two of these now, we're concentrating on the third. I packed my rucsac last night, starting with the 2 kg of water with which we'll set off every day. Then I tried to strip everything to a minimum, taking out some of the gear I'd originally planned to carry (most of first aid kit, half of the clothes). Given that we each have to take a sleeping bag, a sleeping mat and a bivvy bag I think I'm down to the essentials. Or I did until I picked up Paula's sac. As usual, she's managed to get her sac down to the weight of a moderately heavy t-shirt - much less than, say, the normal weight of her make-up bag. (This may be literally true if Paula's make-up kit is weighed when she's carrying one around professionally.) Anyhow, I think we've both minimised as much as we can.
When I returned from the walk with Pete I was, I lost a load of weight (I'm guessing I was about 20lb lighter than I am now), largely because we hardly ate. Strangely, I think I'm as fit now as I was when we set off the first time, though I wish that I'd been doing the regular running that I was up until a year or two ago. Hanging out in Calvi anticipating the walk has led me to reflect on several aspects of my condition now relative to then. I feel surprisingly unchanged. Life events since then have been good; I guess I might question whether my career choices have always met the highest fairy-tale standard, but I've met some great people and get to take this year away so they can't have been too far off. Zoe and Heidi didn't exist then, of course, and I can't and don't want to remember life without them.
My last, as yet unresolved, packing choice concerns what book to take. I frittered away all of my time at Gatwick doing web stuff (ordering a new photo album - family have to endure more than 5 times as many photographs as web followers, posting the girls' newsletters on line, updating my mac software etc) and didn't get myself any new books. By the way, if you bookmark the blog rather than navigating here through our homepage you may care to check out the Morocco snaps that I posted at the weekend.
Don't know why but I really would like to take one of Patricia Highsmith's Mr Ripley novels. I read The Talented Mr Ripley many years ago and found it very unsettling - I haven't read another one since but now I want to. Failing that, I'd like to read one of the few John Updike novels that I haven't read, or one of the better Philip Roth novels (the half dozen that I've read divide evenly between the brilliant - such as The Human Stain - and the borderline unreadable - such as American Pastoral). At the local bookstores they do have some English-language books but nothing that I really want. There's a predictable selection of middle-brow north London novelists (I don't know if they actually live there but you probably know what I mean - Julian Barnes, Nick Hornby, Zadie Smith, Nikki Richie, Tim Lott) who hold no appeal to me at the moment. There's also a pre-Bram Stokes vampire novel that I'm quite tempted by in one of the stores, which has the bonus of being appealingly slim, and some Barbara Vine books, which I suppose I'd enjoy. But no Highsmith, Updike or Roth. My likely fall-back is to take The Beak of the Finch, which I was planning to read in the US just prior to flying to The Galapagos.
Of course, we wont be on line and since the walk runs through the remote mountains we wont get a phone signal for most of it. Last night we finally decided to ask Paula's parents and the girls to bring my mac with them when they meet us in Vizzavona, so at the end of next week I may be able to post a blog and check email. We're spending a couple of days at Vizzavona - 9 days into the walk - to recuperate. If you ever do the walk I'd advise that you do this and take a day off somewhere in the first week. Although the walk itself only crosses one or two roads (literally), there are some attractive-looking detours that you can take to the mountain villages.
Yesterday we went down to the beach again in the afternoon. If you asked me to choose how I wanted my sea I'd probably ask for it to be at this temperature so you can easily walk in and swim and float around. But this is a sign of mental softness. The sea that I most enjoy is the cold sea off the Dorset's Hive Beach. It takes an effort of will to get in but once you do you get an endorphin rush and there's nothing finer than to be be looking back over the superb Dorset landscape of green hills and golden cliffs. Hive Beach shelves off very aggressively, which is ideal for swimming, though much less safe - people die there occasionally, sometimes after being swept in while walking along the shore. Also at the right time of year if you dive down you find that the sea bed is thick with huge spider crabs whose shells wash up onto the beach. There are, though, some days when Hive Beach is just too cold - my threshold is marked by a freezing sensation in my eyeballs that no amount of energetic front crawl will shake off. There's none of this in the main beach at Calvi - you can walk out for a couple of hundred yards before the water rises above your waist, so the girls can play unsupervised. And while they may be there I've not yet seen one of these at the Hive Beach:
And the view back from the sea here is as beautiful in Dorset.
I wonder who we'll meet on the walk. The majority of walkers are French followed by Belgians and Germans; less than 5% of those doing the GR20 are English and only about 2% are from Corsica! Only about 35% of those walking the GR20 complete it, with the majority either only intending to do parts of it or simply dropping out. On the beach this afternoon I met 3 guys who have flown over from Belfast via Nice today to start the walk tomorrow - they plan to go as far as Vizzavona. And I saw three French girls who were evidently about to start too, judging from their kit (they look far too fresh to have just finished it). If there are very many people doing it we wont get sleeping space in the refuges - they typically have space for up to 30 but the smallest can only accommodate 14. At any that are full we'll have to use our bivvy bags - these are goretex bags that fit over a sleeping bag to give you protection if you sleep outside. They're supposedly breathable so you can zip yourself right in if it rains, but it would be too much like being in a body bag for me to want to do this. They save us having to pack a tent.
Wish us luck. If you hear from us in the next week something went wrong. If you haven't heard from us by next Sunday the telecoms let us down at Vizzavona and it'll be another week after that before the next entry.
Posted: Tue - June 7, 2005 at 07:07 PM
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Published On: Feb 08, 2006 06:20 PM
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Published On: Feb 08, 2006 06:20 PM