It's a fucking learning experience!
We started out to do our first walk today: taking a bus to just outside the town and walking a long (loooong) loop back to our hotel. The company estimates it at five hours of walking, and says to allow seven when you add rest stops and lunch breaks and so on.
First the bus let us off at the wrong place. Then -- epic fail #1 -- we thought it had let us off too soon rather than too late, and walked way too far along the road looking for where we wanted to be, before realizing and backtracking alllll the way again. Having now walked two hours already, we decided to just do an out and back partway along the loop, to a conveniently placed visitors' centre and back, and then catch the reverse bus back home, but -- epic fail #2 -- forgot to check the return bus schedule. (I thought I had it downloaded, so I didn't think to check the bus stop sign; but I did not have it downloaded.)
Then we had to cast about a bit at the start of the walk, because the directions were a bit confusing; we'll be sending a note to the company about a few infelicities. Starting with, they said there was a red phone box at the bus stop we wanted to get off at, and since we'd been watching and hadn't seen one, that's why we thought we'd been let off too soon; but the phone box is not (is no longer?) red, so we'd missed it. (We still should have realized where we were from other clues, but that threw us off at the start. For the rest of it, I blame catastrophic jetlag.)
Anyway, we finally got ourselves oriented and hiked crosscountry to the visitors' centre. It was a lovely walk! Gorgeous scenery of hills and farms, sunny and windy and cool. It amazes and delights me that we can just blithely walk into and across farmers' fields, past (and sometimes carefully through) their cattle and sheep herds.
Thankfully the visitors' centre was open and had (a bathroom and) free wifi -- cellphone signal was bad to nonexistent all day, and never strong enough for a data connection. So we were able to get online and check the return bus schedule, which turned out to be: one passing in an hour, and we could not have backtracked fast enough to catch it, and one passing in four hours, which would mean idling by the side of the road for two and a half hours. And that was it for the day. If we'd remembered to check the schedule before heading out, we could have made sure to turn around and head back in time to catch the first one. Epic fail.
Plus, by the time we got to the centre, Geoff's feet were very tired and he didn't think he was up to backtracking across country the way we had come. Going back along roads would have been easier walking, but significantly longer, plus the roads are quite narrow and have virtually no verge, so walking along them, as we had done in the morning, meant constantly jumping up onto the few steep inches of grass and bramble between the roadway and the hedge whenever a car came by.
So we punked out and phoned the taxi guy who had picked us up at the rail station the day before and taken us to our hotel (as I've remarked to a couple people, yesterday we took a car to a train to a bus to a plane to a train to a train to a train to a taxi to our hotel), and he was willing to come pick us up and take us back to our hotel. (For a lot of money, but our only alternative was to hitchhike, which is our absolute last resort.) He's a friendly guy, very loquacious with details and anecdotes about the area, but his accent is so unfamiliar to us that I think we miss a quarter to a third of what he says! When Geoff phoned him, he wasn't familiar with the visitors' centre we were at and asked for our what3words location, and I was worried that the words would get mistranscribed because his accent and Geoff's are so different. But Geoff spelled each word out, and he did manage to find us, though it took him forty-five minutes to get there: "that's the middle of nowhere!" he'd exclaimed to Geoff when he'd pulled up our location. We had a pleasant wait sitting outside at one of the centre's picnic tables, and after a while struck up a conversation with a local man who was bicycling around the area. He confirmed that it's very isolated; once the volunteer staff of the visitors' centre go home, there's very few people around.
Anyway, now we're back at the hotel, rather earlier than we'd expected to end the day! In the end, though, it wasn't a bad day. Now Geoff is napping and I'm blogging, after which there will be a lot of showering before dinner. And we have learned many mistakes not to make on tomorrow's hike!
An irony here is that I was a little worried that I wasn't in good enough shape for this week, and would be holding Geoff back, and instead it was Geoff who flagged today! In fairness, his pack is heavier than mine; he carries more things. (Even when he was already starting to flag, he offered to take my half-full water bottle in trade for an empty one, to lighten my load at his expense; I declined the offer.)
Tomorrow's hike is listed as "not a long day, but a hard one": four and a half hours of walking, they say to allow six hours in all, and a cumulative ascent of 750 meters. Here's hoping we can make it!
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ride_4ever) wrote2025-09-06 11:05 pm
