extract

and now for a wee taster...    



(From the introduction)
...In many ways we were extraordinarily naïve long-distance walkers. For a start we had no extensive training or experience: we had once in about 5BC (Before Children) walked from the south coast of Spain to the highest peak in the Sierra Nevada, about ten thousand feet up, in three days, and five years ago went up Helvellyn one day at the end of January, and that was about it. We practised for this trip by walking out of York for 15 miles and getting the bus home on several weekends through the winter. Furthermore we had no specialist hiking gear. We went to an outdoor gear shop and bought lightweight rucksacks, sleeping bags, trousers and a T-shirt or two, but didn’t take a tent, along with all the accessories needed for bivouacking out on mountainsides like cooking-pots, gas stoves etc. We didn’t buy new specialist anoraks, relying on our old showerproof jackets, and we didn’t buy those special hiking sticks like ski-sticks. We did need to buy a couple of regional maps in Germany but once we hit the E1 we only needed Arthur Krause’s excellent guide (Kompass, Innsbruck) until we got to Italy, where we had to purchase one local map to make the connection back to the E1, and then from Pavia had the invaluable collection of maps of the Via Francigena with directions in Italian and English (Terre di Mezzo, Milan).

The trip was planned with meticulous foresight in the certain knowledge that:

a)  we didn’t want to book every night’s accommodation before we left;

b)  we wanted to be able to change each day’s route or destination at the drop of a hat depending on the weather, tiredness, hunger, etc. ;

c)  nothing would go according to plan anyway, but

d)  we would cover at least the minimum number of miles needed to walk from York to Rome....

(So we got as far as Holland, and left Goudereede on March 26th)...

DAY 26   GOUDEREEDE – OUDE TONGE (26 km.)   Even warmer.  c19º


(We went off through the village) to find the Deltapad, a long-distance footpath which goes across the Maas/Rhine delta towards Antwerp. We had been advised that it went through an area called the Slikken, which until 1971 was a large mudflat and salt marsh influenced by the tides. After the building of the dams, it became dry land populated by scrub, bushes and small trees, but the path took us through a kind of primeval swamp. We had to take our boots off and wade in the water, which soon became knee deep for about two kilometres. It seems that at high tide – or perhaps at exceptional spring tides – the water is pushed up above ground level. In any case it wasn’t rainwater as it hadn’t rained for weeks. A unique biosphere is created: the pools contained quantities of frog-spawn, and who knows what was lurking in the mud underfoot, but we pressed on, thinking “this must surely end just around the corner”. We had been warned not to wander into the undergrowth beside the path for fear of catching Lime disease from ticks, but no-one had mentioned the fact that we would have to negotiate this replica of the Florida Everglades!

After emerging from the swamp with freezing fizzing feet we walked beside reclaimed land next to herds of semi-wild Fjord horses, deer and oxen which have been introduced over the last 30 years to graze upon the recently sown grasses. We finally came upon a sea-dyke we could walk upon with our faces to a stiff breeze, past whirring wind turbines, looking out over the inland sea on our right. We passed the bridge over to the next island and found our way to Oude Tonge, a fishing village, where we looked for a place to stay and discovered a little hotel in the main square.

There we stopped for the night, after having a beer at The Goat, where various members of the landlord’s family and friends engaged us in conversation and gave us useful tips about travelling in southern Holland while a 70-year-old African parrot cackled hilariously in the background....

( Later - much later - in the Black Forest)...

DAY 74  FORBACH – OCHSENSTALL (22 km.)  Cool but clearer.  c12º

We set off on another cold morning to rejoin the E1 at the top of the hill near a reservoir, meeting an old couple in their eighties dressed in very old-fashioned hiking gear – or was it just their traditional Sunday best? ‒ on their way down towards Forbach. The track continued to wind its way up and up: when the sun came out it was quite warm but very chilly in the shade. And there was a lot of shade! Occasionally the path, which was a gravel track wide enough for a forestry vehicle, would emerge from the dense dark canopy of the pinewoods and a wide panorama would unfold on our right hand side. There were a lot of groups about again – “Sunday walkers!”, we caught ourselves smirking once ‒  some of whom seemed to have to shout at each other even when walking very close together, and many off-road cyclists who spent a lot of time whizzing downhill and not much time struggling up, as far as we could see. The path ran alongside the main road, the picturesque Schwarzwaldhoherstraße (Blackforesthighroad) to a bikers’ caff, where a delightful narrow footpath veered off to the left into the woods up to Ochsenstall, which is an amazing old wooden chalet-type bunkhouse, specially built in the early 1900s for summer hikers and winter skiers (*Fig. 20). The walls of the large café/common room downstairs were covered with old photos of tanned men climbing sheer rock-faces in plus-fours and fingerless gloves, or ladies standing on skis with long dresses covering their ankles, with captions like “OCHSENSTALL, 1908”. The place is now run by a young couple, and she said she’d cook us whatever we fancied since we were the only guests. However as it was getting dark another walker arrived: Konrad, a German of about 35 or 40 who spoke Russian and Polish and had done a lot of farm-work all over Europe. He was walking on the Westweg heading north from Basel and told us there were quite a few cheap places to stay the next night in Kniebis. He said he might set off with us in the morning and go down to Mummelsee, which is a small lake famous in German folklore.

(to be continued...)