We’d been talking about going to Nepal for about a year, off the back of some fantastic European hikes that we’d done previously. Nepal felt like the next adventurous and ambitious journey so we did tons of research, found a recommended trekking company and agreed a route that seemed to fit our needs. We described ourselves as experienced hikers, which we are, but it would seem that’s different to being an experienced Himalayan hiker, as we were to find out. But we did prepare, (as much as walking in Norfolk can prepare you for ridiculous elevation increases), and counted down the days excitedly.
And so we left home on a cloudy September afternoon and found ourselves about 18 hours later stepping out blinking into the sunshine of the Kathmandu airport exit, and witnessing for the first time the absolute chaos of a Nepalese city. We managed to find a taxi driver in the throng of people near the exit, threw our bags in the boot and ourselves in the back, and went on the first of many bum clenching rides that we were to have in the next couple of weeks. Heading into Kathmandu meant more and bigger potholes that we’d ever seen, it meant near misses with other cars and scooters that seemed to be heading at us like a weird video game. It meant car and bike horns constantly sounding as vehicles overtook on both sides, and it meant that every right turn was preceded by a small prayer and a brush of the lucky Buddha tassels hanging from the rear view mirror. We had quite a few of these journeys to remember, many with our Italian friend Alberto in the front seat, regularly crossing himself. On a later bus journey from Pokhara to Kathmandu he told me that his watch had recorded 10,000 steps in four hours simply from sitting in the seat and going over the bumps. I’ll not describe every journey in detail, as it might trigger some latent PTSD, but you’re just going to have to take my word that, in the most peaceful and serene country that we’ve ever been to, travelling as a passenger in any motor vehicle is like watching Grand Theft Auto at double speed while someone holds a gun to the side of your head. And no accidents, or at least none that we saw – just as you think that you’re bound to be sandwiched by two other cars, or the pillion rider in the motorbike will fly off at the next pothole, time slows down slightly and order is briefly restored, just in time for you to open your eyes to see the next near-miss.
But trekking was what we were here to do, so let’s return to that. We met up with the trekking company the day after we got to Kathmandu, borrowing poles, sleeping bags and duffel bags for the journey, and, one curry, two beers and a sleep later, met up again at 0630 to take the bus to Pokhara. We weren’t entirely sure even then who was going to be o the trip, but we were soon joined by our guide (Sandeep), porters (Anish and Nara) and another trekker, Alberto. We were incredibly lucky to spend the next couple of weeks in their company. Sandeep is funny, considerate and knowledgeable. Both porters astonished us by carrying about 25kg from a strap resting across their foreheads and marching across climbs and descents that we could barely manage with poles. And Alberto appeared to be immediately in tune with both of us – about halfway through the trek one of us mentioned David Foster Wallace and we had about 20 minutes on Infinite Jest while going uphill, completely forgetting that Mrs E had been left behind at the start of the conversation. He had quite a lot to share with Mrs E as well – they both had concerns about blisters, stomach issues and altitude sickness, with Mrs E falling to two out of three of these – Alberto was a trained pharmacist and appeared to have a bottomless rucksack containing a chemist’s solution to every ailment.
So that was the crew that set off – first on the bumpy bus ride to Pokhara, then in a car to Nayapul, then our first trek to Hile. This was a relatively straightforward 10k hike, mainly uphill, but all done in a few hours and readying us for the experience of tea houses and longer days to come.
We made eight tea-house stops on our trek, and they were all pretty similar – very basic rooms separated by plywood walls, occasional warm water, and communal eating areas where there was a standard menu set by the Nepalese authorities. A bit of variation in this as you get further away from the road, as everything has to be carried by mule or porter (and only by porter once you cross past the sanctuary border), so by the time you get to the base camps, everything that you’re eating, living in and using for power (eg huge LPG bottles) has been carried there by hand for at least two days. While tea houses aren’t necessarily the most sophisticated holdings by western standards, they still use plenty of aluminium doors, steel beams, corrugated iron, cement and timber – all lugged there on the backs of porters negotiating ludicrously steep steps and paths. The standard tea-house menu is fairly limited, but it doesn’t really matter as long as you like Dal Bhat – the Nepalese national dish that always has a bowl of dhal, a mound of rice and a vegetable curry, together with whatever relishes are available where you are. Most Nepalese that we met ate Dal Bhat twice a day if they can – usually with their hands, mixing curry and rice together on the plate and making little mouth sized balls. The portions are really generous, and there’s always an offering of more just when you think you might still be hungry. And they’re totally what you need to power your hiking.
We were at almost 3,000m by the second day, and on the third morning hiked by head torch at 0430 to the top of Poon Hill, to watch the sunrise onto Annapurna, Dhaulagiri, Fishtail and Himchuli mountains. Mrs E gave up the 800m ascent at about half way, and lay down on a bench with Nara looking after her, but after we’d been at the top for about 20 minutes waiting for the sunrise, she emerged from the final steps with Nara grinning beside her. Apparently her main motivation for her Lazarus-like performance was a concern that I might be left on my own to describe the experience in the future. Proper FOMO! And she was right, as it happens. There wasn’t much cloud about, and it seemed to be clearing just before the sun emerged. I don’t really believe in God but if I did I’d be thinking that he had the biggest ever SAD light – the mountains changed colour completely, lit up in a deep yellow light.
Three long days of hiking (and dragging up and down huge climbs and stony descents around 3,000m), and we were ready for the climb to Annapurna Base Camp at 4,130m. This would be the first time we’d gone over 3,200m, and we were both nervous about altitude sickness, which every other trekker we’d previously met before appeared to have had. In the event, it wasn’t too bad, although we both had a bit of difficulty catching our breath as we climbed, and Mrs E struggled over the final hour – we got to the Namaste sign below base camp and she burst into tears – she described it in the same way that she’d used when finishing a marathon in 2006.
Sunrise the next morning and a shorter amble to see God’s alarm clock light up. This time, however, there were mountains on all sides – we’d trekked north since we left, then at Machhapuchhre Base Camp, headed west into the base of a crown of mountains. It was simply (& literally) wonder-full.
Heading back along the trail was always going to be a bit anti-climactic, but we made the best if it, walking through forests with langur monkeys, past stunning waterfalls and over perilous rope bridges, and covering more ground than we’d planned originally, so we could spend an extra night in Pokhara. The final day of hiking was all downhill and largely on road, which was just as well, as the weather reminded us that we weren’t yet out of the monsoon season, and it tipped down all day. After finally getting down to Nayapol, we ate celebratory snicker bars (that had definitely seen better days), shook hands, hugged, put the bags on the roof rack of the taxi, then squeezed our six sodden bodies inside for the bumpy ride (this time with the added challenge of faulty windscreen wipers and opaque screen), to get back to Pokhara.
A few goodbye beers for Sandeep, Nara and Anish, a great meal at the Little Windows restaurant (recommended, should you ever find yourself in Pokhara), a sleep, an attempt at a run in the rain, a visit to the international mountain museum (recommended as above…), a good curry and a couple of beers, another sleep, then time to head back to Kathmandu. We flew back and Alberto took the bus, which in the end took him 12 hours (it’s only 200km, but the roads are horrendous). We had the best part of the day in Kathmandu, had a couple of drinks with a very tired Alberto in the New Orleans bar (recommended if you find yourself thirsty in Kathmandu…), a quick nightcap overlooking the city, with the top of the Swayambhunath temple lit up (we’d visited a couple of weeks before and it was great, so if you ever find yourself in Kathmandu…), and then another sleep.
We’d arranged to visit the Pashupatinath Temple in the morning. This is one of the oldest and the largest Hindu temples in the world, and sits on the banks of the Holy Bagmati river, so it’s used for funerals, on one side of the river and annual celebrations of the passing of loved ones on the other. As we wandered into the temple complex, we were met by an ambulance which stopped and despatched a body covered in an orange sheet and decorated with flowers, onto a metal stretcher, to be carried round to the riverside. Keeping our distance, we saw the procession heading to the river side, the washing of the feet in the river, the anointing of the body and finally the procession to the pyre, which we were told would burn for 2-3 hours. A real privilege to be able to witness this – we were on the other side of the river for most of the time, so slightly bizarre amongst the celebratory nature of the other river bank. Finally said goodbye to Alberto, whose plan to have a ‘This Is Water’ tattoo in reference to David Foster Wallace was beginning to make a lot of sense (if you don’t know the quote, have a listen here – if only every graduation speech was like this!), then a taxi ride through the bumpy and teeming streets to sort out our flight back home.
In reading this back, I’m concerned that I might have underplayed the astonishingly poor state of the country. Like most tourists, we saw the bits that tourists see a lot of the time, but it’s impossible to ignore the desperate poverty in both the rural and urban areas. Nepal exports about $1.25 billion in goods every year (there are over 30 companies in the USA that make that each year in revenue), and it’s reliant on India and China for buying most of that, but also for providing almost everything that the country needs. The one exception is electricity, which Nepal has lots of, thanks to its network of hydro-electric dams. But it’s still a nation of subsistence farmers and hugely growing urban areas that seem to serve only to concentrate the poverty.
Fifty years ago, my parents drove me to Heathrow airport and put me on a plane to Karachi, where I was to meet my cousins, aunt, and uncle, who were living and working near Rawalpindi. I was there for only six weeks, and a good deal of that was inside a US/Italian ex-pat compound, but we did manage to travel outside sometimes, and witnessing the poverty juxtaposed with the most astonishing sights of the Hindu Kush and the Kyber Pass was very similar to how the last couple of weeks have felt in Nepal. Pakistan has moved on a little since then, but it’s far from a success story in development terms, and if it takes another 50 years for Nepal to get to where Pakistan is today, then it won’t really say much for civilisation, will it?
Of course it’s wrong to think about this through a western lens and make judgements about how happy people are and what you’d throw away in order to bring whole populations into what we’d consider a better place, but it’s still worth thinking about. And if you think about it and consider it a worthwhile use of money that you don’t really need, here’s a link …
Me and Mrs E had cycled in the Netherlands a couple of times before – the last visit was in November, when the weather was so cold that we had to buy ski mitts for the way home, and shivered our way back to the Hook of Holland past completely frozen dykes. So, naturally, we were up for some more of that, as long as the weather was going to be kind to us, which of course it would be, in early May.
Well, not if the weather forecast was to be believed. With a few days to go, the weather across all of Europe was looking a bit bleak, and where we were heading looked like it was going to be raining all day, every day. And with one day to go (actually, on the day of departure (actually, with about three hours before we were due to leave for Harwich)), when Mrs E asked me to check her bike and I found that the hydraulic brake was completely knackered, it was beginning to look like a pretty crappy time was heading our way.
Mrs E owns two bikes. One is her lovely bike that she’s had for a few years, and which has transported her on a few tours before – a great bike, although, as we found out quite late on in our planning, not very good at stopping. And her new whizzy Dutch E-bike, which has enabled her to get back from a shift at work in record time, and which she’s terribly protective of. Unfortunately, the problem with the other bike meant she had to ride her pride and joy, which left us with a few dilemmas for the trip.
Firstly, it being a nice shiny new bike that she was still working out how to use, she was very protective and didn’t entirely trust all its complex features to always work. But her biggest worry was the likelihood of being able to charge the battery every day – especially since one of the design ‘features’ of this bike is a non-removable battery, which means that the whole bike needs to be near a socket to charge.
I had a different dilemma though. For years on our bike trips we’ve been reasonably well matched, I tend to ride ahead of her and if she needs me to slow down, the deal is that she’ll ring her bell to stop me sailing off into the distance. The first time we cycled in the Netherlands we were heading south through Zandwijk, through all manner of pedestrian traffic, and all I could hear was a regular pinging of her bell. It reminded me of Don Hector, just after Lalo tells him that he can’t find any evidence that Gus is at fault and he’s going back to plan A. Note that you need to have a working knowledge of Breaking Bad/Better Call Saul for that to make sense. If you don’t, just imagine a really impatient hotel guest hammering away at the reception bell. Anyway, Mrs E wasn’t going to be making any Don Hector impressions. Quite apart from the fact that her e-bike has an eerie echo-y bell as part of its gizmo collection, she was never, ever going to be left behind again. I knew this, because when cycling with her in the past, I’d worked incredibly hard to keep up with her, and just as I got alongside she’d press the little ‘boost’ button on the handlebars and disappeared off into the next county.
With all of this potential fretting in mind, we got the bikes on the ferry on Saturday night, had a short sleep in a fabulous cabin, got up at 6, and by 7:30 were pushing the bikes off the ramp, in our full wet weather gear. The fww gear lasted us about 400 metres, as we realised that all the weather forecasts had been wrong – there was no rain to be seen (and there wouldn’t be any for the next 48 hours).
So we headed up the coast, a route we knew reasonably well, heading past Den Haag and Katwijk and Noordwijk, where we had the tour’s first appletaart, and on into Haarlem, where we sat down with some impossibly beautiful people and ate a very trendy Sunday brunch. Because we were off the ferry early, we’d travelled most of the trip by lunchtime, so pootled leisurely along to Zaandijk, where we were staying that night. The route through to Zaandijk has many things to love – fabulous cycle lanes, lovely villages, lots of wildlife, no litter, and not really much in the way of people. Those that you do see seem pretty happy to see you, although the ones that we spoke to seemed a bit nonplussed when we told them that we were here to cycle across the Maarkerwaarddijk.
A word about those cycle lanes. I’ve waxed lyrical in this blog before about the wonders of cycling in the Netherlands. And if you’re bored with that then you can skip this next bit. But the network of cycleways in this country defies belief if you’ve spent your life mixing it with traffic in the UK. In the 1960s, it could easily have gone in a different direction – the Dutch car manufacturing lobby hired an American designer, David Jokinen, to help redesign the streets of Amsterdam and The Hague to make them more car friendly. One of his plans involved concreting over one of the main Amsterdam canals to build a six lane highway. Fortunately, a combination of finances and pressure groups stopped this happening. Key to these groups were the Provos, semi-anarchists who were represented on the Amsterdam city council, and the members of Stop de Kindermoord (Stop Childmurder), which was set up following the death of the daughter, by a speeding motorist, of an Eindhoven journalist. By 1975 there was a standard design manual for road and street development which not only prioritised cycle usage, but complemented it with the concept of living streets and reduced traffic speed. Fast forward to today, and cycling has just become the norm across the Netherlands. Very rarely do you have to have any contact with car drivers, but if you do, you normally have the right of way, it’s very clear whenever you don’t, and car drivers are, to a fault, polite and courteous. As are the cyclists. It’s almost as if there’s a respect for people riding bikes, which may be a surprise to you if you’ve been used to riding a bike in, say, the UK. The paths that we went on had fantastic smooth surfaces, were often well away from the roads in beautiful countryside, had no potholes, no litter, were clearly signed and just wonderful to spend time on.
Back to Zaandijk, which was great for a walk in the evening past all the working windmills and the sort of houses that you see here and almost take no notice of, but which if they were anywhere else in the world, would have a preservation order and a turnstile in front of them immediately. My kids, when they were young, used to play with playmobil, and I never really understood the appeal of the buildings, but I think I do now, having spent a bit of time with the real thing – the buildings are cute but functional, and look like they’ve been designed by architects who are incredibly proficient but who never let go of their sense of fun. Huge windows, over-pitched roofs, shiny doors, intricate brickwork, immaculate gardens – like a set of childs’ toys increased to adult size without gaining any of the full sized mess.
To bed then, and up for breakfast looking over the mist, to just about make out the windmills on the other side of the river:
We were headed for Enkhuizen this morning, via Hoorn, and planned to cycle over the Maarkerwaarddijk in the afternoon, ending up in Lelystad for the evening. On the way we saw yet more fabulous cycle paths, borders of grass and cowslips and elderflower along uninterrupted and unpopulated paths, and pastoral scenes of springtime that made Mrs E go aah in all the right places. We saw ducklings, goslings, lambs and foals in quick succession, so much so that Mrs E titled the road ‘post-natal avenue’ – she was a woman very much in her element.
The Maarkerwaarddijk was a big deal for us, and almost the whole point of the trip. Mrs E has a thing about bridges – a few years ago we took a trip to Malmö, just so that we could go across the bridge that connects Denmark to Sweden, which we did, four times in total. We’d originally planned to cross the Afsluitdijk to the north of here, but the mileages didn’t quite work out. There’s not much in it – the Afsluitdijk is 32 km long, and the Maarkerwaarddijk is 30km, so they’re both pretty sizeable pieces of engineering.
Both dams were designed and built by Cornelius Lely, who figured that the Zuiderzee would be a safer place for all concerned if it was closed in. This had a massive impact on geography, ecology, fishing and farming, made the resulting massive lakes into fresh water (I’ve no idea how), and massively reduced risks of flooding. The only reason I know any of this is because we’d made good time across to Einkhuizen, so decided to grab a coffee in the Zuiderzee museum, which has its entrance just before the Maarkerwaarddijk. Before we knew it, we’d bought tickets to go and look round the museum, and were told that it was just a 20 minute boat trip away. A little bit unsure about delaying our ride, not to mention leaving all our gear unlocked on the bikes, we still went over, and on the on the other side of the boat trip found a living museum, full of Dutch artisans in aprons and clogs, a full blown wedding in progress, loads of buildings restored to the 1900s, and an indoor museum which told us everything that we ever needed to know about the Zuiderzee. Just fabulous.
And just a quick boat trip back to find our belongings still attached to our bikes, and to start the two hour journey over the dam
Which was, of course, also fabulous. Huge sea lakes on each side of the road, great crested grebes that seemed to be located at exactly 50m intervals, and heads down for 30km. Unfortunately, heads down was about right, as we also had the company of about 5 million sand mites who were constantly swarming into our path, and mouths and eyes and ears. Horrible. They eased off after about 90 minutes though, and we had the last few miles of the road sweeping away from the dam and round into Lelystad, to ourselves.
Into Lelystad, named after Cornelius Lely, and, in keeping, seemed to be full of big buildings made out of concrete. It was a bit of a shock after the nature trail we’d been on for the previous 50 miles, but very friendly, and we soon found ourselves sat down at a slightly bizarre all you can eat sushi techno-buffet, where we knocked back about half our body weights in won ton soup, sushi, fried seafood, noodles, and anything else that looked good on the menu. As a result, we both felt pretty sick for the next 24 hours, but we were on holiday and determined to get our moneys worth.
Up in the morning for a short ride to Amsterdam, which was just as well, as it chucked it down with rain all day. The sort of thing that would make a cycling holiday really hard work, unless of course you had an electric bike, which at least one of us did. No shortage of water in general – as well as tipping it down from above, we had the Markermeer on our right for most of the journey, and sometimes to our left as well. Into Amsterdam then, and able to mix with lots of other cyclists, and to the Social Hub hotel, ostensibly a student hotel but with fabulous rooms, great food, really lovely staff and great facilities. The sort of place that no student deserves, of course.
We’d got to Amsterdam early because we had a booked slot to visit Anne Frank’s house, which was suitably sobering, and made our way back out into the rain feeling a mixture of depression and inspiration.
Wandered around Amsterdam in the evening, still marvelling at the architecture and having the sort of discussion that you have when you’re in a city that you love (how would we manage if we lived here, could we afford to, what would we do with the dogs, would anyone ever come and visit etc etc) then back to the Social Hub, where lots of happy young people were chatting and working and playing fussball, despite it being way past their bedtimes.
We expected rain the next day but again got lucky and headed out of Amsterdam to Katwijk, and down through the dunes towards the Hook. We happened across an Ernest Hemingway themed cafe (as you do) on the side of a lake, where we recharged ourselves and Mrs E’s bike, then diverted into The Hague for some light retail therapy. The route out of The Hague took us past all of the embassy and ambassador buildings, which made us feel like we were cycling in Beverly Hills, and soon we were back on the coast, buying up a load of food in Lidl and then hauling it, our bikes and luggage onto the boat. A very civilised picnic in the cabin, a catch up on Teemu Pukki’s emotional farewell to Norwich City (me) and the German occupation of the Netherlands (Mrs E), a brief sleep, positioned so that when we woke up in the night we could see the stars out of the porthole, and a 0530 wake-up, and we were ready to head home.
I’m writing this, having got back this morning to a lively reception from the dogs, and the day before I drive up to Scotland for #1’s stag weekend. This will, apparently, involve some drinking, some hi-jinks and some cycling. But it’s really going to have to go some to match the last few days. Proost!
The plan was pretty simple. I wanted to run/walk around the perimeter of Norfolk, with the minimum of support, and knock out around 170 odd miles in six days. Me and this route have had quite a bit of previous – I tried to run/walk it a couple of years ago, with disastrous results, and for many years I’ve been involved with the Round Norfolk Relay, a great event that follows a similar route, but with 60 teams over 17 stages of a continuous (and thereby, overnight) relay. The Round Norfolk Relay probably deserves a much better write-up than that, so I’ll crack on with that when I’m not wandering around with a stupidly heavy bag on my own.
As with most of these undertakings, I prioritised the playlist over any silly logistics like the best route or the right shoes. And so I set off, literally, with a song in my heart, courtesy of twenty of my favourite albums, a bunch of podcasts and, rather optimistically, a 54 hour audio book of David Foster Wallace’s ‘Infinite Jest’. If you’ve not come across IJ before, I’d recommend a bit of caution when approaching. It’s sometimes referred to as the last great American novel – mainly by fans of post modernist literature who rave on about its meta-fiction leanings and use of tennis as a metaphysical trope. I’m reading IJ as part of a 10 week course where we’re being asked to read 120 pages a week, and so far I’ve managed 120 pages in four weeks, finding bits of it impenetrable, so thought someone else reading it to me might help. Which it has, thus far, but there will get to a point, about 6 hours in where the audio overtakes what I’ve actually read and stops making sense. Which is a delightful segue to the first album to listen to, starting on the early morning train to Cromer, in a bid to decide my favourite live album ever by listening to them really closely. And by the time I’d held both semi finals (Talking Heads/Stop Making Sense vs Johnny Cash/Folsom Prison and the all-R&B battle of Dr Feelgood/Stupidity vs Nine Below Zero/Live at the Marquee), and then held a very close final between Talking Heads and Dr Feelgood, and then allowing THs to clinch the final, partly because of the quality of suits worn by Messrs Byrne & Brilleaux – well, by then I was a good 8 miles into the walk and somewhere between Bacton and Mundesley.
I’d gone wrong at Bacton before by staying on the coast path and not being able to get past the power station without making a 3 mile detour, so I stayed on the beach from Mundesley, hoping to beat the incoming tide, which I just about did. Bacton has put in what I assume are sea defences to protect the cliffs next to the power station – about 3 meters of banked sand which sits above the beach, but which seems to be being blown away by the wind that comes down from the north. So I was lightly sandblasted for a mile or so before heading for Happisburgh, and its postcard lighthouse and church, both sitting perilously close to the cliff edge.
Up along the dunes as far as Horsey, where I took a quick detour to look at the seals. There was a blackboard where the seal people (I assume) had noted that the current seal count was 1,920, although I can’t help feeling that can’t be a particularly precise science.
Stayed on the sand up to Hemsby, where I climbed the steps up to the town, hoping to get something to eat. But Hemsby was shut, as far as I could see. If I’d wanted to fill up at Jack’s Seafood, the Veggie Hut, or Benny’s Beach Kiosk, I was out of luck. And no joy at the Beach Shop or even the RNLI Shop, let alone the giant fibreglass caveman crazy golf course. If you’re from this neck of the woods, you’ll know that Hemsby has been in the news of late, as quite a bit of the town has been condemned to fall off the cliff tops as the sea has washed away what limited defences it has had. And because people can be quite snobbish and cruel, there’s been a fair amount of ‘who cares?’ comment – Hemsby is seen by quite a few people as a poor cousin of Great Yarmouth. But as you walk away from the sad attractions and past/under the town, you realise that that attitude is, well, snobbish and cruel. You can look up at the edge of the cliff, where only last year there were front gardens and the row of telegraph poles that marked the footpath, and now you see the edges of buildings and the poles toppled onto the beach below and it’s really very sad. People lived their lives in those houses, looked after their gardens, tolerated the constant pedestrian traffic in front of them, had kids, moved in, moved out, grew up, lived and died, and now everyone’s being kicked out for their own safety. There are a few disparate concrete and rock defences that have been put on the beach recently to slow down the erosion, but slowing down is probably the best that places like Hemsby can hope for.
On, then, to the hopelessly optimistically named California Sands, then along to Caister, by which time the novelty of the walking /jogging on sand was beginning to wear off (or wear out) , so up to the road again and walked the last bit along the promenade into Great Yarmouth.
My friend P raves about Yarmouth and its history, and I need to go on a visit with him sometime to understand the town a bit more, as up to now I’ve not found that much to love about it. And today was no exception – the quickest way to get to the railway station was through some nondescript streets, an underpass that allowed me sight of the station, and access if I was prepared to cross a few lanes of traffic and a steel mesh bridge. Which I was, cos I had only a couple of minutes before the train left. So I ran as fast as I could, which was an excellent way to get mile 32 on the board.
Day 1 summary – 32 miles, 8hrs 5mins, 66,135 steps, powered by Talking Heads, Dr Feelgood, Nine Below Zero, Johnny Cash, 5 hours of Infinite Jest, and a 3 bean chilli with rice & chips in Winterton.
.oOo.
I’d gone back to Norwich to see Mrs E, sleep in my own bed, and get the heavy bag with all the camping gear. I really wasn’t taking that much stuff but it’s amazing how heavy all this lightweight equipment can be once it’s all packed together and on your back. Everything was in my lovely and cavernous rucksack which I’d bought online purely because it weighed very little, without realising that it was exactly the same material and colour as one of those Ikea bags that you used to get. Cue hilarious jibes from Mrs E as I got everything ready.
I left early, almost managing to avoid waking Mrs E and the dogs, and got the first bus to the station, almost the first train to Yarmouth, and was on my way at exactly 8:08. Which reminds me that I need to write a blog about the number 808… The idea today was to walk, rather than try running, with the Ikea bag, as I only had 20 miles to go to the first campsite. Decided to change plans after the first few miles – the route went inland and I managed to get lost fairly early on, and perilously close to some drainage ditches in finding my way. As it was, with the grass so high and so wet, by the time I was back on decent footpaths my running shoes and socks were completely soaked, and there didn’t seem to be much prospect of getting dry. The walk itself was lovely though, and I made really good progress across fields with no distractions, other than lots of horses, one of which bore an uncanny resemblance to Joey Ramone.
Anyway, after about 6 hours I was nearly at the campsite and it was still only 1430, so I decided to push on to Harleston, get into a hotel which would have a radiator, and cancel the campsite. So this made a nice easy 20 mile walk into a 31 mile route march in soaking feet. Grabbed some food at the Wherry Inn in Beccles and pressed on, through some lovely south Norfolk villages and got to Harleston at about 1900. On the plus side, the room had a bath. On the minus, no radiator, so tried to dry out my shoes in the bar (‘Can I put my shoes by the fire?’ ‘I’m afraid not sir, that fire is just for decoration and produces no heat’) so optimistically put them on the bedroom windowsill and hoped they’d air dry. Which they didn’t.
Day 2 summary – 31 miles, 9 hours 39 minutes, 68,177 steps. Powered by Stevie Wonder/Hotter Than July, Camera Obscura/Let’s Get Out of this Country, 3x Stewart/Campbell leadership podcasts, none of which said anything about leadership, 3 hours of Infinite Jest, and a sweet potato curry & chips.
.oOo.
Woke up in Harleston to sunny skies and the sort of positive feeling that a planned 22 miles, as opposed to the original 34, could bring. And soon I was skipping away from the hotel, literally full of beans and with a another song in my heart (Oliver’s Army, seeing as you asked). Of course, it wasn’t long before I got lost again, and the feet were reassuringly wet before I’d gone more than a few miles. Back on track, I wandered west along the southern county boundary, hopping between Angles Way and Boudicca Way, fields all around for miles, and the solitude only broken by hares and deer running off the path as I approached them. Bliss.
Stopped for lunch in Kenninghall, which also had a Co-op, so I popped in and bought some plasters, as by then I’d had that tell-tale message from my right foot that I was about to lose a toenail. I wasn’t sure what the campsite might have to offer so I also bought some dates and, ever with an eye for a bargain, a half price cheese slice.
This being Saturday on a bank holiday weekend, there were inevitably some other walkers, who seemed very happy to be alive, and a few large groups of teenagers, who didn’t. I met three of these groups, walking the paths with rucksacks even bigger than mine, and looking quite downbeat. You may be familiar with these groups, or even been in one yourself, if someone ever convinced you that you should do your Duke of Edinburgh’s award scheme at school. I’ve not got a lot of time for the royal family, but I do have a sneaking regard for the Duke’s legacy, as he seems to have managed to take perfectly happy teenagers and subject them to abject misery for entire weekends in the name of service. I saw the last group in the distance towards the end of the day, and they all had marching orange rucksack covers, so they looked like they were transporting radioactive waste across the border. I caught up with the group eventually, and cheerily asked the girl at the back if she was having fun yet. ‘No, not really’ she replied, looking pretty fed up with her lot, and for a moment I thought she was going to burst into tears. Thankfully she didn’t, and I walked along the rest of the group trying to be pleasant and positive, asking the lad in front, how much further they had to go. ‘Only another 4 miles’ he replied, in the sort of tone that he might have used to announce that he has double maths next, followed by geography with the creepy supply teacher.
Soon after the DoE encounter, I got to the campsite, which was ideally positioned at the bottom of Peddar’s Way, a path that follows an old Roman road North right to Hunstanton and the sea. It’s a great route and it’s amazing to trek along it, reminding yourself that there were groups of legionnaires putting their backs into making another perfectly straight road across the country. Although you can’t help wondering whether they all got together a few years later and compared notes on their legacy:
‘Well, my crew finished Ermine Street in record time, and I reckon they’l be using that for years to come, possibly renaming parts of it something like the A10’
‘Well, my lot built the Military Way, as a means to support Hadrian’s Wall, and I reckon people will still be admiring its breathtaking engineering for a couple of thousand years’
‘That’s nothing, my team built a road from just outside Thetford to Hunstanton, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it got turned into a barely used footpath in the future.’
Day 3 Summary – 22 miles, 6hrs 30mins, 48,833 steps, powered by Elvis Costello/Armed Forces, Gram Parsons/Grievous Angel, Best of Elmore James, 99% invisible podcast, and a few hours of Infinite Jest. And a veggie burger & chips.
.oOo.
Anyway, I got to the campsite, checked in and got pointed to a field and chose a pitch between a couple of motorhomes. Set up camp, and then went to check out the campsite facilities. The on-site pub would not be providing food, I was told, but they had a few things to eat at the reception. Unfortunately, the only thing that wouldn’t need heating up was a tin of beans. So, cheese slice, cold baked beans and dates for dinner then. Spent a very demoralising couple of hours watching Norwich get taken apart (again) by a fairly average West Bromwich Albion, and, there being very little else to do, decided to go to bed. Had I mentioned how cold it was? It was really cold. So, going to bed was a challenge in itself. I just about had enough clothes to keep warm inside my not-overly-warm sleeping bag. And by enough clothes, I mean socks, pants, tights, trousers, 2 t-shirts, two long sleeve shirts, a down coat, hat and gloves. I convinced myself that I could keep warm like this, if I kept my face inside the zipped up bit of the bag, and tried to sleep.
Sleep did not come particularly easily, and I was conscious at about 0100 that the motorhome next door had decided to play some irritating dance music. This was just about audible enough to be annoying, and annoying is what it was. I managed to drift off, but the music kept up, and it woke me up fairly regularly through the night until about 0400, when I decided that I needed to make some sort of protest. I knew that I should have extricated myself from my sleeping bag to do this, but I was fairly well wedged in, and really didn’t fancy getting cold and knocking on the door of the motorhome, so I took the action that any right thinking Briton and Monty Python fan would take, and decided to fart in their general direction. Now, I’m not one of those amazing people that can summon up tumultuous trumpets at will, but I’m not bad, and I knew the tin of beans would work very much in my favour, so summoned up all my effort into producing something truly reverberating. Despite the racket I’d managed to produce, there was simply no effect on the music, so all was in vain, and I realised all too late, that I’d failed to properly think through my plan. Because farting inside a sleeping bag under multiple layers of clothing, inside a tent, when the only way of keeping warm is to keep your face well inside the sleeping bag, is not to be recommended. The noxious coughing fit that followed the fart also had little effect on the music, so all I’d really achieved was to add toxic fumes to the giddy cocktail of cold, discomfort and noise that had stopped me from sleeping in the first place.
By 0630 and with very little sleep, I decided to get up, pack up, and go, making sure that I knocked on the motorhome door on the way out. Surprisingly, as I emerged from the tent onto the long and inevitably very wet grass, I noticed that the noise wasn’t coming from the motorhome at all, but from somewhere in the distance – it was still going on, and (very obviously now) was some rave event going on a mile or so away in the forest. Obviously, I was a little embarrassed, and I think I noticed the curtain twitch in the motorhome as I stole away in my wet running shoes:
‘I see that idiot camping next door is off early then’
‘Yes, did you hear him last night?’
‘Hear him? Couldn’t not hear him, a bloody sight louder than that rave’
‘Still it’s not surprising – have you seen what he has to eat at night?’
‘Yes, no wonder he’s on his own’
etc etc
Well, at least the early start would allow the long day (32 miles) to be achievable, and there was little chance of getting lost – where the Peddars Way isn’t completely straight, it’s pretty well marked, so I tuned into IJ for a few hours in the bright cold morning. This was the best bit of walking so far, although the silent forest was punctuated a fair bit by the Sunday morning trials bike riders who also seem quite keen on the soft sandy paths. And IJ was a lovely accompaniment. I wasn’t sure if I was really understanding it as deeply as I needed to (although it seemed to make a good deal more sense once I’d gone into that near-hallucinatory state that you get after about 7 hours of exercise), but I think that’s a feature of the whole post-modernistic schtick – if you don’t understand something, you can always tell yourself that the author never intended you to understand it anyway. I got a bit lost listening to a Thomas Pynchon novel once, and was half way through before I realised that the audio app was set on shuffle. So I started again, listening to the chapters in the right order, and it added absolutely nothing to my level of understanding.
Anyway, I was enjoying the whole experience, and decided after 10 miles to try to run for a bit – I was meeting Mrs E later that night and didn’t want to be late. I’d already sent her a series of ‘can you just bring’ messages (Walking boots! Ibuprofen! Nail clippers! Your warm sleeping bag! – it was almost as if I hadn’t planned this very well). I gave her a call and told her about the night’s events, and she convinced me to knock the camping on the head and get accommodation for the last couple of nights. I protested for a bit (my lovely lightweight tent was currently working out at about £50/sleep and I was quite keen to get a bit more use out of it), but I relented, not least as I know that my tent was wet and would be even less inviting next time I put it up. She later told me that, after hearing about the previous night, she was actually driven by the thought of me never, ever going anywhere near her sleeping bag in the future.
Stopped for lunch at a community pub that had just been renamed the King Charles III, and which was sporting a huge England flag outside. Inside, the small dog in the table next to me was trying to look fierce in a Union Jack collar. Almost managed to avoid conversation about the up-coming coronation. Away and a bit more run/walking, past the wind farm around Swaffham and soon got to Castle Rising, which I really wanted to stop at, but didn’t have time. And finally into Great Massingham, where the lovely people at The Dabbling Duck kindly ignored the smell (mainly my shoes) and pointed me upstairs to a room with a bath. Bliss.
Met up with Mrs E and took on clean clothes and walking boots in exchange for very dirty clothes and running shoes. She asked if I’d put the running shoes inside a couple of bags in the boot of the car, as they absolutely stank, and told me the next morning that even so, she’d had to drive home with all the windows open.
Day 4 summary – 32.3 miles, 8hrs 49mins, 67,421 steps, powered by Otis Redding/Soul Manifesto, Sturgill Simpson/Metamodern Sounds, 3 hours of Infinite Jest, and a nut roast & chocolate milk & chocolate drink (not all at once).
.oOo.
The days were going to get even better from here, the Ikea bag was much lighter without the camping gear, and I didn’t have the option of running, as I was in my boots. And the route was into North Norfolk, full of impossibly beautiful villages between great swathes of fields. More and more horse parsley on the road verges and the paths, which seems to be a coastal thing, and which smells of vanilla and celery. And a hill, which I got to after about 9 miles. So I’d been going for about 125 miles at this point, and this was the first hill, which tells you all you need to know about the landscape of Norfolk. Anyway, it’s called Bloodgate hill, and when you get to the top there’s the site of an iron age fort, and you can stand there, and because Norfolk is as flat as it is, see right over the the woods before the sea at the Burnhams, and out to properly shaped fields on all sides, today almost all dark brown and freshly ploughed, with an occasional flashes of early rape seed yellow. I could have stayed there for ages, but I was getting hungry, and headed north to Burnham Market.
Burnham Market has a couple of claims to fame – it was Nelson’s birthplace (although I passed a sign for Nelson’s birth a good two miles before I got to the village), and it’s known by people in Norfolk as Chelsea-on-Sea, for all the second homes and ridiculous cars that descend on it at weekends, spilling out Jessicas and Marmadukes and designer dogs and bemused young nannies. The village centre has a dozen or so shops, one of which is a Joules – hard to imagine that the local population (724 in 2021) can keep that one going. But there’s also a cafe (or, more likely a café) called Tilly’s that made me a sandwich and a coffee without pretending that we were in South Kensington, and I headed out shortly afterwards, narrowly avoiding a collision with a couple wearing matching Breton tops and non-matching but complementary gilets. They were hurrying to miss the rain – when I’d gone onto the cafe the sky had been a glorious blue but now it was really grey. (If you’re from Burnham Market and you’re reading this, it had gone from Lulworth Blue to Elephant’s Breath.) Dodging rain, and more Boden coordinated families, and soon I was heading for the sea.
There’s something wonderful about seeing the sea for the first time. It doesn’t matter if you’re 6 years old and competing for space to look over your Dad’s shoulder to be the first to say “I can see the sea”, or if you’re a 60 year old bloke on his own, climbing over a stile into a field with only half a mile between you and the water. And if you’ve got something wonderful in your headphones at the same time, well it just feels…right. And that’s why, if you’d been travelling on the road from Burnham Overy Staithe to Wells at about four o’clock on the first of May, you might have looked out of your window to see an old man standing on top of a stile, silently and enthusiastically dancing to ‘Life During Wartime’.
This part of the coast has lots of flats and marshes before you see too much water, but it’s beautiful nonetheless. I thought I was on my own when I turned on to the coastal path, but realised, sometimes quite late on, that I was sharing the path with quite a few fully camouflaged bird watchers, lying, sitting or standing perfectly still. They were friendly enough, but I sensed that they were a bit disappointed by their cover being blown by some twit with a big Ikea bag on his back strolling along and wishing them a good afternoon.
The grey sky now just a memory, I headed for Holkham. The beach at Holkham must be a good couple of miles across, and has enormous sandy beaches that wouldn’t look out of place in a brochure for the Seychelles:
After Holkham, across some dunes and woods and into Wells, which was selling Bank Holiday ice creams to familes on the front, and further back into the town, lots of beer to happy people with red faces. Found my bed for the night, left the Ikea bag in the room, and headed to join them.
Day 5 summary – 24.8 miles, 8hrs 08mins (there it is again), 54,881 steps, powered by Long Ryders/Final Wild Songs, Nick Cave/Abbatoir Blues, several hours of Infinite Jest, a demoralising Norwich City podcast, and a prawn sandwich and slice of Billionaire’s (I know, but it was Burnham Market) shortbread.
.oOo.
And so to the last day, the shortest leg, and the delights of the Norfolk coast path for the whole day. The sun was shining, my feet were dry and had the same number of toenails attached as when I’d started, and all was right with the world. And typically, this is where you’d find a ‘however’ thrown in to darken the mood. But there isn’t one, really. I didn’t want to rush this leg, so I just followed the long and winding sandy path past Stiffkey and Morston, passing the sort of harbour that ought to be in a Famous Five book:
Then on to Blakeney, and looking out to Blakeney point, still on the path, before turning back into Cley, crossing over the river and through the village and out again to the beach where, for the first time, I could wander down to the water edge. I say wander, but it was more like moonwalking, as the beach at Cley is gravel, and lots of it, and really difficult to walk on without sinking. And by lots of it, I mean miles and miles, all the way up to Weybourne, where at last you can get on to a cliff path again. The route from Cley through to Cromer is stage 5 of the Round Norfolk Relay, and I made a mental note as I waded through the shingle not to offer to run that leg in this, or any other year. Just before the end of the leg, there’s a climb up the ‘Beeston Bump’, which is one of those hills that is so steep that you have to use your hands to run up. I ran this leg a few years ago and can vividly remember panting my way to the top of the hill, and finding myself at eye level with the shoes of a couple of the running club’s supporters, who’d positioned themselves on the top bench with the express aim of watching their fellow runners go through agony after 10 miles of really hard slog. As I finally got to the top of the path, they both shouted out ‘Well done!’, and Great Running’, which are exactly the things that you shout at runners at any race, but this time I think they really meant it.
After the Bump, it’s a fairly easy stretch down to Cromer, with West and East Runton on the right, and the crashing sea a few yards to the left and lots of yards below. Eventually you get to the bit where you re-join the beach, and with only about half a mile to go, my fairly slow walk turned into a bit of a sulky saunter, as I realised that I didn’t really want this bit to end. It was 1630 and I’d not eaten since breakfast, so I was really hungry, and if I just walked to the steps and went up to the promenade, I could have my fill of anything that Cromer had to offer. Ok, this was basically chips or ice cream, but both sounded quite good. So I climbed the steps. I decided I couldn’t be bothered with chips or ice cream, so I sat on a bench, fished around in the Ikea bag and found a manky protein bar. And then I stopped my watch.
Day 6 summary – 22.3 miles, 7hrs 31mins, 52,465 steps. Powered by The Kinks, Hamish Hawk, Teenage Fanclub, Aztec Camera, T Rex, Velvet Underground, The Bluebells and The Staple Singers. And another 4 hours of Infinite Jest. And one manky protein bar.
.oOo.
Overall – 167.2 miles, 357,952 steps. I listened to almost 19 hours of Infinite Jest, which means I have a mere 37 hrs and 48 mins left. Oh, and 870 pages. Wish me luck x
Mrs E and I are on a diet. I know, I know, neither of us need to and you’re very kind but we have our reasons.
Reason one is that we have returned from Sicily, after 6-8 hours hiking every day, both half a stone heavier than we left. Thereby proving that lots of exercise really didn’t balance off against eating nothing but cake for breakfast and pasta/gelato in the evenings.
We divert at this point on the reasoning front. Mrs E is keen to look a million dollars for Jr Emu#1’s wedding in the summer. I’ve not asked her what her current currency self-valuation is, and, of course, I wouldn’t be so rude, but it’s sad if it’s more than a couple of grand shy of the million, because I think she’s never stopped looking fantastic since the day I met her. Well, there was an incident with a heavy fall involving a trifle dish that made her look like Frank Bruno, but even that was quite endearing. And anyway, self-image is just that, isn’t it? It’s all about how we feel ourselves rather than what others think.
My reason 2 is slightly different. For quite a while now, my fitness has been going down the pan, and I had a look at some of my training diaries from years ago, when I was running at a decent lick. According to these diaries, I could knock out a sub 3 hour marathon in the morning, have a couple of pints and fish and chips at lunchtime, more chips in the evening, and be nicely rested in time for another run the following morning. I couldn’t do anything like that now, and, of course I’m in denial about that all being twenty years ago, so the only factor that I can change is the one that gets me back to the weight I was when I was running well, which is about half a stone lighter than I am currently. I do appreciate that what I’ve just written is the ramblings of a deluded fool, but there’s a voice in my head that keep saying that I’m only a few pounds away from being able to run properly again…
So, different reasons, but the same objective, and we’ve both agreed to follow a plan based on the very lucrative writings of Dr Michael Mosely. I’ve had a bit of a root round and there doesn’t seem to be any family link between Dr Michael and Sir Oswald, and that’s a bit of a surprise, because the latest offering from Dr M has quite bit in common with a very dark, ultra-disciplined and spartan existence. Essentially, the Fast 800 approach instructs you to avoid all food for 16 hours, and then to eat two meals, of around 400 calories apiece, with nothing in between. No sugars, no alcohol, no chocolate, no snacks, no bread and definitely no chips. Frankly, if you enjoy your food. this is not the life for you.
But it makes a bit of sense. There’s links in there with ketosis, which, as a runner, means you need to shift your attention to running slowly to burn fat. Theres a lot of sense in reducing the number and size of your insulin spikes to a couple a day. Giving your body something to do other than processing food all the time seems to be a good call as well. But it’s fairly tough going, especially at the start.
One of the things that you do at the start of the exercise is set your target weight. The target weight is a bit like a carrot on the end of the stick which is attached to the top of your head, and possibly your self-esteem. It’s in sight, but never quite achievable no matter how hard you try to get to it. Incidentally, there are 41 calories in a carrot, which means that you could have 10 of them for lunch. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Dr M’s next book gives us a calorie count for the stick as well, but I digress. Anyway, the point of the analogy is relevant – if you look on social media there are people who have been on this diet for a couple of years and not got to where they want to be – understandably the author has re-purposed the d-word into a ‘healthy lifestyle’.
Beyond the calories, the fast element can be a bit of a challenge, although personally, I’ve not had a huge issue with it. This is because Dr M and I have a bit of ‘previous’ in the from of the 5:2 diet. The idea of this is that 2 days a week you fast for 24 hours, before eating in the evening, and that you don’t go stupid on the other 5 days. I did a variety of this diet for several years, always fasting on a Monday and Thursday. It got me to where I wanted to be physically, but the impact of a 24 hour fast on my mood and mentality was a bit much. Mrs E used to work a late shift on Monday, so I would come home from work to four rowdy boys of various ages, who needed feeding, watering, cleaning, entertaining, tutoring and more, and I’m afraid that between the hours of 1700 and 1900 they mainly just got a lot of tired shouting. After food, which I would often eat without cutlery because I was so hungry, all was fine, but they collectively petitioned against ‘Monday Dad’, and order was restored after a few years by me simply eating a sandwich at lunchtime.
A 24 hour fast is one thing, and it made me feel several shades of rubbish, but it’s as nothing compared to some of the fasting approaches of the past. Fasting has been a part of many religions for as long as religions have been about, of course. And if you want to know about more recent non-religious proponents, look up Upton Sinclair, Edward H Dewey, or my personal favourite, Linda Hazzard, who carried the nickname ‘The Starvation Doctor’. These days, we’d call Hazzard a psychopathic fraudster; she treated people for a range of ailments, and almost always by putting them on starvation diets with maybe a tomato and a couple of oranges a day for months at a time. She was convicted of manslaughter in 1911 for the deaths of at least 15 people at her sanatorium in Washington – a place that the locals named ‘Starvation Heights’.
So , after a few days of getting used to this, and in the knowledge that we’re not anywhere near the experience of being treated by Ms Hazzard, we can manage the fasting bit of this fairly well. Until the last 30 minutes or so before we eat. Thankfully, Mrs E writes up what we’re going to eat a week ahead so we don’t buy any food that we don’t need (let alone any that we might actually enjoy). This helps hugely, because the run up to the whole breaking the fast thing is a bit reminiscent of those hangry Mondays. Except there’s just two of us, and no children around to tell us to grow up and behave.
We bump into each other. I put things back in the fridge before they’ve actually been used. We ask each other multiple times about how long it will take for the food to be ready. I check more than once what we’re actually cooking (which must be annoying) and whether we’ll be allowed to have a spoonful of yoghurt afterwards. Occasionally, when the meals look like they might actually sustain us, we realise that they serve four. Words are muddled, thoughts go foggy, and attention spans reach all time lows.
And then we get to eat. Sometimes we use cutlery. There are 10-12 mouthfuls to enjoy, and then we’re done.
I’d been to Sicily once before, when I was young, naive and, for the duration of the entire trip, drunk. It was a university hockey tour, and probably not the best way to explore Sicily’s culture, geography and people. I look back on the trip with a bit of a shudder, but try to remind myself that everyone does stupid and reckless things when they’re young.
This time was going to be very different. Me & Mrs E wanted to walk the Magna via Francigena, which is a pilgrimage path running from Palermo through the centre of Sicily to Agrigento, and we were promised that we’d (and I rather obviously quote…):
Roam the pure natural landscape of Sicily’s rural backcountry
Stay in villages full of history, such as Sutera, with its Arabic maze of alleys
Experience the enthusiasm, hospitality and pride of the Sicilian people
Try traditional Cannoli pie filled with ricotta, pistachios and candied orange
That sounded like exactly the sort of things that we should be doing in March, so off we went.
Our arrival in Palermo was a bit less idyllic – it’s a big city, and the airport train took us to the centre through some fairly ropey areas, depositing us outside the central station, with Google maps assuring us that we had a 10 minute walk across to our hotel. Half an hour later, having wheeled our cases through cobbles, kerbs and lots of litter, we found the hotel, checked in, and wandered around Palermo looking for our dream candlelit trattoria. One brightly lit vegan burger later, we found a bar that served Mrs E some weapons grade Aperol spritzers , together with huge plates of bruschetta and chips, which were, apparently, a gift from our host, who must have thought that we looked hungry. Our Italian is very limited, so our conversation was a bit stilted, but it did allow him to say “Hello Baby” a number of times at various volumes, and to establish that Paul McCartney and Mick Jagger were both still alive, and that he’d like to visit us in Liverpool at some point. We made arrangements to come back after the walk for further entertainment.
We had a taxi pick us up in the morning to deliver us to Santa Cristina Gela to start the walk. Again, a challenging conversation but we did establish two important things. Firstly we should always follow the red and white path markings. And secondly that GPS was a very good thing indeed. There was some other stuff that may or may not have been about Mussolini and railways, but that was much harder to follow and probably best ignored.
Our walk to Corleone started gently on undulating, soft green grass tracks, shortly giving way to a bit of mud. The first 10km was fine, but then the mud started getting wetter and wetter and turned from mud to clay, and before too long was adding a couple of pounds to our boots.
We heard a couple of days later that Sicilians call people from Corleone ‘Men with feet of clay’, which I don’t think is intended as a compliment, but maybe we were acting like natives with our stupidly heavy boots. We discovered that many of the paths that we took doubled as streams, and quite enthusiastic streams as well, as it had started raining just as we’d started the walk. This meant going down was really scary, and going up was even worse. At one point, we went down a steep muddy path/river bed for about 2km, all the time looking at a river below which our notes said should be crossed carefully, and a grass/mud climb the other side that looked almost vertical. We managed to get across the river, with very fast water coming up to our thighs, and just about got to the top of the other side, despite picking up clay on our boots with every step. I tried to reassure Mrs E that not every day would be like this. I had absolutely no reference point to be able to say this, other than my sunny optimism, which was getting a bit of a soaking of its own. Mrs E was also less excited than me on the result of the Norwich game (a 3-2 win away at Millwall) which came through about half way up the climb.
Finally made it into Corleone, which most people will associate with The Godfather. Don Corleone is fictional of course, but there’s quite a lot of early mafia history which emanates from Corleone, and if we’d not been covered in mud and arriving two hours after it closed then we would have had a wander around the mafia/anti-mafia museum.
Instead, we trudged to the hotel, where we were greeted by power cuts and some firm instructions that we should be taking off our boots, after which we were directed, freezing, barefoot and outside, to the room furthest away from the main building, presumably because we offered a health hazard to other residents. Between our room and the main hotel there were an astonishing number of lights on every tree and every wall, and possibly giving a clue as to the source of all the power cuts.
Washed most of the mud off and opted to eat in the hotel, partly as it was still chucking it down and partly as it was the only place open in the town. An interesting experience, and again not quite the rustic candlelit trattoria that we’d hoped for – I don’t think I’ve ever been in somewhere so brightly lit, except when the power went off. We were ushered into the main eating area, and took a seat near the middle, and just as we sat down Mrs E asked if we could move – there was a smell coming from the middle of the room that was going to impact her dining experience. The smell came from the centre table, where a man in dungarees had sat, and Mrs E was absolutely right – he absolutely stank of urine, which appeared to have made its way onto the yellowing hoody that he wore under the dungarees. Feeling a bit more charitable than Mrs E (Norwich’s away win was still making me very upbeat), I suggested that he might be a local farmer, and that we shouldn’t judge, because it “might not even be his own piss”. This reasoning wasn’t really appreciated, and we noticed that the many other diners were also moving tables, so that we created a kind of neutral doughnut around the poor smelly bloke.
A succession of waitresses came to see us, our attempts to point at things on the menu and ask for them didn’t seem to work at all, and eventually the third waitress agreed that the point and say “Si” approach was acceptable, despite her attempt to upsell us the risotto. All of the staff looked as if they would much rather be somewhere else, but it may be that they were undergoing some sensory deprivation testing. In addition to the assault on their noses and the blinding lights, there was a sound system that would have done justice to one of the larger Ibizan clubs. It was mainly tuned into a local radio station, but at one point managed to mash up the radio with the football commentary from the huge TV screen in the bar, together with some romantic ballads on the restaurant speakers. A special mention for the only male member of staff, for whom the name ‘Lurch’ might well have been invented. Wordlessly and aimlessly he wandered between tables, occasionally picking something off one table to put it down somewhere else. His bow tie, which presumably had begun the evening at a steady East-West setting, had begun moving around of its own accord, a bit like a revolving tie with a very flat battery. Halfway through our meal it had gone from ESE-WNW to a jaunty SE-NE, and by the time we left it was creeping gently towards true north. Maybe that’s how you wear a bow tie in Corleone. But it’s Corleone so maybe best not to ask.
Up early the next day for the next leg, a 21km trek into Prizzi, which would have been stunning if it hadn’t been tipping it down with rain again. We’d had a hasty breakfast, sped up by the surprise arrival of Urine Man, who popped into the restaurant for a coffee and left behind a distinct reminder of the night before.
Walking up and out of Corleone past olive groves and broken down farms, an idyllic walk spoilt only by the amount of fly tipping on the side of the paths. Fly tipping feels like it’s something of a national pursuit round here – whole bathroom suites and tiles at one point, collections of kitchen contents next, clothes thrown onto the road, a bin liner which was split open and was spilling out human hair, and loads of plastic bottles and cigarette packets, often with branding that I’d not seen for years at home. I mentioned to Mrs E that there were loads of Chesterfields on the road, and she told me about an hour later that she’d been impressed that I could tell the type of sofa that had been dumped, just from a few springs and cushions. Alarmingly, there were lots of disposable gloves on the side of the road as well – now why would that cause any concern?
We saw no one else walking, but a couple of drivers took a bit of interest in us. The first one stopped his car so that he could shout a long and enthusiastic message of support, complete with lots of positive hand action. We decided that, as this was clearly a great place to waste enemies, that he was using us as potential alibis. He might well have been responsible for some of the disposable gloves. A few km later, a jeep overtook is up a hill and the driver jumped out, asking if he could take our photo, as his web site publicised the Magna Via Francigena pilgrimage. Or at least, that’s what we thought he said. There was definitely something about his web site in there, but it would have to be really specialist for a picture of two muddy tourists in walking gear for us to be the March calendar picture.
We saw a bit of wildlife, in the form of giant frogs, most of which had been flattened on the road, and vaguely domesticated dogs, many of which decided that we were deserving of a lot of attention.
Sicily has a number of dog breeds, but we mainly drew the attention of the Maremmano-Abruzzese sheepdog. These dogs, which look like oversized white labradors, are bred to protect sheep, and to bark if they see anything out if the ordinary, which definitely included us.
Proud sheepdog parent teaching puppy to bark relentlessly
Apparently they’ll also attack, if provoked, and will only stop once the shepherd calls them off. Frustratingly, we saw a great many dogs, and no shepherds. Mrs E read up about the dogs later and found articles suggesting they weren’t recommended for keeping as pets in towns and cities, as all they did was bark all the time. Which led, naturally, to a conversation about Solomon, a dog who we will always miss when we go away, but will wish he could shut up within minutes of getting home.
Finally started the long climb into Prizzi, and with about 1km to go a car pulled up and the driver jumped out, addressing us by name, which was a bit unnerving, until it turned out that it was Salvatore, who owned the Airbnb that we were staying at that night. He’d noticed it was raining and asked if we wanted a lift for the last bit, but we took a look at the state of each other and the cleanliness of his car and thought better of it.
We met up with him later when we’d arrived and it turned out that he’d been a driving force behind the Magna via Francigena route – he assured us that the worst of the mud climbing was behind us, and pointed us to the only restaurant open in Prizzi that night, a very brightly lit Pizzeria which turned out to be staffed and frequented entirely with cast lookalikes from The Sopranos. At one point, Christopher’s double came in for a takeaway, while Uncle Junior held court with dozen of his family. Truly bizarre.
Prizzi is one of the towns that had offered houses for sale for €1, to anyone prepared to live in them for a couple of years. In some areas you’d also get a grant of up to €30k to spend on the property, again if you committed to live there. Cammarata, where we were walking to next, had made headlines a couple of years ago by waiving the €1 fee. You get the dilemma when you go through the towns – these are idyllic places to live but there’s no work about, and an aging population. There’s some indication that the incentives might have drawn some younger people back home, but from what we saw, probably 90% of the houses were shuttered up, and of the few people we did see, they were even older than us.
Not that we actually saw any people on that day’s walk. We did 25km on a very hilly path, mainly through the Carcaci nature reserve – more beautiful views over the mountains and deserted forest roads as we climbed up to just under 1000m. All was well until the rain kicked in again, this time with some added wind, which soon turned ridiculously strong. By this time we were descending along a cliff road, with vehicle detours in place because of falling rocks. It was probably the only really scary part of the trip, and we arrived in Castronova, making quite the bedraggled entrance into the only bar in town, and immediately being ushered into a side room for the sake of the public good, where the barman brought us hot chocolate and cannola, and suddenly all was right with the world.
We were half way through the walk now, and were in fairly good shape other than Mrs E’s blisters, which hadn’t been helped by having the previous three days walking in soaking wet socks and boots. The next day was to Sutera, another impossibly pretty town surrounding the Monte San Paolina, and it was only 15.5km, so we thought we were in for an easy hike. In reality, it was another tough one, the initial climb up to Aquaviva Platini was a challenge, then followed by a long and very muddy ridge walk to the long road up to Sutera.
Worth it for the views alone though, and we were sustained by a long round of ‘Finding The Band In The Hardware Shop’, with winning entries including Sister Sledgehammer, Sheryl Crowbar, Paint Guns and Hoses, Barbecue Streisand, U Bend 40 and Earth Wind and Firelighters.
We stayed a couple of hundred metres downhill from Sutera, and again, there was only one restaurant open, which was a little way away. Our B&B host was appalled at the idea that we might want to walk to it in the dark, so she called the owner, Franco, and arranged for him to give us a lift. Don’t think we’d get that sort of service at home. Anyway, we got picked up in a knackered Fiat with no suspension left, and we’re despatched at breakneck pace to Franco’s restaurant, where we had the best antipasti we’d had all week, then the best pasta we’d had all week. We both almost fell asleep at the table, as we had to wait for Franco to finish his pizza deliveries and lock the restaurant up, but well worth it nonetheless, and to get us home at a reasonable hour, Franco went for a PB on the way back.
From Sutera to Racalmuto then – another long day punctuated by stunning views, and very lively dog interactions, the scariest one being with six loud and lively sheepdogs at once who seemed to be keen on herding us toward their sheep, then immediately away from them. More stunning valley views and with the bonus of decent weather, the walk took around 7.5 hours – Mrs E concluded that her cut off point, for future reference, was six hours, which I look forward to forgetting when we plan future trips. Todays best game was ‘Famous People In Hospital’ and winning entries included Urinary Tract Geller, Cancer Ian McKellen, Jennifer Canestan, Rib Separatori Amos, Gina Lolladentalbridgeida, The Monty Burns Unit, and my personal favourite, The Brighouse and Gastric Band.
As ever, it was another climb into Racalmuto to end the day’s walk, but this time into a town centre with loads of pedestrians and cars. We managed to find somewhere to sit and watch what was going on, as we’d not seen so many people in one place since Palermo. It turned out to be a funeral at the church in the town square – we were assured later that it was normally much quieter, and sure enough, when we sought out the only restaurant open a couple of hours later, there was nobody around. There was a bit of confusion at the Airbnb that we’d booked before then though – we assumed that when we’d been let in, that we had the whole flat to ourselves, and so set up camp in the kitchen. I offered to get our boots cleaned, as the next day was the last day of walking and was mainly on the road – we didn’t want to trudge a load of mud into our last hotel in Agrigento. So I set to, cleaning hopefully the last bits of clay in the kitchen sink, which took a lot more time than I thought. Just as I was getting to the end, there was a loud Ciao Ciao downstairs, and into the kitchen stomped a vision in leather trousers, leather waistcoat and a very stern expression, which turned pretty thunderous when she saw what I’d been doing in her kitchen sink. Going ballistic is an overused expression, but completely valid in this case, and for the first time since we’d landed in Sicily, I was very glad that I couldn’t understand Italian. I did, however, get the gist, and apologised as much as I could, and also established that there were two other parties taking rooms in the apartment and that the kitchen was only to be used for breakfast. Cruella, who Mrs E had named within seconds of meeting her, was in charge of breakfast, which unsurprisingly the next morning turned out to be a rather spartan affair. But completely served us right.
And so to the final day, a short (11.5km) hike up to Grotte and then largely downhill on roads into Caldare, where we got a train into Agrigento. Still beautiful, particularly the start, but more houses, (mainly) chained dogs and litter as we headed towards the coast, so we were pleased to be able to get the train. We got into Agrigento and walked what Google maps had told us was 20 minutes to the hotel, and which ended up as 45. We really wanted to see the Valley of The Temples and were told at reception that it was a 15 minute walk, so Mrs R bandaged up her blisters and off we set for the last trek of the holiday. Unfortunately we took a wrong turning, ending up 45 minutes later at the wrong entrance, but that mattered a lot less as soon as we started to hike up the hill to see the temples. It would be worth going to Sicily just to see this archaeological site – it’s over 2,000 acres in size and is brilliantly preserved – The Temple of Concordia is the most stunning, and the one that you’ll see on the tourist sites – built in the 5th century BC and still looking pretty good:
We were knackered and ideally would have got in a bus back to the hotel, but there weren’t any buses or taxis, so we trudged up the hill back to the hotel, packed away our walking boots, popped Mrs E’s blisters, showered, and went into the restaurant to celebrate. It ended up being a bit of a muted affair, as we were both so knackered, but we still had a couple of days ahead in Palermo where we could get the right side of an Aperol spritzer or two, so we looked forward to that instead.
Next day, to the station and the train back to Palermo. Slightly demoralising to take 2.5 hours to cover slightly more distance than we’d taken six days to walk, but I guess the train had a lot less mud to contend with. And Palermo in the sunshine was lovely – really stylish and as effortlessly cool as many of the other Italian cities we’d been lucky enough to visit. An afternoon at the No Mafia Memorial was suitably sobering, but the Aperol was calling, and it was only a short walk away…
Yet another ‘sorry I’ve not been bothered to write a blog for ages’ apology to start. Sorry.
In particular, sorry to the several (yes, several) people who mentioned this in the pub last weekend. And not that there’s been nothing to write about, either. Since the last time we met*, me & the Mrs have been on a few adventures, Norwich City have managed to drag themselves into new lows/highs/lows on a weekly basis, and there’s been fun & games with bicycles, running, dogs and music, often all in one day. So sorry. Again.
With that in mind, I’m going to start jotting down some thoughts on being away from home (incidentally, until recently the only place that NCFC have had any success this season), and, more or less in reverse order. And then it’ll be time to tackle some of the weightier questions of the day, such as how to manage when your dog becomes older than you, what age is appropriate to stop messing around in bands, and why your smoking history may say more about brand affinity than any market research programme.
First then, to Iceland. We’d decided to go to Iceland last summer, when you might remember, it was desperately hot. Unlike myself, Mrs E doesn’t really enjoy any temperature much above 15°C, so was quite keen on planning some time away, to go, I suppose, to a place not in the sun.
Taking this sort of decision was, in retrospect, a bit of a knee jerk reaction. Just like how you shouldn’t go to the supermarket when you’re hungry, get married for the presents or lead a government with no qualification to do so, booking a cold holiday for January when you’re hot in August should really take account of the fact that you’re going to be bloody cold for a good few months before you go. But we were also going because Mrs E believes that being cold, and in particular, being cold while submerged in water is good for her joints (insert your own joke here about making them difficult to light). So it seemed an ideal destination.
Mrs E is also fascinated by countries that can be dark all the time, or light all the time, and that’s a box that was ticked almost immediately on arriving in Reykjavik around 4pm in complete darkness, and by spotting the first tiny bit of sunlight just after 11am the next day. But Iceland seems to manage its way through darkness by making the most of it. We were there mid January and were surprised to find Christmas lights everywhere – we were told later that they stay up typically to the end of February, as they lift the spirits during the more depressing months of the year. Blocks of flats have matching lights across all the balconies, often paid for by the building owners, and we heard of fines being issued if you didn’t do your bit to cheer up your fellow man. Indoors seems to be a bit different – Iceland appears to have taken elements of the Danish hygge movement to its heart, so that any time you walk into a public building, hotel or restaurant you’re plunged into darkness, even during that narrow window of light outdoors. On a couple of occasions we had to search for things we’d dropped in the hotel room by using the torches on our phones , and we used the same technique in restaurants, fearing that if we didn’t get the order right that we might be landed with some of that tasty fermented shark that we’d heard about.
Reykjavik, some time between 11am and 3pm
Maybe these low wattage rooms were something to do with conserving energy, you might think. And you’d be completely wrong. Where the rest of the world wrings its hands and pays lip service to our apparent energy-driven oblivion, Iceland sits back with a pious grin on its face. It may not be that great for fresh food, or a stable tectonic environment, but it does very nicely for clean energy, thank you very much.Electricity comes from geothermic water processing and hydroelectric dams.Hot water goes straight from the geysers and underground sources into the pipes that provide domestic hot water, which is why in older buildings you can still smell the sulphur when you turn on the hot tap.There’s so much electricity being generated that Iceland has three of the world’s largest aluminium smelters, and Icelanders pay around €90 a month for all of their utility bills.
So, they’re pretty well sorted in lots of ways, and now that most people have forgotten the Icelanders’ part in crashing the world economy in 2008, they seem to be making up their economic numbers with a heavy focus on tourism, which provides about 40% of Iceland’s annual exports, 10% of its GDP, and 15% of the workforce. This is mainly focussed in Reykjavik, where curious tourists like ourselves can step out of their darkened rooms onto a dark streets and be picked up and transported across the dark landscape to lagoons and geysers and frozen waterfalls, all of which have a significant wow factor. And if you’re adventurous, and don’t mind being cold and very patient, you can go out and search for the northern lights, probably the greatest tourist money-spinner of all. We were very keen to see the greatest free show on earth, so forked out £60 each to stand on the side of a big boat for a couple of hours in -10°C at 10pm. The lights did make an appearance about an hour after we’d set off, and danced about the sky while about 200 tourists scrambled for their phones to take some very grainy photos. Our captain obviously wanted to get a good look as well, so turned the boat towards the lights, at which point all 200 of us rushed to the stern of the boat, in a scene eerily reminiscent of the last scenes of Titanic.
Not entirely satisfied with our dodgy photos from the boat, we chatted to a couple of Icelandic folk, who advised us that Thursday would be a far better night for chasing the northern lights, but we’d be better off going by minibus across the island and away from the light pollution of Reykjavik. It was going to be a bit more expensive, but the trip did include hot chocolate and, more to the point, ‘if anyone was going to find the northern lights, it would be the driver of that minibus’. So, we were duly despatched from the hotel late on Thursday, hopped into the minibus, and spent several hours experiencing the art of searching for the lights. In practice, this seemed to be about getting off the main road and heading into the heart of Iceland, on narrower and narrower roads, stopping occasionally for the driver to jump out, look up at the sky, tut loudly then jump back in the bus and drive on again. A word about Iceland’s roads at this point. There is a main road that goes around the island, imaginatively called the ring road. This is used a lot, and looks like it is gritted. As a rule, no other roads are. Certainly no footpaths are gritted, although some people clear the snow from outside their houses, and you sometimes see a bit of black ash scattered on the paths to make them a bit less slippery. But once you’re off the ring road, you’re driving on a mix of snow and ice. Or in our case, being driven at pace by a born again fearless Viking who was keen to get his charges to their destination in record time. We wouldn’t have been surprised at all if he’d put up a novelty fairground sign with ‘Scream If You Want To Go Faster’ written on it. So a long journey, but far from boring. We stopped, as above, to check to see if the northern lights were any more visible from a layby than from the windscreen. We stopped for hot chocolate, which was hard to drink with mittens and wrapped up like the invisible man, but delicious nonetheless. We even stopped to help our fellow tourists, as our driver skidded to a halt and cried (in a very non-Viking style) ‘Let’s go and do some good, guys’, and we piled out of the bus to try and push a hire car out of a snowdrift. I realised this was unlikely to work as I found myself waist high in snow as we tried to push the car out. But we were in the middle of nowhere, so at least we were able to give the three Spanish tourists a lift back to Reykjavik. You’d think they’d be grateful, but for some reason they weren’t too happy about being rescued when they heard they’d be out for another three hours – kept muttering about having a flight the next morning and needing to tell someone that their car was in a ditch with no known location. Anyway, they held back, looking fairly unimpressed when, half an hour after the rescue, the driver finally stopped the bus and let us out. The driver was very excited.
‘Trust me” , he said, “I think I see them”.
To be fair, the ‘fairly unimpressed’ feeling was quite contagious. We’d piled out of the bus, expecting bright green fires dancing across the heavens, ended up looking at a grey sky that was only slightly less grey than the ones we’d been looking at for the previous three hours. Echoing the punchline of the Emperor’s New Clothes, an apologetic voice referenced the whole grey/green dilemma.
“Aah, but look at the photograph!” triumphed the driver.
Among his many other talents, out reckless Viking driver was an enthusiastic photographer, and had set up tripod, support lights and very expensive camera, every time we’d stopped, and this time he was fairly skipping with excitement. Sure enough, as we lined up to look at the screen on the back of the camera, we saw quite a bit of green sky. Unfortunately, as the actual (very grey) sky was also quite visible, it took quite a bit of Viking mansplaining to tell us that his camera had a more sophisticated understanding of light than our own eyes. Having said which, who were we to pass up the chance of a free photo?
“I bet they’re right in front of us”, we were both thinking
I mentioned Mrs E’s enthusiasm for managing her well-being by getting extremely cold, and ideally submerged, and Iceland in January was, in many ways, her ideal destination. We spent time in the (not so) Secret Lagoon with quite a few other tourists, swimming around between temperatures from baby-bathing to vegetable-blanching, then getting out in our cossies to hobble across the ice to the changing rooms. We had what Mrs E described as possibly the best day of her life, at the Sky Lagoon, where we descended down tiled steps into 38°C water with so much fog that we couldn’t see beyond a couple of metres – it took us a while to get our bearings, and only after some light swimming, a submerge in the ridiculously cold plunge pool, a huge sea-view sauna, an invigorating salt scrub and a bit of a steam bath did we make our way back to the pool and locate the bar, where we spent part of the kids’ inheritance on a beer and a wine, to be enjoyed overlooking the edge of the pool while the sun set over the ocean. Awesome.
I’d made a bit of a schoolboy error in the Sky Lagoon, by not wearing a hat to go swimming. I’d seem people going into the pool in trunks and bobble hats, and decided that I wasn’t going to go for such a ridiculous look. Instead I kept from getting too cold by simply submerging into the pool whenever I started shivering. Unfortunately, as the air temperature was a bracing -15°C, this resulted in my hair freezing with a thick layer of ice within a few seconds. Never thought there’d be such a thing as bobble-hat envy, but there is.
All of this wasn’t quite enough cold water action for Mrs E, so we elected to walk a couple of miles to a local swimming pool a couple of days later. The weather forecast was quite bleak, with lots of snow, sub zero temperature, and what looked like a lively wind on the forecast. We’re used to lively winds at home, and I thought that the weather app was making a bit much of it – it looked like 22 mph to me, which might normally be described as fairly brisk. About halfway to the pool, after much sliding and swearing, I realised that I’d not read the app properly; I’m pleased to report that 22 metres per second is almost exactly 50mph, which is why we’d spent so much time being blown across the icy roads. The wind was still blowing when we got to the pool, still blowing when we got changed, still blowing as we gingerly stepped onto the ice surrounding the pool, and still blowing as we tried desperately to keep warm by swimming up and down, teeth chattering in the gale. Unsurprisingly we were the only people in the pool, and the only people flying back to the hotel in the wind.
There was lots more to occupy us while we were there – Reykjavik has loads of museums, particularly if you’re interested in dark age history or cod fishing, and there are some fabulous places to eat, although, again, a keen interest in cod fishing is helpful. It’s horribly expensive and ridiculously cold, but for all that, coming home to only have to wear two jumpers indoors and managing to get a pint for a fiver suddenly felt like we were living a new dream.
So, if you have a chance, go. Take lots of money, a torch, and a hat to match your swimming trunks.
*Can’t say ‘Since the last time we met’ without reference to :
Since the last time we met I’ve been through About seven hundred changes and that’s just a few And thе changes all tend to be somеthing to do But you’ve got to believe that they’re all done for you, for you
You will win my undying admiration for placing this lyric without the need of t’internet.
Part two was kind of the whole point of the exercise. About three years ago before Covid, before some crappy bereavement experiences, and certainly before we even started to talk about the next world war, me and Mrs E started to plan the next stage of our lives. This was to involve decreasing any work that couldn’t be justified as improving the world around us, looking after the people that meant a great deal to us, and getting away into the rest of the world as much as it was humanly possible. As you can imagine, the pandemic has put a bit of a downer on the last part of that plan, and we decided that 2022 should be the point at which we relaunched our travelling ways.
We’d heard a lot about the Amalfi Coast from friends, and we’d previously enjoyed the process of booking walking tours with On Foot Holidays, so it was just a question of time before the world opened up and we could dust off our walking boots. We sorted out an itinerary with them, then went through the laborious process of navigating our way around timed Covid tests, international green vaccine passes and passenger locator forms to get everything booked and sorted for March. Delightfully, requirement for most of this paperwork was revoked the weekend before we left, but hey ho.
We took the train from Florence through Rome and Naples to Salerno. Well, we tried to anyway – we pitched up at the station to get the train, and found it packed with angry people all of whom had had their trains delayed or cancelled because ‘someone had been found on the line’. There was a general lack of sympathy for this someone, most notably from the tourists in the station, rather than the locals, which perhaps suggested a bit of self interest, but again, hey ho.
Eventually we managed to get away, had a relaxed and speedy rattle down to the south, then found ourselves on a bus from Salerno to Amalfi. It’s hard to really do justice this journey without the aid of a video or some sort of zero gravity machine. It was a fairly sizeable bus, seating maybe 50 people, split between relaxed locals who were returning home from Salerno, from local markets or from school, and tourists like ourselves, frantically looking for the sick bag. The road snakes around the coast, enjoying a great many steep slopes and an even greater number of switchbacks, most of which have a vertical drop on the side, without any sort of guard rail. The driver of the bus had a fairly testing schedule to keep, and did so with the same sort of technique that you might have seen delivered by Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock in ‘Speed’. Either that, or in some of the more rapid scenes in ‘The Italian Job’. Mrs E, who had been very keen to sit near the window and to enjoy the sea view, asked early on, in a slightly shakey voice, if I thought the whole trip would be like this. And it was.
Just over an hour later, we landed in Amalfi, where we enjoyed the experience of solid ground beneath our feet, found the hotel in a maze of valleys and staircases, and got introduced to a phenomenal view from our room, of yet another astonishingly stripey cathedral:
Out in the evening for our first disappointing meal of the trip, at one of the few restaurants open, and a lesson to ourselves that we should never again trust anywhere that had pictures on the menu. Undeterred by the experience of ‘Casa Wesawyoucoming’, we continued our uninterrupted run of gelato every night (85% chocolate fondant and lemon della Nonna, thanks for asking), we took ourselves to bed, to be pleasantly awakened at 4:30am by the recycling efforts of Amalfi’s very own refuge management team. I’m guessing that they do all the recycling and waste management at such a ridiculous hour so they don’t disturb the tourists, but if so, it was a plan that dramatically backfired.
And so to the first walk of the trip, which was a climb up to the village of Ravello. This started with 380m of climbing which was pretty much vertical, and pretty hard going. There was an alternative easy walk, but on further investigation, this just started by taking the bus to Ravello. We opted to go for the harder walk, on account of this being a walking holiday, and after 30 minutes were coo-ing and aww-ing at the views.
When we first start looking at walking Amalfi Coast, I searched for some pictures online, and saw lots that looked like postcards. I guess I thought it unlikely that every view we had would be postcard worthy but I was dead wrong. Every time you look back on where you’ve come from, every time you turn a corner to look down to another cove, you just want to take another picture. To save effort describing every single picture we took, here is a generic drawing:
As we walked, Mrs E asked if I knew anything about how to take better pictures, and I bluffed my way through a vague explanation of the rule of thirds, where you split the picture into horizontal and vertical thirds, and typically place your subject into the third on the left or the right, allowing a wider image space to the side. We agreed that we’d try to take this approach on a lot of the photos we took going forward, with the added bonus that if and when we had a massive row and split up in the future, that we could edit each other out and still have an excellent set of square pictures to look back on.
We headed for the Villa Cimbrone on the way, we’d read a bit about this place, it was a favourite bolthole of Virginia Woolf, DH Lawrence, Henry Moore, Winston Churchill and Greta Garbo. Humphrey Bogart filmed ‘Beat the Devil’ here and Gore Vidal (nothing if not a well travelled bloke) wrote that the view from the Villa was the most beautiful place that ever seen in all of his travels. Having built ourselves up to a fever pitch of excitement at walking in the footsteps of the rich and famous and taking in the astonishing vistas from the infinity gardens we found a notice on the main gate to say that everything was closed for the day.
This was a shame in a number of ways, but to put a positive spin on it, we managed to save a good deal of money on wasted wedding deposits. To explain, we’d started the morning with a video call from New Zealand from Jr Emu #1 and his lovely partner, who had called to say that they were now engaged which is fantastic news that fuelled every one of those bloody steps up to Ravello.
Apparently the Villa Cimbrone now functions primarily as a wedding venue, so if we’d had access to it in our current elated state it would only have been a matter of time before we put our first downpayment on some wildly impractical venue hire. Instead we spent time considering what hats to wear for the big day ahead and enjoyed a convoluted discussion on how the stag night was likely to map out, depending on who got the job of the best man.
Back to the walk, and through Ravello, past the views to Atrani, and up to the Torre dello Ziro, a coastal watchtower built to protect against Saracen pirates. This is apparently haunted by the spirit of Giovanna D’Aragona and her children, who were locked up here after she was accused of having an affair with her butler.
So it’s probably pretty scary to come here at night, but also manages to be fairly testing during the day…
It takes about 15 minutes of climbing and sliding to get to the tower. There is no signage, you just go inside the pitch black opening, give thanks that your phone has a torch built into it, and start climbing the stone spiral staircase. Once you get to the top of this, you notice that someone has kindly installed some metal stairs and the sort of mesh cage that you see on cherry-pickers, that goes out over the top of the tower. You can stand on this and scare yourself stupid as you look down a couple of hundred metres through the metal mesh, and this is a good time to reflect on the levels of health and safety adherence there in place in different parts of the world. Standing and gingerly peering over the edge of the drop, I wondered just how much control and process would be in place in the UK to stop you from getting to this point, but here it’s just a long abandoned tower with a really scary and dangerous ascent just left for you to take your chances on.
Back to Amalfi via the Valley of the Mills – lots of descending on steps and slopes, and towards the bottom of the valley, past a number of abandoned paper mills which were straight out of the Scooby Doo sets. Huge buildings that are now just shells, and the memory of the Bambagina paper that had been produced here since the middle ages. Rather than just using wood pulp form paper, Carter Bambagina is made from the slurry pump by mixing water with wood, rags, cotton and hemp white. There are still a few ‘authentic Amalfi paper’ outlets around if you find yourself here, desperately needing a greener alternative department to parchment.
The second day of proper walking took us to Praiano – this would take about 25 minutes by car, but on foot, with lots of ups and downs it took us almost 6 hours. We were given a few route options, including taking the bus, and were a bit concerned that there were ‘less vertiginous’ choices, thereby making ‘vertiginous’ a word of the day. We opted for the longest and hardest option (still believing in our walking invincibility two days in), which took us through San Lazzaro at 650m and then onto the Abu Tabela path, which stretches all the way down to Praiano. Abu Tabella came from this part of the world, and settled in San Lazzaro after having made his fortune as a mercenary and tax collector in and around the Khyber pass. Later he became governor of Peshawar, where he had a fairly direct approach to governing the peace:
When I marched into Peshawar, I sent on in advance a number of wooden posts which my men erected around the walls of the city. The men scoffed at them and laughed at the madness of the feringhee [a disparaging local language term for Westerners], and harder still when my men came in and laid coils of rope at the foot of the posts…However, when my preparations were completed and they found one fine morning dangling from these posts, fifty of the worse characters in Peshawar, they thought different. And I repeated the exhibition every day till I had made a scarcity of brigands and murderers. Then I had to deal with the liars and tale bearers. My method with them was to cut out their tongues. When a surgeon appeared and professed to be able to restore their speech, I sent for him and cut out his tongue also. After that there was peace.”
Apparently even now, in times of unrest, Peshewar citizens send a small wish for the return of Abu Tabela, to re-establish law and order. Abu sounds like someone who wouldn’t take much truck with anything that irritated him, so I suspect he might of kicked off at the descent into Praiano – one of those stages where you seem to be slipping down steps for miles, but never seem to get to the bottom. As ever, the view makes it all worthwhile, and you get to see Praiano which is predictably easy on the eye from a distance.
And just as lovely, it turns out, close up. Still waking up from the winter, so much of it was still closed, but well worth wandering around, particularly if you’re a fan of very very long stone staircases.
Walking day three, and time for the Sentiero degli Dei (Path of the Gods), up to the San Domenico monastery and across to the village of Nocelle. The first couple of kilometres go more or less straight up to the monastery, past the markings for the 14 stations of the cross, and finally up to the square in front of the church where, bizarrely, there was a man asking us to buy some lemonade, and another asking to have his picture taken against the view. We were nicely off-season, so we’d not seen any other people on either of the previous walks and this was the only day that we did. Fortunately we had a week of immersing ourselves in a whole load of some heavily accented ‘Buongiorno’, ‘Buono Sena’, ‘Ciao’, ‘Grazie’, ‘molto bene’ and ‘non-Parlo Italiano’, so we considered ourselves almost completely naturalised. If only we’d actually met some Italians we could have tested ourselves, but instead we cross paths with Americans, Dutch, Germans, French and some occasional Brits. I was surprised not so much that there were foreign tourists, but that there were so few locals. I figured that if this was on my doorstep I’ll be walking here every day, but maybe that’s the thing about stuff that’s on your doorstep.
Anyway, the Path of the Gods was the day that would’ve justified the whole holiday. Fabulous views, stomach turning drops, challenging ups and downs, blue skies, blue escape seas, and a brilliant drop down from Nocelle to Positano – another coastal town with its waterfront stepped houses, and tiny narrow streets with, apparently, a gelato shop at every corner.
As I’ve mentioned, we hunted out the ultimate gelato wherever we went which was both a great reward for the walking, and an excellent guilt trip for us in the land of Catholicism. And probably the only place where we would rub shoulders with Italians who went on holiday. I’ve been told about this culture before, but this was the first chance to see first-hand the importance of gelato in society. It seems to be an opportunity to meet, date, chat and generally shoot the breeze for everyone, not least for the age group that, at home, might be getting tanked up on Breezers and WKD to talk to each other. Access to gelato is all hours, often until midnight, and available to anyone who owns the scooter. Which is everyone. The only challenge that we saw in this impossibly simple social network was the need these days to wear a helmet when riding a scooter. So the number of times we saw the young and beautiful of southern Italy parking their Vespas a few hundred metres from their destination, in order to resolve their ‘helmet hair’. Aah, first world problems, eh?
Leaving Positano the next day we headed for Sant Agata. Again, we were given route options, which were termed medium/hard, and perhaps should’ve been hard/harder. We wimped out and wandered down to the port area of Positano, found a shop that sold bus tickets (not as easy as it sounds), and jumped on the bus to Colli di San Pietro. This turned out to be a smart move, as the weather turned from idyllically continental to bloody miserable – we’d avoided the really tough option because the route instructions look ridiculously complicated and would’ve been much worse in the wind and rain that greeted us when we stepped out of the bus to reacquaint ourselves with our stomachs.
The route took us along the coast for a few miles, then turned inland at Torca,, climbing higher and higher so that we could see both the coast we were leaving behind and the one we were headed towards. Unfortunately having made the decision to leave the difficult map-reading behind us, we managed to get lost almost as soon as we headed north, and found ourselves in a bizarre network of terraced allotments and wilderness. Fortunately my ‘trusty’ GPS map came in use here, and I persuaded Mrs E to follow my confident scout leader-style tramp across the hillside to what looked like on the map to be a proper footpath. And, to both of our surprise, it turned out to be exactly where we needed to be, and I briefly bask in the glory of my wife’s admiration. Very briefly, as I’m pretty sure I that as I announced that we were back on track, I heard her muttering about luck versus judgement.
We found a hotel in Sant ‘Agata and were greeted as if we were the first guests of the year, which we subsequently learnt that we were. Found a great place to eat around the corner, and declined a tiramisu as we said we were too full, and then sneaked our gelato (85% chocolate and black cherry) past the restaurant on the way back.
And so to the last day of walking and talking, from Sant ‘Agata to Sorrento, via Schiazzano and Masso Lubrense. Slightly grey again but still plenty to coo about, including a detour out to Villa di Pollio – there is the remains of a Roman Villa here but it almost gets in the way – the view out to sea; south east to Sorrento and south west to Puolo is really worth the trek.
We headed east to Sorrento and got there about five hours after we’d set off, to another near empty hotel with lovely people treating us kindly. At our advanced ages, that seems to have become something to treasure.
We stayed an extra night in Sorrento because we wanted to see Pompeii, so we hopped on another train the next morning and did just that. Pompeii is astonishing beyond words, not just the story of the a huge site (170 acres – really?), but the story of the excavation which had started in the Middle Ages and gradually progressed and been bodged right up to the present day. Like so much of what we saw in Florence, there wasn’t a great deal of labelling, so I think you had to do your bit of (ahem) digging to understand what you were looking at. Nor was there a great deal of limit to you wandering about – obviously there was a bit of protection around the frescoes and some of the really well preserved buildings, but very little restriction about what you could reach out and touch or walk around. So that’s what we did, and completed the second week of awestruck cooing.
Home the next day, leaving our last Ciao’s behind us, and enjoying the delights of Ryanair and ‘Greater’ Anglia. Home to grotty weather, lively rows in the Stansted queue, no mask wearing and no vaccine checks. Kind of the opposite of where we come from, which was a bit demoralising. But also home to the dogs, who were exceptionally pleased to see us, and back out the next day for a run where I didn’t need to use my hands on the hilly bits. So we didn’t want to come home, but we’re glad that we did, and is that the best kind of holiday? I bought a bottle of Limoncello from Tesco’s when we got home and put it in the freezer. It’s almost finished, it’s only been used when we bore our friends and family about our holiday.
Well it’s been a funny old couple of years hasn’t it? There’s been very little of excitement or humour to write about anywhere, much less than to grace the pages of your favourite grumpy blog. However, I have actually managed to leave the house for the first time in a couple of years, and as a consequence this one is very much about ‘What we did on our holidays’. Here we go, starting with the process of getting out…
We left the dogs (without saying goodbye) at 6:30 in the morning just as it was getting light. Our taxi driver told us that we didn’t need to wear masks, so we kept them on. Then he told us about some of the problems in the NHS because his mate’s wife works on one of the wards. Although to be fair he didn’t really know what the problems were, or what challenges she faces, but it’s nice to know he has an opinion anyway. A fairly inauspicious start for Mrs, E, who was on her two-week break from nursing.
Onto the 7 o’clock train to Stratford – fully masked up – some of our fellow travellers less so, and at Ipswich a large man who looked like he say look like he’d say ‘rugger’ rather than ‘rugby’ sat next to Mrs E, and a prematurely bald businessman sat next to me. They both helpfully wore their masks around their necks which says exactly what needs to be said about Ipswich folk.
From Stratford to London City airport, which was practically empty but for five British Airways flights out to Europe. Some touristy types like us looking both excited and nervous and some business types that might have been nervous too, but they cunningly disguised their concerns by talking loudly on their Bluetooth headsets, often about what a tough week they were having (it was Tuesday morning, 11:30 and they were just about to get on a plane so ‘tough’ may have been the wrong word). Onto BA3279, where we broke our fast with a roll that had enjoyed a very brief encounter with some sliding egg and avocado. We were sitting next to each other with no one else around until some twit decided to relocate next to us and relax by pulling his mask down and start snoring away. You could almost see those little crown shaped droplets spraying out of his nose as he spluttered away, waking only to press the flight attendant button so that he could demand some coffee.
Flight all over and fun ensues when the flight attendant asks people not to stand up, which is a clear cue for some people to stand up, which is itself a cue for the attendant to say “Look, I can see you, please sit down”, and so on. Then the same exchange follows when certain rows are asked to stay sat down while others disembark, and so on.
I had tried to learn a few words of Italian, on the understanding that if I used an effective accent, I might be taken for a native. So I tried ‘good afternoon’ and ‘thank you’ at passport control, which seem to get a bit of a sarcastic raised eyebrow return (a look I was to get used to). I even threw in a ‘Prego’ after the guard said “Grazie’. I’m not entirely sure when to use ‘Prego’ – I think it roughly translates to the French ‘de rien’, ie ‘you’re welcome’ or ‘it’s nothing’, but it’s a bit softer than that – it feels more like something that you just said to close an exchange. It saves a lot of time too, because it avoids being caught in that “thank you” cycle at the end of every conversation that you have at home.
Blinking into the sunshine outside the airport, we negotiated the tram ticket machine successfully and shelled out €1.50 on tickets to Firenze, then hoiked our bags on wheels across half a mile of cobbles to the hotel.
Our hotel, we learnt, was the oldest one in Florence, and, we were later to find, had not only a history dating back to the 13th century but a plumbing system to match. To our room on the almost top floor then, dump the bags, make an immediate cup of tea (because we are English and by 3 pm will suffer withdrawal symptoms if we don’t), and then out, out, down to the river, promenade along the bank, look at the cocktail options at the cafés and saying to each other that we could do that if we wanted to (because we could) but just carrying on walking anyway because there’s so much to see in a new city, and wandering around because around every corner, it would appear, is something to make you gasp. I envy anyone arriving in Florence for the first time because you do a lot of gasping. One minute you’re on the banks of the Arno, looking out at the bridges, all lit up by the sun behind you (gasp), then you turn around and see the Ponte Vecchio (gasp) with all the shuttered windows facing facing you and the second storey looking suitably precarious on top. The second storey was built for the Medici family (as was quite a bit of the city) so that Cosimo I could travel across the river without getting wet in the rain. He also decreed that the butcher shops, which he had dominated the bridge from the mid 15 century should be banned, because he objected to the smell. This ban is still enforced, which is the reason why it’s now dominated by jewellery shops, which are much easier on the nose and eye. Anyway, gasp.
Some bridges, inc a rain free Medici walkway
We spent the first night enjoying the sounds of the city settling down for the night, which unfortunately involved some serious drum and bass action from the nightclub a couple of blocks away, interspersed with the couple in the flat opposite shouting at each other, possibly about whose turn it was to complain about the music. By the second night, the club managed to ramp up their hours and as our friends at M/A/R/R/S would say, pump up the volume as well. So we trooped down to reception in the morning all prepared to have a row, and were told it was, of course, no problem to change the room for an internal one, and yes, it is a problem living in the city, and yes it was inconsiderate of them to play music that loudly, and yes they had had several complaints, and no we weren’t making a fuss, and yes we would very much like to show you the room. So we packed up all our stuff, went to the new room, unpacked everything, opened the bathroom door to find the smell of rotting sewage flooding out, contacted reception, got a visit from a maintenance man who shook his head and said he’d try to find the switch for the pump and would be back in ‘due minuti’, waited for half an hour, phoned reception again, had a visit from the duty manager who tried her very own sniff test in the bathroom and exited gagging noisily, rapidly taking us to another room, where we all nervously sniffed the air, took us back to our room so that we could re-pack, got someone to help us carry the bags, and finally landed us in the room which we could call home for the next four nights. They also gave us a bottle of Prosecco which we necked almost immediately. Which was nice.
All of the days in Florence followed pretty much the same pattern. We woke up early, got some exercise, in order to justify breakfast, got out of the hotel soon after nine, headed for something cultural by foot, spent the day doing just that, with maybe a break for coffee, then found somewhere that wasn’t too touristy in the evening to eat. So we were tourists, and in Florence there doesn’t seem to be any shame in that. There’s so much to see that we could’ve just spent another week or two doing touristy things, but being there for a chunk of time allowed us to at least do justice to the things that we did visit.
Mrs E is a big fan of the ‘Silence of the Lambs’ follow-up ‘Hannibal’, and encouraged me to join her on a pre-visit screening, so I could familiarise myself with the film locations. This meant that day one of the visit was spent climbing to the top of the 95 meter tall Torre di Arnolfo, which sits offset to the Palazzo Vecchio, and has some seriously good views over the city. It also has the window where Hannibal throws Inspector Pazzi onto the Piazza della Signoria after first disembowelling him. I think that’s right anyway. The viewer gets to watch Anthony Hopkins ask “bowels in, or bowels out?”, then say “out, I think”, before the cut away to the drop. Mrs E likes this sort of thing, she calls it light entertainment.
Anyway, six days in Florence fairly flowed by. Exercise for me was running, either out along the river to the end of the Parco delle Cascine (gasp) or up into the hills overlooking the city (2x gasp). Both routes were stunning and times were pleasantly slow, not least as I was forever stopping to take pictures:
Filling up on hotel breakfast is a skill that we’ve developed a fair bit on previous trips. Always eat eggs if they are offered, drink more coffee than you’d normally need, and if there is anything portable (fruit and pastries are good), make sure they make their way into Mrs E’s handbag so that we don’t need lunch. After 3 to 4 days of this, we were slipping into an easy routine such that within a few minutes of sitting down, I had an Americano and a mushroom and cheese omelette in front of me, and Mrs E had her cappuccino and eggs (bolle per sei minuti) in front of her. (There was a danger that we were turning into regulars at the hotel in the same way as ‘the major’ and ‘the ladies’ did at Fawlty Towers. We may have escaped just-in-time.)
And then, post-breakfast, we went exploring. The Uffizi on the first day – astonishing pictures on the walls and even better ones on the ceilings. Botticelli to remind us where we were, Caravaggio’s Medusa, to give us sleepless nights, and more religious iconography than you can shake a stick at.
Then the Palazzo Vecchio, with its astonishingly huge rooms, yet more frescoes, and an exhibition on Dante thrown in for good measure.
Over the river to the Pitti Palace, home of the Medici clan – huge ballrooms, stunning views of the gardens, more astonishing ceilings and priceless artwork.
Back to the Loggia to wonder at a few amazing statues – we thought it was impressive by day but then we saw it by night and it blew us away:
After a couple of gallery days, we crossed the river again, and wandered up to the Piazza Michelangelo – amazing looking down on the city, then further up the monastery of San Pietro which had even better views:
and the most ornate and complicated cemetery that you’ll ever see. Crumbling mausoleums, gravestones built like wedding cakes, some plots still cared for after 100 years:
It’s an amazing and beautiful place to be buried. You manage to feel very alone, in amongst thousands of bodies altogether at close quarters. On the way back down the hill, I told Mrs E about the plot of ‘Lincoln in the Bardot’, which is about the afterworld/underworld of graveyards, and, amongst other things, makes you want to choose your neighbours very carefully when you get buried yourself.
I had a run the following morning up to the same place but went a bit further, hoping to turn around when the hill stopped, but after 25 minutes it was still going, so I turned around anyway, for probably the best mid run view I’ve ever had. I stopped briefly again on the way back down at the Piazza Michelangelo, and for the first time noticed that the huge bronze statue next to the viewing point is a copy of Michelangelo’s David:
There’s another one at the Loggia outside the Palazzo Vecchio, but it’s dwarfed by the other statues, and by Neptune on the other side. The original marble sculpture, which Michelangelo sculpted from a spare piece of marble in the cathedral workshop yard, is in the Accademia gallery, which is devoted mostly to sculpture. Inevitably most people are there to see the nine ton, 17 foot statue of David, and once you turn the corner in the gallery and see it at the end of the corridor you can’t but ignore all the other astonishing pieces that are nearer to you. I was expecting a similar experience the one you get in places like the Louvre, with a limited time allowed in front of it, but people were just able to mill for as long as they wanted to, alternating between gazing up and marvelling, and relentlessly taking selfies:
We took the train out to Siena as we’ve been told it was ‘like Florence but smaller and better’, and it was indeed smaller, but not necessarily better for that. The cathedral was amazing both inside and out – the outside reminded us of an elaborate wedding cake and the inside of the Cat in the Hat movie – it was by far the stripiest thing we saw all week:
Siena’s civic museum had its fair share of amazing art and frescoes but after a day we were keen to get back to Florence, where we knew that just wandering around would end up with another jawdropping church or square that we’d not yet discovered. I’ll admit to being slightly distracted as we toured the incredible mediaeval relics in the museum, as I was trying to also follow what was going on in the Leeds-Norwich game. This was a ‘must-win’ game for Norwich, which they rather predictably ‘did-lose’. With Norwich one nil down early on in the game my mood nicely reflected quite a bit of the mediaeval portraits of purgatory, and I may well have let myself down when Kenny McLean equalised in the 91st minute. Normal post-match mode was restored shortly afterwards though, as Leeds sealed the victory in the 96th minute.
We spent the last day in Florence at the Basilica di Santa Croce – a little way out of the centre, and very much the place to be buried if you’re anyone from round here. So there are memorials or graves for Leonardo da Vinci, Dante, Galileo, Machiavelli, Rossini, Marconi…and many many more:
The Basilica di Santa Croce, as Mrs E was keen to point out, was used for the opera scene in Hannibal, where Anthony Hopkins goes a bit creepy with Chief Inspector Pazzi’s missus.
Anyway, a gasp around every corner is how we will remember Florence…and that was only the first part of the holiday…
Apologies for the radio silence from the Emu blog. Like most people, I’ve had a rubbish 2020, followed by a rubbish 2021 and I’m not sure that sharing any of that is going to be of any help to anyone.
However, what I have noticed over the last 18 months or so, is that everyone has been able to derive some sort of enjoyment from other people’s misfortunes. So here’s a blog about misfortune, disaster, stupidity, weird cows and stagnant water for you all to enjoy. Here goes:
Like many other people with time on their hands during lockdown, I decided that I was going to do something exciting once I was allowed to be properly outside again. What I had in mind was a really long run over quite a few days. I’d been talking about this for a while with Mrs E, who approved of the project on condition that a) I didn’t do anything stupid or injuring and b) it didn’t cost too much money. So b) put the idea of running between luxurious B&Bs across the country into the long grass, and I started planning a more spartan event, involving a small tent. I started training properly, and planning routes between campsites, which were beginning to open up in May. And, most excitingly, started ordering all manner of ultra lightweight equipment. As each piece of lightweight gear arrived, I unpacked it, held it gently in my hand, and marvelled at its delicate being. It didn’t strike me until much later that combining lots of lightweight gear in one place would make for something that was actually quite heavy, and that may well count as my first school boy error.
I planned a route over six days, which roughly covered the perimeter of Norfolk, on long distant paths. By the start of July I had all of the routes downloaded, all of the kit bought and paid for and all of the campsites booked. By the start of July I was ready to go – I tried out the tent, albeit in the living room with unwilling volunteers pretending to be tent pegs, because it was raining, and it seemed to work. I could even just about sit up in it. On the 2nd July it had just about stopped raining, and at first light I was ready to go, just managing the time so that I could bring Mrs E her morning cup of tea. Rubbing the sleep out of her eyes, she looked me up and down; the first time she’d seen me in my new lightweight gear.
“Those trousers are ridiculous”, she said, instantly putting me at my ease before my big expedition. “They look like the sort of thing that Lionel Blair would wear. And they woke me up.”
To be fair, they were a bit ridiculous. Alongside an elasticated waistband that was straight out of the Damart catalogue, they also boasted a roomy nylon fit with long side zips to allow for speedy changing without shoe removal. This was the first time they’d been worn, and she was right, they really did make quite a noise, a sort of shushing, swishing noise that I could only avoid if I walked like John Wayne. I wasn’t really sure about the Lionel Blair reference. Somewhere on the internet there is video evidence of our band playing on TV with Lionel Blair introducing us, and dancing along as we played. I suspect it was more memorable to us than to him, but I have no recollection of him wearing noisy lightweight running trousers. Anyway, armed with this peculiar insight into my wife’s waking thoughts, off I went.
I hopped noisily onto a train to Cromer about half an hour later, with my lightweight/heavyweight bag on my back. Got to Cromer, walked down to the sea, removed the Lionels and started to run, keeping the sea on my left. The plan was to get nearly to Caister-on-Sea, then turn inland to Martham, and then on to Clippesby, where a pitch with my name on it would give me a well earned night’s rest.
Day One was relatively uneventful. Even by keeping the sea on my left I managed to get slightly lost, and had to circumnavigate Bacton power station, which I can report is a good size bigger than it looks on the map. And as I was on the the Norfolk coastal path, unsurprisingly a lot of the running was on sand, so quite a bit of this soon turned to walking. No matter though, and 29 miles later I jogged into the campsite, bought an ice cream from the reception area, found my pitch and (you’ll have to forgive me here, cos I’m new to this camping parlance) ‘set camp’. The campsite even had its own bar, where they were showing Spain vs Switzerland on the TV and serving food. So, one veggie burger, a caramel slice, three pints of Guinness and one penalty shoot out later, I staggered back to my very small tent, and negotiated with my sleeping bag and inflatable mat. The three pints of Guinness were probably my second schoolboy error, as exiting your way out of sleeping bag and very small tent several times during the night is not to be recommended, particularly if your legs are complaining about a long run the day before.
Refreshingly though, I found that I could move fairly freely in the morning, and I’d (apparently) ‘broken camp’ well before my fellow campers had changed out of their jim-jams.
Day Two involved getting onto the Wherryman’s Way, which runs between Great Yarmouth and Norwich – I was going to follow this to Loddon, then pick up the Angles Way, which by the end of day three would land me somewhere around Thetford. I’d decided that today was going to be more walk than run, so had slipped into my Lionels, and made my way noisily out of the campsite, no doubt waking many of the other campers as I shuffled past.
“Did you hear that noise, Brian? Fair woke me up. Any idea what it was?”
“No idea. But it sounded strangely like….well, Lionel Blair, going for a walk”
Off I set along the route, when a voice in my headphones advised me to turn left onto the hiking path. I mentally made a note to write a charming letter to the navigation software company when I finished, as without their help I’d have completely missed the small gap in the hedge which led onto a narrow path.
A few minutes later, and I’d redrafted my note a couple of times, as the path gave way to a jungle of nettles, thistles and reeds which I had to negotiate like an Amazon explorer. Each time I got to a clearing I checked my tedious progress on my phone, and I was still on track – river to my left, field to the right, so there was nothing for it but to press on. In actual fact there was a very clear alternative, which was to turn round, go back to the road and to stop entrusting my well-being with a silly black line on my phone, but for some reason I wasn’t thinking of that as an option. And while I wasn’t thinking of that, a very loud bark was barked from across the field. The weeds and grass were up to my shoulders at this point, so I wasn’t able to see anything that was in there. I’m not by nature a fatalist, but I have read the legend of the Bungay Black Shuck, and I was headed in that general direction. I hoped that me shouting ‘Sod Off!’ very loudly would do the trick. It didn’t, and I was replied with a louder, more menacing, and worryingly closer bark. So I stood as still as I could, like a meerkat, popping my head above the nettles and swivelling around to survey my impending doom….
,oOo.
Meanwhile, about twenty yards away, a frustrated deer put his head above a similar set of nettles, looked in my general direction, barked again, and wandered off. Relieved, I just tried to remember whether deer got particularly aggressive during rutting season, and for that matter, when rutting season actually was. Tentatively I carried on, and finally was rewarded up a climb to a jungle free bank of a field. Checking on my trusty map, I saw that I was still on the hiking path, and off I jogged, with not a care in the world, other than the thought of lunch that no doubt awaited me at some Broadland inn en route.
Crossing the field, I came to a drainage ditch. It was about 3 metres across, and thankfully some kind soul had put a couple of logs across it, and I balanced like a tightrope walker with a bad case of DTs. As I lumped across to the other side, I looked behind me, and saw the log disappear into the stagnant ditch. ‘Ah well’, I thought, ‘no going back now’. It was amongst my more stupid thoughts of the morning.
Along the next field, still no noticeable path anywhere but on my phone, and I got to another drainage ditch. No kind souls placing logs in advance here, and a couple of metres across – too far to jump, even without a ridiculously lightweight/heavyweight pack on my back. What I really needed was some sort of pole, so I could reenact one of those village sports days where they vault across a river. I should confess at this point that I never, for one moment, considered that a ridiculous idea. I found a tree nearby that looked like it had been struck by lightning, and managed to pull off a branch that, to all intents and purposes, looked like something that the Slag brothers from the Wacky Races would carry:
I’m not entirely sure how I managed it, but with a bit of fancy footwork and the help of a muddy island and my caveman club, I managed to get across to the other side without getting my feet wet. Again, the familiar ‘no going back now’ thought rattled around in my head, almost as if it was a good thing.
I strode on purposefully across the next field, still on the path, with a drainage ditch to my left, and still holding my trusty club. I was about halfway across the field when I noticed a cow to my right. And another, and another, and another. In fact, quite a few cows were headed in my direction. I don’t like cows. Never have and never will. They’re gormless, dangerous and the wrong size for their brains. By rights they should be British political leaders, haha. Anyway, several of them were headed in my direction. I tried the tactic that had worked so well with the deer/Black Shuck situation.
“Sod Off!”, I shouted. And to my surprise, they did.
I felt quite pleased with myself, but this was quite a short-lived experience, because as I looked up, I saw many more cattle, all headed in my direction. Clearly the first lot had found my ‘Sod Off!’ so amusing that they’d been to get all of their mates. They were all headed in my direction, and by the time they were a few yards away, I was beginning to panic. I tried ‘Sod Off! and a number of variations on that theme. I tried waving my trusty caveman club around, and over my head. They inched forward, and started to pin me in. Finally I tried.a line that had only previously worked outside a chip shop in Edinburgh, around midnight, about forty years ago, to a drunken charmer who was offering to beat me up.
“I’M NOT FROM ROUND HERE!”
Maybe it was the volume of the voice, the anxious tone, or the combination with the caveman club wave. Or maybe they understood every word, and decided, as did my Edinburgh opponent all those years ago, that if those were the best words that I could offer, then I really was a pathetic specimen that deserved to be left well alone. Whatever it was, they turned on their ridiculously tiny heels and stampeded off in the other direction.
I wandered on towards the edge of the field, still holding onto the club, just in case. Gently stepping on to some reeds, I lost my footing and fell directly into a drainage ditch. By the time the water hit my waist, I’d managed to use up almost all of the swear words I knew, and was cursing on repeat as I threw myself across the reeds to the other side. The bottom half of me was covered in a sludgey mess from the ditch that absolutely stank. As I scrambled up the side of the bank, still cursing, I thought again that at least today’s hike couldn’t get any worse than this point. On reflection, this was a hopelessly optimistic thought. By now, the route had mysteriously disappeared from my phone, as had any mobile signal. So even if I’d wanted to call my wife I’m not entirely sure what I could have asked her to do. My cheery optimism started to peter out.
Seeing an abandoned windmill a few fields away, I decided to head for it, on the logic that there still ought to be some sort of path to it that didn’t necessitate diving gear. I navigated a couple of further ditches semi-successfully, although by now I wasn’t overly worried about getting a bit wet.
.oOo.
I can’t remember the sequence of events that led to the next disaster. One minute I was finding my way towards the edge of a field, looking for a way across the widest ditch I’d seen so far. The next minute, I was in it – I’d fallen through the reeds, I was literally up to my neck in drainage, and my feet weren’t touching anything other than water. The lightweight/heavyweight rucksack was pulling me down, and I wasn’t able to turn around, so I kicked as hard as I could against the reedy bank and launched myself across to the other side. Fortunately I managed to keep my head above the sludge, grabbed onto the reeds on the other side, and hauled myself out. It doesn’t sound too bad written down like that, and it was over very quickly, but I was as scared as I think I’ve ever been in my life. A couple of other thoughts struck me. Firstly, that I’d exhibited astonishing levels of stupidity – if any of my children had been half as idiotic on an adventure as I had in the last couple of hours, then I’d have sounded off at them for being ridiculously irresponsible. And secondly, that if I were to have any say over when I got to meet my maker, then it definitely would not be in a Broadland drainage ditch, dragged out goodness knows when and in goodness knows what condition.
Away from the ditch, I did my best to assess the situation. Mentally, I was now, by a country mile, the most stupid object within a five mile radius. Including the cows. Physically I was tired, and I’d managed to knock my back and left knee so that neither was very keen on any further movement. Stylishly, I had rather lost the edge. My lionels had lost their jaunty swish, and, like all of my clothing was now clinging to me unhelpfully, under a carpet of slime and small-leafed greenery that until recently had been laying peacefully on top of the stagnant ditch. And pungently…well , I was in another place altogether. If every farm animal in the county had shat on me from a great height for 24 hours, I think I would have smelt slightly fresher.
‘Ah well’, I thought, ‘I’m not sure it can get any worse’.
And naturally, it did, but fortunately only for a bit. After climbing up the bank, I found myself in a very large field, fairly close to the windmill. I wandered around the perimeter, peering into the drainage ditches that surrounded it on all four sides. Thankfully there were no cows, but that was probably because, other than airlifting them into position, there was no obvious way to get them onto the field. I considered the situation as best I could. Despite the submerging incident, the waterproof rucksack had lived up to its billing, and everything inside, which included a tent, sleeping bag, two chewy bars and a bottle of water, was all usable. My phone had been in an unzipped pocket but had miraculously not disappeared into the drain – it was complaining of being wet, and was still functional, but without any signal. So things weren’t exactly desperate, but there was still no obvious way to get out of this miserable field.
Walking back around the field again, I noticed that a corner had been fenced off with barbed wire. Behind the wire was lots of reed bedding, which I assumed led to the connection of two drainage ditches. I didn’t have much option but to try it, to see if there was a way of getting across, but I was very nervous about going into an area that was fenced off, given how precarious the unfenced area had been. I said a quick prayer before passing my bag across the barbed wire. Thankfully the bag didn’t sink, and neither did I, as I tiptoed through the reeds. After about twenty yards, I came across a brand new galvanised five bar gate, and beyond that dry land which seemed to lead up to a path. It suddenly struck me that the gate and the barbed wire were there to stop idiots like me going into the field, rather than stopping idiots from getting out, and I fair skipped up the slope, as well as my left leg and lower back would allow.
I realised that I’d managed to get myself onto the Wherryman’s Way. I realised this partly because I knew that the path follows the river Yare, and beyond the path was a huge river. And in the river were the sort of pleasure boats that you only ever see in summer in Norfolk. There were quite a few of them, many piloted by cheery souls in captain’s hats, and they merrily waved at their fellow nature lover standing on the footpath. I waved back, trying to forget that I looked like Stig of the dump, and hoping that they were upwind of me.
I couldn’t run any more because my knee was still complaining. I checked my phone and was delighted to see that I had a signal. So I phoned Mrs E, who was slightly put out to have her Saturday morning dog walk interrupted. I don’t think I’ve ever actually cried down the phone before, but the threat of this must have come through to her, and she said she’d come out to Acle to meet me. Optimistically I asked her to bring a change of clothes and some wet wipes so I could carry on.
I made my way to Acle, found somewhere that sold coffee, and even better let you drink it outside, and waited. Mrs E turned up in a cloud of dust in the car park. She said she had the clothes ready if I wanted to change and carry on, but by then, I was completely fed up and my left leg had given up the ghost. I asked if she could take me home so I could get a shower, lie down, and forget about the last few hours.
On the way home, I asked if she wanted the window open. “That’s alright”, she said, “you don’t smell too bad. Those bloody trousers were a mistake though”.
You might be reading this as a Paul Simon fan. In which case, feel free to step away now. Big fans of Rhyming’ Simon (or lil’ Pauly, which his diehard fans definitely don’t call him) tend to be a bit precious about his work – kicking back when phrases like ‘cultural appropriation’ or ‘oversized monitors for everyone in the band except Paul’ are used.
I’m fairly ambivalent, but I’ll confess to a bit of a black mood every time I hear the opening chords to ‘Fifty Ways To Leave Your Lover’. This always leaves me disappointed, insofar that Paul tends to leave the listener a little short changed on the learning front. Having had a look at the lyrics, short changed to the tune of 45 ways, so if we’re looking to the song as a list of ideas, we’re a good 90% down on our expectations. To be clear, the ‘ways’ which are outlined in the song are:
Slip out the back, Jack
Make a new plan, Stan
You don’t need to be coy, Roy
Hop on the bus, Gus
Drop off the key, Lee
Even these five recommendations seem a little flimsy on closer inspection. If your name was Roy, for example, you might feel a little underwhelmed if you’d gone to Paul for your relationship-ending advice.
However, the Emu is very much here to ease the pain in these troubled times, and would respectfully suggest a further set of strategies to leave your lover, which Paul may want to incorporate into future versions of the song.
6. Bogart the spliff, Cliff
7. Play her all your records by The Fall, Saul
8. Snip through his brake cable, Mabel
9. Wait till he’s asleep then violently sever his nose, Rose
10. Go swimming and tie her legs to an anvil, Granville
11. Mention ‘big boned and jolly’, Wally
12. Tell her you’ve been charged with Gross Moral Turpitude, Dude
13. Tell her the sea’s your mistress, Idris
14. Dig a shallow grave, Dave
15. Slip your head in a noose, Bruce
16. Give her a swerve, Merve
17. Show her your truss, Russ
18. Walk around in her skirt, Kurt
19. Shoot some amateur porn, Shaun
20. Tell her you’re a slave to your work, Dirk
21. Say you fancy her Gran, Stan (a bit more effective than ‘A New Plan’)
22. Say you play for the other team, Gene
23. Cop an inappropriate feel, Neil
24. Reveal you’re a cleric, Derek
25. Leave an unpleasant stain, Wayne
26. Tell her your real name is Doris, Maurice
27. Reveal yourself as a big fan of Boris, Horace
28. Forget the safety word, Edward
29. Establish that behind your back she calls you Just In, Justin
30. Tell her you’re married already, Eddie
31. Reveal your prosthetic leg, Greg
32. Tell her you have the virus, Sirus
33. Mention your chlamydia, Lydia
34. Call him Mr Floppy, Poppy
35. Test his olfactory gland, Fran
36. Lower his sleeping hand into a blender, Glenda
37. Stab him in the hand if he tries to feel ya, Ophelia.
38. Play him some folk songs on your concertina, Katrina
39. Elaborately fake your own suicide, Clyde
40. Use the trusty ‘it’s not you, it’s me’ line, Clementine
41. Impale him on your fender, Brenda
42. Pretend it’s a vaccine, Maxine
43. Resign from (or, possibly, join) his quiz team, Christine
44. Tell him that’s not what you meant by a mouth organ, Morgan
45. Tell her you need to set the bar higher, Isiah
46. ‘Forget’ to feed the cat, Pat
47. Give her a bath in something corrosive, Joseph
48. Hop on your cycle, Michael
49. Carelessly leave laying around the elaborate plans for her mausoleum, Ian
50. Tell her you’ve modelled your emotional development on the personality of Hannibal Lecter, Hector
As I write, Bob Dylan has just released a seventeen minute version of a song documenting his thoughts on JFK and the American dream. So it’s probably not too much to ask for Mr Simon to go in the same direction. (I can guarantee that the rhymes above are no more contrived than the one’s you’ll find on the lyric sheet of ‘Murder Most Foul’).
The Emu 