Diary - Km 1046
This trail is really good at not being a trail.
Sometimes there are no markers for miles (there are never markers on the roads or streets), so you have to look at your phone more than you would like to. Sometimes the marker indicates you should climb over a stile to the other side of a barbed wire, so you do, then walk a bit and the marker casually appears on the opposite side of the wire, but wait, how did it get there??! There is no stile to climb back…so you climb the barbed wire. And then walk a tunnel of raspberry thorns and scramble up a grassy steep hill, because somebody put that orange bloody triangle up there, but getting to it is your problem. If sheep can do it, so can you. Sheep are better at it, fyi. Many times you follow a barbed wire along a farm perimeter, cows looking at you like you’re deranged. They’re probably right.
Oh, and the other day I walked into shit. No, no, not a pile of shit. A whole, big, swamp of knee-deep cow poop and rain water. The trail (aka a tunnel in tall farm grass made by many hikers walking it) ran by, you guessed it, a barbed wire, and ran straight into that invisible puddle. I wanted to film my struggle, but it was kind of sucking me in, so maybe next time (i’m pretty sure this wasn’t last).
I’m not saying it’s not beautiful or not fun though. It’s all about managing expectations. Don’t compare it to the US trails. It’s still new compared to those. Ask somebody who’s done the PCT in the 70s if the trail was always very clear, see what they say.
If you stop expecting it to be a trail and just think of it as “someone drew a line across the map and I’m gonna see if I can walk it”, it starts to piss you off less, and every day there are some really pretty bits of country to enjoy.
I walked some sea rocks, hugged some big pine trees, rode a bike through amazing forest for two days, swam in the ocean, swam in the river, saw glowworms in a cave (soooo many glowworms!) and in a couple of days I’ll start canoeing a river.
Oh and I passed a 1000km mark. 1/3 of the trail walked. Ok, I hitched around 280 of those, biked 82 and ferried around couple, but the rest I walked, I promise.
