Things we love about Norway ...

Things we love about Norway:

1. Honesty. The country is legend for the cost of alcohol and waiters are not embarrassed to suggest we drink water. On New Year's Eve we thought we'd splash out and asked if they had any champagne. 'It's too expensive', we were told. 'Drink the red and more water'. The red was still £16 a glass.

2. They positively insist that we take food from the breakfast buffet for a picnic lunch (are you listening Switzerland!), only the Norwegians seem to take vegetables and fruit. This does however leave more bread, pancakes, apfel stroop and nutella for my continued carb fest that I kid myself will be burned off after a few hours of pottering around on skis.

3. They can ski madly for hours, occasionally stopping to shoot at things, then get on their bicycles and cycle up the hill to home, on snow, when it's -14 degrees, balancing their skis on their bikes.  It's all I can manage to finish the same 5km circuit in 40 minutes, trudge up the hill dragging my skis behind me, and then spend 20 minutes in the shower defrosting.

4. They are really good at cooking fish. Even my 'vegetarian' meal is fish; a 'cold water' fish I'm told when I ask what it is. In Norway I wonder if there is any other sort. It is Dingo Baby's ambition to change his diet and he reads 'Becoming Vegan' at the table while eating reindeer four ways.

5. That beneath that taciturn exterior that respectfully refuses to intrude on my personal space by saying 'hi' when passing (except when they want you out of the way on a trail and if you don't move it's your own fault if you get mown down ... I will get over it eventually) there is a sense of humour ... coincidently appearing whenever I deploy my magnificent snow plough on the steep bits.

6. Berries: in drinks, in deserts, stewed, whatever.

7. Hardy facial hair, essential for dealing with gale force head winds ripping across the fells that shred anything stupid enough to have been left uncovered.

8. And the fact that they can be as smug as they like about the wealth in the country. Rather than give away North Sea oil to BP et al, it has been used to fund the largest global sovereign wealth fund, worth today 711 billion pounds sterling. Four percent of the fund's return can be used in the national budget for the current population of 5.1 million people, saving the capital for future generations. The country is ranked in first place on the Human Development Index (2015), comes in fourth on the 2016 World Happiness report (flanked by other Scandinavian countries and Switzerland), is ranked in first place for income equality (gini coefficient), and is second on the global gender gap rankings (again, flanked by other Scandinavian countries). In comparison, the UK, who gave its North Sea oil to private interests (at least taxed from the 1970s at 50% under a 'super profit' law, but a rate that has declined over time and was effectively abolished in the 2016 Conservative party budget), is respectively: 14th, 23rd, 14th, and 18th.

Way to go Norway.

Notes to Self for the New Year 2017

1. Keep things in perspective: remember the Cold War when we learnt how to hide under a desk in the advent of a nuclear attack (although I was always a bit sceptical that hiding under a desk was going to be much use). There was never a 'golden age' of progressive liberal ideas nor will there ever be. Every civil liberty and law against bigotry we have now has had to be fought for and the coming years are just a continuation of that struggle.

2. Prepare strategically: the next five years is an endurance event, not a sprint. Carbo-loading is necessary, as is a flask of tea. Avoid chafing, and anything liable to fall off or breakage will need to be strapped down.

3. Pace yourself: fight one battle at a time, and fight it well.

4. Hang on to the belief that there is no way 2017 can be as interesting or as tragic as 2016.

5. Put on repeat ... 'not to compromise, not to collaborate, but to understand': remember that there is a reason why people do the things they do the way they do them. Just because someone votes against their own interests does not mean that they should be shunned, laughed at, or insulted. That would just be an indication of my own fear shining through and what generally got us into this mess in the first place. It is not beneath my dignity to engage in dialogue .. not to compromise, nor collaborate, but to understand.

Brexit, and other things lost in translation

It was inevitable on this year’s meanderings through the Pyrénées that Brexit would be le sujet du jour once the locals found out I lived in London (not that I ever admit at first to living in Britain but always start off by stating my Australianness, pre-empting any hostility that seems to have remained between the two countries since about the 12^th century).

'Pourquoi?’

Good question. And my response in Frenglish went something like this:

‘Parce que pleusiers raisons.

Une: le premier ministre David Cameron et son enemmi, Boris Johnson, sont narcissistes.

Deux: le pays est divisée. Dans le Nord, les peuples sont plus pauvres parceque de la deindustralisation, la mondialisation et le chomage. Dans le Sud-est, les peuples sont plus riches et ils n’ont aucun soin pour le Nord. Le Nord levée son doigt dans le ciel vers le Sud-est.

Trois: le democratie fecking ne marche pas.

I’m not sure it was the best explanation. It became even trickier when some Spanish asked ‘pourque?’ as I speak no Spanish and they spoke no English so we drew maps on the serviette in between eating pasta and gateau basque.

Language becomes tangled at the frontier, crossing over and back, ignoring Westphalian borders and imaginary nation-states, exemplifying why Europe as a cultural entity (not the EU as an economic project) is worth fighting for. Walk anti-clockwise around Pic du Midi d’Ossau and at some point bonjour becomes hola and then back to bonjour again. The refuge gardes generally speak at least four languages (French, Spanish, English and German). At communal tables people extend patience and grace to let me practice my atrocious French, and to converse with German French, Swiss French, Southern and Eastern French accents (even other French people had trouble following the latter so he switched to English).

There is a recognisable expression on someone’s face when they don’t understand (furrowed brow; head tilt; eye squint in concentration) and alternative words, sentence structures, hand gestures are used to keep the conversation going. The non-English nor French speaking Spanish men at les Viellettes were determined that we would have a conversation even if it was in pigeon, piecing together whatever language we could to include everyone in the debate. I’m always amazed at how few verbs we actually need to make ourselves understood. 

There are occasionally questions though that I will never have an answer for because I couldn’t think of the words fast enough to ask them before my protagonists had passed, like:

• Why were two young people taking their goats with them on a hike over Col de Riou?
• At my picnic spot above Luz Saint-Sauveur, where did the tall woman go and why were 20 goats following her?
• And how did the nude hikers I passed on the way to Bagnères de Luchon prevent their backpacks rubbing the skin?

The ‘strange’ invokes a necessary interpretation of cultural practice with its inherent risk of getting it wrong. Whether the cheese on the dinner table is for the vegetarian pasta only or for the veal ragout eaters as well is lost in translation. We share. More cheese is brought (there is always room for more cheese at least).

It’s not that anyone is immune to making the odd cultural stereotype. The French refuse to accept that lardons are not vegetables, but laughed at my joke, only made in French, that the lovely German group I was tagging had ‘put their towels down first’ in all the gîtes I had wanted to stay in meaning I was forced to stay elsewhere. And how do you know when you’re in a town with middle class English tourists? There’s no hummus left in the supermarket.

The Germans are loud and chatty over dinner (always getting their beer before finding their beds, while I’m always finding my bed and showering before even thinking of a beer) but share their vegetarian food with me and are in bed and asleep by 9pm. However, they also get up at 6.30am and, resplendent in undies and overhanging beer belly, turn on the main light, deciding everyone else in the room is getting up then as well. The French are not impressed. Viva la difference.

Navigating our differences can be exhausting, alienating, destabilising, using up precious reserves of cognitive and physical energy to manage the dissonance of someone else’s arrangement of consonants, values and comportment. And yes I understand I will make a twat out of myself by getting verbs and pronouns and tenses confused and yes there will be times when I will avoid all contact with another different human being because I just can’t consciously think about what I need to do to be understood anymore. But it will pass, and I will remember the joy of comprehending what someone else is saying, and I will give thanks for a stranger’s patience in trying to understand me. 

Things I would not be without in the mountains

• Voltarol and tea tree oil (no self respecting Australian travels without the latter and my knees no longer respect me and require the former).
• Wool clothing, from bra to socks (even in a heatwave and even though you will need to mortgage your London home in order to buy it).
• A can of tuna, crackers, cheese, and trail mix (NEVER leave home without emergency rations).
• Knitting (for those short days when your gîte is in the middle of a cow field you will thank me that you learned to knit).
• A book (NEVER equate sacrificing a book with saving weight – there are much less important things you can lose instead).
• Floss and toothbrush cover (while all other forms of hygiene practices may become questionable, NEVER forget to clean your teeth).
• Tupperware lunch box (for all sorts of purposes you haven’t even thought of yet).
• Craghopper towel (worth ignoring its obvious alien origins in return for its enormous lightweight hydrophilic capacity).
• Batons/poles (you cannot carry 12-18kg of extra weight up and, more importantly, down mountains without looking after your knees – it will save you on voltarol in the long run).
• Eyebrown tweezers, nail scissors and file (there is no excuse for becoming completely feral).
• Gusseted trek pants: 

Now I may have fallen fashion victim in the purchase of my latest trek pants. They have no gusset (and let’s not even mention the muffin top they create). I have always just assumed that every trek pant ever made had a gusset so I didn’t check when I bought them. I mean, why, North Face, would you make trek pants without a gusset!?! Surely the makers of trek pants understand for what purposes their pants are going to be put, even by a woman. Or perhaps, sadly, they do just assume that a woman will put her trek pants on for a wander to the park and back.

The stretchy fabric of modern tech pants may be more flattering around the butt but if it doesn’t come with a gusset leave it alone. Those of us with hips and gluts know that no matter how stretchy, if you’re taking a big step in any direction without a gusset the crotch is just going to ride up and you may very well find yourself having to delicately adjust your knickers while balancing on a rocky descent, poles in one hand, other hand manoeuvring under the backpack, and hoping no-one else is about to appear on the trail any time soon because you’re going to have to keep doing this until you get to some level ground which is the only type of ground that gusset-less trek pants are good for. ALWAYS buy trek pants with a gusset.

Reflections on time, Tour du Pic du Midi d'Ossau, 21 August 2016

In my picnic bag today I discovered a piece of Madaleine cake. Now it could be considered pretentious at this point to use it as a segue into reflections on time but I have to note that I can now spend hours doing nothing when just a few days ago I had no time to spare.

This can have serious consequences, for example, falling asleep in the sun beside a mountain lake with bare legs that soon crisp nicely, adding blisters to the welts gained from whatever bug I was sharing a bed with last night. But overall life doesn’t get any better than having nothing to do: sitting on a shaded terrace on a hot afternoon, reading a book with a cup of tea interspersed with listening to cow bells and crickets, waiting for my gîte host to arrive and freshly prepare my dinner (she left a nice note saying to ‘install yourself’ until her arrival). Perhaps lashing out with some knitting or playing with the local dog, but returning to the deck chair eventually to do nothing but watch light play on clouds, adjusting the green of the lake or the blue of the mountain range as it folds in on itself.

I have always wondered how the bergers fare being up in their huts with no-one but their dogs and sheep or cows for six months of the year.  But I suspect I could be a good shepherd.

On losing big things and the importance of the small

Pic du Midi d’Ossau is rather large at 2884m in height, isolated from the rest of the range and at times visible from Pau, some 55km away.  So you’d think it would be a difficult thing to lose. Similarly, Lac Gentau, the size of a couple of football pitches that tucks in front of the Pic, and Refuge d’Ayous on its shoreline, the size of a Victorian terrace. Difficult to lose you’d think.

But in a Pyrenéen cloud all landmarks further than a few metres distance disappear into the grey mist and I spent an hour walking in rain soaked circles trying to locate them. I find two other lost French souls and we finally stumbled on the refuge when it loomed within spitting distance.

It is eerie, not to mention difficult, to navigate when walking in the clouds. Occasionally a person emerges from the gloom but otherwise all is silence apart from a cow-bell, a peeping bird, or water moving somewhere in the distance.

A mountain, a lake, and a refuge are not the only things I am capable of losing when out walking.  I lose the desire to speak: following in the words of Borges, ‘don’t talk unless you can improve on silence’, I see no point in vocalising small talk in a mighty landscape.

But while this may appear to border on the misanthropic on my part, small acts of grace and kindness can still always be received. Half an hour to the top of Hourquette d’Arre (2465m), in 30 + degrees of heat, after five hours with no shade and a massive ascent traversing a slope where the trail had been removed by a landslide leaving me with nothing but trust in my boots not to slide in the same direction on an incline of ‘I’m not looking down’ proportions, hitting the last litre of water in celebration as the lacets start to level out but finding a final ascent of scree is required, with legs starting to buckle, I find a single piece of nougat left in the remnants of my picnic bag. All I needed to get me home. Bless you Madame Vignau ...

Bodily Excesses

I’ve never thought of mountain walking as an excessive physical activity. It’s just a slow movement through space and time, one foot in front of the other, and eventually you get to wherever you need to be that afternoon. A little sweaty perhaps, a little tired in the legs if it’s a long day, but it’s not exactly running a marathon. At most my definition of bodily excess would be putting voltarol on sunburnt knees.

However a jaunt in the Central Pyrénées in August has led me to conclude that there are excessive conditions that are best avoided, like a late summer heat wave. With plus 30 degrees everyday for a week, not a puff of wind nor a cloud, it was as if the earth had stopped turning. The locals shook their heads and looked to the heavens, muttering that it was unusually hot. Small comfort to know that I have symmetry in my holidays now with climate change buggering up my skiing and my walking breaks.

Nothing with sense moved. Even the vultures would just sit around waiting for the thermals to do all the work, to ruffle their feathers and send them up to spy the carcasses that the heat was doing bad things to. Only butterflies and crickets seemed to be enjoying themselves.

The poor sheep huddled under whatever shade they could find and I knew how they felt, although in the case of the walker with a gîte to get to there is no choice but to slog on.  After one day’s ten hour onslaught over a 2465 metre col, with not a scrap of shade for seven hours, the waitress in the first café I came to in Gourette appeared to be slightly nervous at my appearance and demands for ‘drink! drink!
now!’. And never has walking on bitumen felt so hot or been so slow when discovering my hotel was in fact 40 minutes away from the trail head that evening.

As all walkers know, there is nothing to be done about the weather; all you can do is wear the right clothes for the occasion or as few as possible in this scenario (none in the case of nudist hikers who have the right idea, and yes, they really do exist). You carry extra water and you leave as early as possible. In theory.

In practice, in France no self-respecting boulangerie is open until 7am which means breakfast was never until 7.30 and departure then not until 8am. Already too hot. Yet skipping breakfast to get an early start had its own consequences. Powered by two cups of black coffee and two bowls of tinned fruit (all that was left in the gîte fridge at 7am), I did get to the top of a col in record time one morning, but my metabolism was so confused all it could manage at a refuge for lunch was grenadine with 7Up, chocolate crepe and a beer. This did not put me in peak physical condition for the three hour descent to Cauteret. In practice it is better to lose 45 minutes and wait for the bread.

It’s not possible to complain too much though about the bodily excesses of walking in a heat wave when compared to how the runners in the Grand Raid de Pyrénées must have felt. With 80km, 160km or 240km routes, the latter taking in 10,000m of ascent, they happened to be using some of the same GR10 trail as me when the thermometer tipped 35 degrees. The 100km checkpoint was in Cauteret so I could sip on my beer and watch the leaders come through the main street looking like limp whippets.

The trails are a masculine space at times so there is no surprise that it tips towards excessive activity and a hierarchy of exploits: the Raid, climbers, then those on the HRP, the GR10 or 11, and day trippers way down the bottom. Refuge de Pombie in the Pyrénées National Park is a leyline for young, fit flesh from either side of the border attempting to climb Pic du Midi d’Ossau. Men may not necessarily outnumber women but they outweigh the conversation with tales of adventure. The next day, as I headed down to Gabas, I met a Spanish man adjusting his shoes. He was running the entire tour of Pic du Midi d’Ossau, and where it took me a leisurely ten hours over two days he will be home for lunch. Respect. In Gabas, two men in their 60s, stopped for lunch, were mountain biking over 1000km across the Pyrénées in two weeks, carrying nothing more than a day bag. They were part of a veritable peloton of mostly male cyclists that descend on the Pyrénées each summer, dreaming of riding like Chris Froome over its cols (only many of them seemed to be falling off their bikes, throwing up and oozing bodily fluids which I’ve never seen Chris Froome do). At Lac d’Oô a group of Spanish men staying the night were completing the GR10 and then returning via the GR11, all to be done in 80 days. Over dinner, a young man in Luz described his plans to do in one day what would take me two. He becomes legend on the trail as other hikers told stories of his efforts including a 35 kilometre day while wearing a knee brace after a nasty fall. Not to be outdone, I met an older woman from Utah who also had a lower leg brace that held her ankle together so she can ‘keep doing what I want to’.

It must be stressed that such levels of bodily excess, or determination, are not a precondition for accessing the mountains. There is no less grace in being a day-tripper as being a climber or Raid runner despite the claims of testosterone. I have come to the conclusion that the mountains do not require of us the same sacrifice. Whether a gentle amble to a refuge for a three course meal plus wine, or ice climbing the remotest peak you can locate, find your own rhythm, your own pace and your own way home.