Icebreaker briefs may not be the world’s worst underwear, but they’re the worst waste of forty bucks I’ve ever spent on gotch. They should really change the name to Crack Chafer, because that’s what these things excel at. This chameleon-like garment transforms itself into a sumo mawashi the moment you start hiking. Once it has lodged itself in your crack, it saws up and down like a...
At Hendaye on the Atlantic. Did I know what I was getting into…? I’m back at my desk after hiking the length of the Pyrenees, from Atlantic to Mediterranean: just under 800 km, with 51,000 metres of elevation gain and descent, in 35 days. I wanted to do this high traverse as a sort of farewell-to-Europe after 15 years living on the continent, six of them in Malta and the rest in...
Cam Honan Cam Honan has hiked across 56 countries on six continents, logging over 96,500 km in three decades. Between July 2011 and December, 2012, he set out on a dozen consecutive thru hikes that took him through 29 US states and 4 Canadian Provinces, a trip known as the 12 Long Walks. Backpacker Magazine called him “the most traveled hiker on earth”. I’ve wanted to speak with Cam for...
Mt. Canigou (2,785 metres) It was time to leave coastal Leucate for a new base on a hill above the town of Prades in the Pyrénées-Orientales. The looming presence of Mt. Canigou (2,785 metres) doesn’t just dominate the landscape of this region. It is the most celebrated mountain in the Catalan Pyrenees thanks to a poem by Jacint Verdaguer, the melancholy Catholic priest who walked these...
I had one more hike to do before we left Svaneti and moved down into the lowlands. I was glad to be back at Meri’s again. It wasn’t as though the food had been bad in Ushguli. It’s just that Meri’s cooking made everyone else’s seem mediocre by comparison. Meri’s cooking didn’t make me fat — it’s my wallet hanging under my shirt The heat was so intense I caught myself glancing...
The 45km road to Ushguli was said to be treacherous: a precarious dirt track requiring a 4×4 and at least 3 hours. Small jacked-up Mitsubishi Delica vans make the trip many times each day in the August high season, and so we walked to the centre of town in the morning to buy a ticket. To my surprise, we were pointed to a regular-sized marshrutka van, the typical fixed-route...
The road from Kutaisi followed the flat coastal plains of what used to be, in Greco-Roman geography, Colchis — the land where Jason and his Argonauts sought the Golden Fleece. Archaeologists believe there may have been some truth to this legend, at least as far as the fleece was concerned. Around the 5th century BC, people in this region did sometimes stretch a sheep fleece over a wooden...
At 2,917m (9,570 feet), Olympus is the highest mountain in Greece. The three-peaked massif broods over the Thermaic Gulf and the three-fingered peninsula of Halkidiki in the Aegean distance, on the border between Thessaly and the province (not the country) of Macedonia. Most choose to climb it in two days, with an overnight stop at one of the mountain huts that sit just above the tree line, but...
It was time to move on to the Pirin Mountains, and the off-season ski resort of Bansko, where hotel suites went for bargain prices and half the restaurants were closed. The Thracians knew the Pirins as ‘Orbelus’ (‘snowy mountain’). The Slavs associated them with Perun, god of storms and thunder, the most powerful deity in their pantheon. To us, they promised some of the best hiking this side of...
It’s a group of nine islands straddling the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, a third of the way across the ocean from continental Europe. The people speak Portuguese, but the islands were undiscovered and uninhabited until 1432. They’ve suffered pirates, invaders, religious persecution and serious crop failures. Today they’re an isolated paradise for hikers and nature lovers. Welcome to the Azores. I made my...