A short note on both my compatriots and the people along the trail. Andrew, I’ve known for many years as both our lines of work crossed on a number of occasions. We’ve walked a number of local trails around Leicestershire and odd days mainly locally and a trip to climb Mont Blanc. We both have a passion for walking, but in different ways. Andrew enjoys walking trails, he likes a specific start and an end point and has walked multiple trails all over the world. Whereas I more often than not go out on mountain days, short and sharp. It’s the love of the countryside and mountains that brought us together and he’s shown me some beautiful parts of Nottinghamshire and Leicestershire that I wouldn’t normally dreamed of doing. Holly, I’m slowly getting to know, she’s a data analyst with DHL and lives in a caravan on an airfield… not your typical stereo type. The reason she lives on an airfield is her passion for parachuting… I’ve yet to ascertain why she has this fascination with jumping out of a plane with just a small piece of nylon to stop her impacting the ground at 125 miles an hour, but no doubt I’ll learn as the day goes on by.
The ‘O’ can only be walked in one direction, dictated by the National Park. Therefore those that start on the same day stay together and friendships are made. A passion for walking and photography brought together an Italian, named James (not even going to try to spell and pronounce the Italian version). As with all keen photographers our first and only concern is how our cameras would fair in the ever changing weather and the paranoia of ‘do we have enough batteries’ even though we both carried plenty of fully charged spares! We parted company with James at Camp Grey as we were spending two nights there and he was moving on. I enjoyed his company, even though we only ever really met up in the evening, as a walker he was, basically a machine and walked twice the speed we did. Another group we met were a fairly large group of Americans on a fully guided trip with porters. They were quite a mixture of ages from mid twenties to late sixties. One of the older gentleman (I’ll call him ‘wiggy’. A little unfair as I saw him doing his morning ablutions one day and it definitely wasn’t a wig, just goes to prove you shouldn’t judge people’s hairstyles, although the colour was definitely not natural) approached Andrew and I at the first camp and struck up a conversation, well, shall I say a very one sided conversation. We both know exactly where he’s traveled in world as does, from hearing him strike up other conversations, everyone else who he talked at! There were other brief acquaintances, mainly American who wandered in and out of our spectrum, but in the second half of the trail, people and groups changed every night.
One thing that has really struck me on this trip is the number of twenty somethings and thirty somethings that are on a sabbatical and those that were couples and where both couldn’t take a sabbatical then the other resigned their jobs to be able to travel for an extended period of time. Work ethic’s have definitely changed since I was at work. For the better? As an employer maybe not but as an employee, absolutely. Most of these people were professionals and not the everyday jobs that most of us have or had, maybe they know that on their return they will be snapped back up into the job market.
I thought that the GR20 was a busy trail, but the GR20 is considerably harder that the Torres del Paine, so the number of people far exceeded what I expected, especially as it’s the end of the season. The ‘O’ route northern section was less busy as the walking is more remote, but once the ‘O’ route joins the ‘W’ Route then there are people everywhere and walking it East to West and visa verse! Busy is an understatement.
One last thought. The common rooms in the Refuge’s were always loud with conversation and laughter… the reason, no internet!!!