– by Trysh Ashby-Rolls –
By the time you read this, I’ll be basking on a beach eight degrees south of the Equator. By the time I return home, my mind broadened by travel to a new country, Christmas will be days away, followed closely by the New Year. So I’m making my resolution for 2016 now: Get more exercise. What with a knee injury sustained last February, surgery in late September, and a knee brace that makes me look like a hockey player wannabe, exercise has been restricted to a few leg raises. Or none at all.
I want to walk my daily half hour again down to the coffee shop and back.
Before I visited my sister in the U.K. for her 70th birthday celebrations in July, I took a train to visit a friend in Durness, located in the most north-westerly point of Scotland. Sitting in the Ozone Café 900 feet above sea level on Cape Wrath (meaning “turn around” from old Norse), accessible by small boat and bus, I met John Peters who is in his fifties.
Once an IT professional, Peters retired young. Just as he was leaving his Edinburgh home, backpack over his shoulders, a neighbour called, “Where you going this time?” To which he replied, “For a walk.” Three weeks and 196 miles (315.4 kilometres) later, over coffee in the Ozone, Peters told me he’s walked in the Himalayas, and on other stiff and challenging trails. Part of the Cape Wrath Trail demands self-sufficiency – carrying one’s own food, water and tent – across wild terrain. This guy is what you might call an Extreme Walker.
Then there’s Peter Ragan, 54, from Arivaca, Azrizona. With a few short practice hikes carrying his backpack – complete with tent and other essentials – he left the Mexican/California border on March 22nd to walk the Pacific Crest Trail. After hiking across blistering desert and freezing mountain ranges, he arrived in Manning Provincial Park, B.C. on September 24th. All told he walked 2,663 miles (4,286 km).
“You can’t really prepare for the actual trail, but those practice hikes helped,” Ragan said. “My pack always felt comfortable.”
I met Ragan in the Slow Coast Café, Pender Island.
By far the most extraordinary extreme walker I’ve met is Sarah Marquis, an explorer and adventurer from Montsevelier, Switzerland. I first noticed the 40-something woman in the breakfast room at the Buddha Zen Hotel, Chengdu, China in 2011. Her plate held a stack of toast at least six inches high. Nosy me had to ask if she intended consuming it there and then, or was she keeping some for later? Explaining that she needed lots of carbs and that she would eat it while we talked, she told me she’d walked from Siberia, across the Mongolian plains and would finish her journey, on foot, in south Australia. I am rarely caught off-guard or wanting for words, but she gobsmacked me silent.
Marquis explained that she’d been in Chengdu for over 10 days trying to “sort out her soon-to-expire passport.” By the time I returned home to Canada, Chinese military officials had arrested her in the Szechuan Mountains. On her website, which is well worth reading, she describes Chinese officialdom in terms of “the moodiness of the administration in China!”
These people and their stories are the stuff of travel. My 2016 goal is vital for my health so I can travel. But I’m not going to extremes.
For interesting reading material look at Sarah Marquis’ website: www.sarahmarquis.ch.
