Gatwick to somewhere in the middle of the Tyrol via an evil empire or two and some good German bread

Take a look at a map, of Austria maybe...or perhaps go searching on Multi map. Innsbruck to Steinach isn't very far. It's about 30mins on the train, If you're buying maps in 1:50,000 scale, which we are, it's just over half of one - our whole journey should, if completed, take about 100. The paths we took, for the most part look easy enough, and generally led south, it's April and we felt well-prepared. Why then did it take us six days? Why are we back in Innsbruck as I write this? Have we given up already?

Eight days ago I was on my own sitting in a Pizza Hut justifying fears with one breath and denigrating them with the next. I was running through some useful and slightly less useful advice from friends strangers and the Internet. For instance, it is said in some quarters that when in Morocco you should line your sleeping bag with stones to deter thieves and keep one arm free when collecting firewood to thwart those out to nick a few dried sticks you've picked up off the ground. More usefully, we were advised that most of the maps of Italy are at least 30 years old and some are much older. This means that roads are often non-existent and footpaths changed beyond recognition. Elevations however are usually fine. Back to the bizarre, apparently in heavy snow you should kick your steps to ensure a sure footing and heel them on a descent - it's also possible to arrest a fall in heavy snow without an ice-axe like we'll ever need to know any of that...well, more on that particular one later.

The flight to Austria was wonderfully uneventful...with no queues at check-in, security, boarding, or disembarkation. We slept overnight at Gatwick and discovered I'd forgotten my penknife and that Julia just had too much stuff. We found that a 1988 FFr 20 Centime coin fits into slot on the luggage trolley. Don't ask me why I had a 20 Centime coin on me. Anyway, it was a 1/3-full easyjet flight to Innsbruck with a cute-talking airline steward advising those caught smoking they'd be asked to step outside.Slipping above the clouds the sun burst in almost below us, reminding me it was scarce 7am and I'd been awake almost all night and in fact most of the last week. Pasted in classic slept-in-your-clothes dank sweat and fighting my breakfast coffee mixed with general aeroplane judder I set myself the task of sleeping.

On the ground my FFr 20 Centime coin also worked for the slot in the baggage trolleys there "is there no end to it's usefulness" I asked of no-one in particular, Julia unhelpfully chipped in with "yes, you can't buy anything with it."

I don't get her point.

Going to book-in at the youth-hostel we glimpsed the snowy peaks that surround the town, setting alarm bells off that April was perhaps too early and reminding me our planning could've been more complete. We made use of €1 left luggage lockers in which I wanted to try my 20 Centime coin again but Julia rolled her eyes and gave me €1. I think she must believe we'll need it later for some higher purpose - I nodded and accepted her greater wisdom.

For those who've never visited, Innsbruck is a town manicured to a bright shine and I have yet to find anything one could describe as cheap, though almost everyone is cheerful. The Idyll was only briefly shattered once, as an elegantly dressed blond man almost tripped over a dogs lead when he wasn't paying attention. He let of a totally incongruous stream of expletives at the owners apology and stormed off in fury. He was probably just having a bad day, but I'm certainly not going to put winding-up the locals at the top of my TTD. Without further ado save having my card swallowed by a cash machine just because it felt like it we were on our way.

Deposited by bus at the Schloss Ambros with the target of walking to a nearby town called Igls by nightfall we were at each others throats within three minutes. Julia wanted to take a look at the Schloss (castle) and me wanting to get on. After a short shouting match Julia won and I sat down on a bench to sulk. I wrote at the time...

"It's already late on day 1 and we have precisely 0km under our belts right now. This "Castle" (glorified house, I think) didn't excite me at all so I'm sitting on a bench. Julia has gone off with her pack, which is a waste of energy..."

Not an auspicious start.

Well there followed some rather normal teething pains, working out how we liked to walk and how best to eek out a good nights sleep in rather low temperatures. We finally got to Igls in the middle of the next day realising we had forgotten a small non-essential groundsheet that would make life easier and that my sleeping bag in the space of one night has started falling apart and zip was broken. At least there was a helpful spring next to the Church where we filled up our water.

After lunch we made our way south in perfect weather for a couple of miles until BAM!...the entry from my dairy rather sums it up... "Hell, hell, hell!" I was wandering along perfectly happily one minute and the next I collapsed. I couldn't walk any further, I went cold, couldn't warm up and we just had to stop. Julia was fine and looked after me wonderfully, which was a humbling experience but much appreciated. The next day we sorted out some trail mix and realised that eating light breakfast lunch and dinner might be fine when sitting in front of the TV, but when walking in the sun with heavy packs, food with slightly more punch might be needed.

The countryside was beautiful, and after that minor disaster things started to look up, at the same time we started to get a new appreciation for the place. Here's a short section of my diary from that day...

"Stopped for water at next town, spring nr. church again - hoping this will prove a theme. Walking into town on an idyllic spring morning with church bells ringing out under a marble blue sky - for the first time today we're out of the trees and the sun instantly makes life OK. Walking down a steep road into the historic heart of this small village the Sunday bells break for a minute and almost instantly live music comes at us out of nowhere. Suddenly I am on edge, Julia says she recognises the piece - I know it and to hear it here, amidst all this beauty sends fear pulsing through my fingers. That piece, and all the hateful things it stands for - proudly bursting from this Austrian idyll reminds me of the dark heart of every paradise - The piece...the imperial theme from Star Wars. How could they?"

As the days went on we started adjusting and getting fitter. The trail mix and our new larger meals worked a treat. We started to cover more ground...my sleeping bag was starting to resemble a mis-shaped not-very-warm blanket but we felt it was getting warmer. We spent one night next to a broken down mill house in the middle of a forrest. Going inside we discovered it must've been abandoned for a long time. Julia didn't spot much beyond the old machinery, but I went in there with a torch and found carved initials and dates stretching back to World War II, some replete with Wermacht or SS unit numbers, and a 1945 Indian Army unit's murals too...I've got lots of photos of the hut, but can't really process them until I get time at a good computer and I don't know how many days/weeks/months away that is.

Happy that we were getting into the swing of things, the next morning we boldly marched on down a steep decline for about half an hour until we worked out it was precisely the wrong direction as it led us to a dead end. What comes down must go up.

Next time around I might actually get around to answering some of those questions at the top...I'm going to leave you with an example of the beautiful countryside we get every day...

ten thoughts...

JP is doing the great Everything We've Been Up To post and I am trying to cover half a dozen other things so this is just a list of my thoughts or fun things I have seen (in no particular order):

1. It's really nice not to be tied to a computer any more. it's doing my lower back a lot of good. It's also, on the whole, very nice to be outdoors so much.

2. My shoulders have been giving me surprisingly little gip. In fact, the walking and carrying everything is surprisingly comfortable. We already feel fitter.

3. Austrians are not as obsessed with Health and Safety as some English. For example, the trams\trains continue up into the hills around Innsbruck. We came across some of the tracks as we were walking. No fences, just a sign with a big red cross on it. You are allowed to walk over the tracks - that´s where the trail continues and it´s refreshing to just be trusted to not be silly about it. That would never happen in England. There are also a lot of steep, narrow paths that are not fenced (sometimes they could rather do with it!) so perhaps that´s the other side of it.

4. We need to eat more now. It's rather obvious but JP almost collapsed on day 2 becuase it hadn´t really occured to us. So now we're obsessive about the calorie content of any food we eat which is not something I've done before.

5. I am less good at navigating than one might hope. So far I've taken us precisely the wrong way down a steep hill that we then had to go back up. Another time, I made us do a 45 minute detour which brought us back to where we had started. I am beginning to be more careful but I am sure that this will happen again.

6. Bringing a tin whistle without a case was never really going to work. A few days ago I tripped over it and it bent in half. I hadn't even used it much, especially here, but having had it has shown me that I would like to get a new, better one, with a case as I enjoyed playing it.

7. Ant nests in the wild are phenomenal. We passed two whilst walking the Trinser Steig (´the climb to Trins´) a couple of days ago. First one, just under a foot high and just over a foot wide. The second was even bigger and both were swarming with red ants. I stared in awe and backed away.

8. We slept in a hostel two nights ago - JP went to sleep early, without making his bed and woke up with a start, demanding why I had both duvets. After a little confusion, I pointed out to him that he had a duvet but was using it as a pillow and his pillow as a duvet.

9. The Austrian obsession with Mozart continues apace. Here in Innsbruck, there is a hotel that proudly proclaims that 'Mozart lived here' and he wrote about Innsbruck in his diary (old German, I think, as I and my dictionary didn´t understand it). It's omething nice, I assume, since they published it on a plaque. All very well and dandy until you look at the dates dn realise that he 'lived' here for all of 6 days in 1769. He would have barely had time to unpack and probably spent more time in Paris.

10. Turns out JP can speak German (well, some) which has taken both of us by surprise. This is only one example and to extrapolate would be unscientific but what if this turns out to be a theme...

With that, I must get back to catching up on Mad Men, I mean, finishing my work. There may be a lot to be said for leaving the world behind but there are still some bits I miss.

Austria and the attack of the munchies, part two...

Before anyone wonders, we're still not in Italy and I am still writing this in Innsbruck - that's a good thing though, it means that Julia is actually able to do her job from abroad and we are not going to go broke in a week.

So...the nights were still cold, and my sleeping bag was getting more and more broken. We had found a way of stuffing all our clothes under ourselves to warm up and it was mostly working. In any case the coldness of the nights was more than made up for by the lovely mornings...

click to find out more...

We were also getting our cook on at the same time although we had yet to find decent fuel so we were using petrol. One night decided to prove you could eat well on the road and put together a diced bacon and Gorgonzola sauce for some tortellini and we ate like kings - that day I also blew our food budget by about 100%, so we haven't eaten quite so well since, although the local food was growing on us.

Austria in general was also growing on us - this was supposed to be a weeklong warm-up for the main event but it's become a journey in itself as we iron out the kinks before we hit serious walking. It isn't a great expedition or a battle through some feared frontier but so far at least it has been a great diet for the soul, if I may be allowed so neat a phrase.

About lunchtime on day six we hit Pfons. We'd already put in a brisk mornings work mostly on roads because our trail had been paved over since the map was made, and we had got into a rhythm of buying food in the afternoon for the next day and then heading out of town to start making camp around 5-6pm. Julia got told by a bored mechanic that the shop we were looking for was in the next town over the river on the left. So we walked. It's one thing to cover miles on tracks and paths, but it's just not nice to follow the roads for seemingly interminable periods with heavy packs in the hot sun. About an hour after we hit Pfons we found a decent food shop, Julia spent an hour in the shop, and by about 4.30 we had food and water and were looking to get the hell out of dodge. The lass had spotted a road out of town that would take us to a good trail for the next day so we headed off, feeling a bit tired. What we hadn't really appreciated was that this path was a concertina of chicanes heading 800 meters up from where we were mostly at 45 Degrees followed by another 400m at 50 Degrees or more up a supposed path which was just straight up a steep meadow before we even got to the trees and thought about camping. With our packs and the hard day we'd had before it felt like being screwed twice in three minutes each time for over an hour - very satisfying in the end but my god we were glad when it was over. Our fitness was already much improved though, because on day one a single look at that would have had us reaching for the guidebook section labelled 'hotels'. We felt good.

The next morning called for a pretty steep climb for most of the day followed by a very steep descent for the last couple of hours. In a brisk but satisfying morning we reached our lunchtime target at the source of a spring where we refreshed ourselves and were surprised to find ourselves amid patchy snow, which was fun.

The afternoon started wonderfully, we had a great time on the rough trail we had chosen along the side of the mountain - it was sometimes tough to follow but never impossible. At around 3pm we hit a little patch of snow we had to wade through...it looked fun so we puckered up, tried to remember that irrellevent advice about crossing snow and ploughed in. The snow was deeper than we expected, one meter or more in places, but we were quickly through it. Ten minures after that we came across a 100 meter field covered in the stuff. It was pretty compacted and so we thought little of it. About 50 meters in to got deep but what the hey...we had good boots and very helpful trekking poles so carried on. At the end of that field we lost the trail, and realised that an even larger field was ahead of us. We looked at the map, and without really enough food to turn back and hit the last settlement we put our waterproofs on, found the trail again somehow, and continued. At about 4pm, and still climbing higher, I started to worry a bit. In the snow we were going to have trouble weathering the night and the view hadn't changed much from the below for rather a while...

It wasn't all just walking either, I have this vivid memory of Julia near waist deep in snow screaming at her pole trying to free it. After some further ado, I managed to get to where she was and gave the pole a massive great yank, succeeding only in separating the top two parts of the pole from the bottom. I did eventually get it by driving one of my own poles repeatedly at the hole until it freed. After using all that energy and sitting in the snow for a minute or two it did take me another desperate age to get myself and my pack up onto two feet again. There are probably methods and systems for doing this but we knew of none - this was supposed to be a walk in the park! Nothing quite that dramatic happened again, so we ploughed on and in the end made camp above Steinach at about 6.30pm with the light slowly fading. Panic over! Awesome!

That night there was a big storm in the valley - being in the trees and on a slope we avoided the worst, but we stood at the edge of the trees watching the black sky rolling in through the long straight valley past where we had camped the night before and towards us. The next morning we were cold and miserable as it kept up a drizzle. Just before we were about to start down the last hour or so to Steinach a snowstorm started, which we waited out huddled on the mountainside around out packs and sleeping bags lamenting that in spending all our time together we now had less to talk about in idle moments.

Walking into town we were struck by a certain quiet deadness in the air, but thought nothing of it. We made our way to the train station to try and find something out about our options...we had decided to spend a night indoors - we felt we had earned it. The snowstorm had held us up so we had hit siesta time and would not be able to go to the information office before 3pm, so a friendly lady at the station told us the cheapest hotel was out by the ski lift, but said it was 'a bit too far to walk'. 20 mins later we were there and confronted by a sign 'closed between the 20th and the 25th of April due to the end of season.' It was repeated all over town. We had hit Steinach in the one week that we could do nothing here - we had hoped of Internet and washing and pizza (I had hoped of pizza) and the one hotel that was open would have cost us more than a train there and back to Innsbruck and a night a the youth hostel there.

To Innsbruck we went. The plan being to kill some time 'till more snow had melted, to get me a new sleeping bag and for Julia to see if her working abroad plan would work out. As I sit here she is beside me having earned money, I have a new bag, and we are on the next train south.

Bye for now!

J-P

Victory, death, and a more reasonable approach to tiddlywinks...Part 1.

A perfectly-timed catastrophic data loss topped off my week today and trying in vain to happily resolve this has tired me out a bit, so instead of going for words I have decided to produce a map to clearly demonstrate exactly what's going on. In the typical nature of such things, a bright idea like that only took more time and added little, infuriating me. This has eased my tiredness. (I wrote this about a week ago, and it's a testament to my fear of minor graphics bodges that I have not posted it until now - it took me that long to work up the courage to put a few squiggly lines over a google map. Pity Me.)

So, a minor hiccup has occurred. As you can see from the map this minor re-direction of effort has had no serious impact on our progress and most certainly has not reminded us just how bloody quickly pretty much every other form of travel than walking can get you from A to B. It does make me smile to think about just how much more interesting was the way we eventually crossed the border into Italy, but more on that later.

Back to the topic. When I think of tragedy in modern life, I think of this video...

Back onto another topic, I'm sitting at my computer with a nice keyboard and some Newton Faulkner in the background (reference topical to last year inserted to date me and the post). A lot of what I thought about on the first couple of days after leaving Innsbruck for the second time now sounds daft given what's happened since, but it did feel odd to go back to a city after even so short a time and great to get back walking again – this feeling was helped by the return of the sun. First day back we made camp just outside Steinach (the town that was closed for the change of season last time we were here). It was a cold night but we were getting used to it, our target was a 15km walk to the border up and down along windy paths and about 600m up over the last kilometre at the end to a catered alpine inn about 15mins from the border. We wanted to see if the higher ways above the pass were open yet. We had checked better this time and this hut was marked 'open Summer and Winter' so we were confident of a warm meal and bed at the end – this gave us spirit on the walk at the end, which proved to be up a ski-slope.

We made the hut by 6.30 and were pretty beat at that point – so when Julia had crashed on a chair and I walked up to the door of the Sattelberg Alm and saw the sign 'The Sattelberg Alm is closed between the xx of April and the xx of May' I had to sit down for a few minutes myself before I went back to give her the news that we'd have to go back down the hill again. I was considering running away instead of telling her until I spotted movement inside the Alm. A slight Austrian opened the window and said that while they were closed they could give us a bed – he just didn't know where. The very important thing we take from this is that when an inn is listed on the map as 'open summer and winter', it specifically means 'closed spring and autumn' with the glaring subtext of 'what idiot would want to go walking then?'

This I could take back to Julia. My spirits restored we made our way up to the Alm. It turned out that it was open for a private conference for four days, and we had hit it on day two. If we had not gone back to Insbruck for a couple of nights we would have found nothing but wood and ice here which would've made for a rather uncomfortably cold night. As it was, our plan of having a go at a higher pass above Brenner seemed scuppered – everywhere above the Alm the snow that we had been avoiding while walking up the slope became solid and deeper, but even at the hut we were confronted with a magnificent vista that made us careless about not being to make the passage. I vowed to get up in the morning and take some photos in better light. When I woke up at first light to capture the faded beauty of a finished winter's patched white, brown and green, I was confronted by a heavy mist and a snowstorm. On the plus side, I went straight back to bed and got another two hours sleep.

The Sattelberg Alm (or Sattelalm) was such a revelation to us that because of it we've decided to create a whole new section on our website for it. 'places we love'. I won't go into too much detail here about it, but you really should click the link and if you ever find yourself near the Brenner pass it's certainly worth a visit. Over dinner at the Alm we had made a new plan to walk down in the morning and follow the road through the pass into Italy, and even that wasn't perfect, as the new snowfall blocked an easy descent. The owner, Luis, who had taken pity on us yesterday, was privy to our discussions and gave us an interesting new option. We could take a route that was newer than our map that didn't go over the top of Sattelberg but nonetheless went high above Brenner and he would lend us some snow-shoes for the attempt. We jumped at the chance – if he thought it was fine, then surely it was...after all this was a man who had taken one glance at Julia's pack the day before and guessed its weight to within 500g, said it was 4kg heavier than it ought to be and had known before we told him where we had encountered the snow last week. With the offer of the snow-shoes you could see Luis doubted we were sane but credited us with a bit of adventure.

He said to drop the snow-shoes off at a petrol station in Brenner with a friend of his. In England this man would have run out of snow-shoes but in the Alps he runs a successful business and seemingly has not lost any faith in humanity either.

It was a lovely, dramatic but abortive attempt to pass above Brenner into Italy – we actually did cross the border but the only path we found down the mountainside was collapsed and would have probably killed us. After about three hours searching one small area for a sign of a trail we turned back, a bit lucky that we could work out which was the right set of our footsteps to follow.

Back at the Alm Luis was wonderful. I accused him of sending us the wrong way so we'd have to come back for another night and he just joked that 'I am a good businessman' then made us a couple of hot chocolates on the house. Turning back was galling, but the safe choice, and in retrospect tramping through the snow completely alone out of season for hours on end with the motorway almost a kilometer below and only the birds in earshot is probably as peaceful as you can get in what is usually such a popular area.

Things then got a bit better again. Luis offered to show us part of the way tomorrow if we wanted to try again. There was no way on earth that I was going to give up on the chance to do it again, so the next day we set out with Luis leading the way. Now this guy was certainly eligible to be called an active fellow. We had found out in the morning that not only had he built the entire top floor of the Alm pretty much entirely by himself and spent most of his childhood searching for his father's free-grazing cattle but he runs ski and walking tours in the area as well. He carried Julia's pack on the principle that if he didn't he'd just go too fast for us, which was very nice of him. When we found out we had gone left instead of right at the very start and we were never going to find a good route the way we had gone, we were rather sheepish and happy that we had our guide with us this time. As it turned out, he stayed with us all the way, taking us a route we would never have found for ourselves and guided us through the worst bits very carefully. It did become apparent that while for us this was a rather adventurous turn and a definite highlight, for him it was a gentle stroll through his backyard. For instance, with us relying on poles and a slow descent to avoid slipping, he had his ski poles under his arms and was speeding down the hill while on the phone to his grandmother. He did carefully point out the few dangerous bits for us too – on one occasion, with a landslide bringing down a small section of the path, he showed us the route through and we carefully picked it out keeping three points of contact. Luis was at the back for a bit going through one of these, and Julia had already gone through – I was carefully navigating the only tiny ledge above a 200m drop and Luis almost ran below me, seemingly on air, and then turned around to look at me. I told him 'I'm still going to take this slow' and he smiled, replying 'yes – we should always go at our own pace.'.

We made it down OK, and it was a great feeling to think that we had passed into Italy thorough a better route than we had hoped – and we felt especially grateful for Luis who had made it possible for us. If you have not done already, you should check out our short page on the Sattelberg Alm. It was a lovely place. Julia spent half of the next day being happily surprised that it hadn't been that difficult at all, despite the snow, needing reminding every single time that Luis had carried her pack for her. Funny memory that girl has got.

Anyway, this has already got way too long for a single blog post and I have not got anywhere near the end yet. I'll sign off now and fill in a part two in a couple of days. There's no graphics to do this time, so I'll probably have it done in half-an-hour.

J-P

death etc...Part 2, or are you sure this is the right way?

Sitting in the lee of a motorway for lunch, easily our least pleasant location to date, we looked at the map in horror. We had grossly mistaken the amount of time it would take us to reach our next target, Sterzing-Vipiteno. We had estimated about a week – we now realized that it'd be a stretch to say two days.

After our lunch under the motorway we really wanted to get away from roads. The only problem was that we were in an alpine pass with a flat bottom covered in stuff and then almost vertical sides. In our attempt to get away from dangerously Italian traffic, we made our way somehow onto an earth track that turned out to be a disused railway line. We were mildly concerned when we came to a tunnel with a rather brutal 'private, keep out or we'll murder you horribly' style sign so we decided to take some metal steps instead. It was a bit Jurassic park; these steps had been bolted into the stone above a vertical drop and not touched for the last twenty years. Parts of the floor were completely missing, meaning a jump was the only way across, and some of the thick steel steps were so twisted and bent we worked out that only falling rocks quite a bit heavier than us could've made them. It took us a while to navigate this little death-trap and when we got to the end, all proud of ourselves, it turned out that it just took us to the other side of this short tunnel. We felt a bit like muppets, and when we came across the next tunnel we just walked through it.

The other side of these steps we came across what looked like a shanty town with one inhabitant. Someone was living in an old railway hut and had collected all the crap that had been dropped in the area for the last thirty years, populated what was in effect a re-structured rubbish heap with a random assortment of goats, ducks and chickens and turned the whole thing into a shabby but livable small-holding much at odds with anything we'd yet seen in this region of almost clinically perfect construction.

We didn't see that again, but we did see a few more abandoned huts and one whole station.

That was very useful because this old railway line was not on the map and up until then we had no idea where we were, save not where we were supposed to be. We camped that night in possibly our most idyllic location yet, and over the next couple of days we meandered to try and avoid reaching Sterzing before our parcel.

It turns out this whole region is littered with old WWII bunkers, some still having the rusted remains of their mock-stone doors hanging off the deep concrete slits. This was a nice distraction, but we wanted to get moving and work out where we would be going. To that end we had a little look at the map, only to find out that even though the map company promise that they overlap, these two maps here actually don't because in the 'new' series that one of them belongs to, they've changed the areas the maps cover slightly. Is it just me that thinks that is monumentally stupid?

Well, regardless we still needed to get to Sterzing and the walk was so beautiful. The sun decided to come out again, and we remembered exactly why we were here. We even had our most storybook encounter so far...Walking through sloping fields surrounded by a velvety deep-pile carpet of blooming spring, we came across a farmer tending his hives and selling his own honey. I must say usually near a lot of bees I get a bit nervous. When I see that much potential harm within a few feet of me, I tend to get a bit jumpy. It's like police with guns – I don't expect to get shot, but it raises the temperature. I looked at his hives, hundreds of bees everywhere, and sensed nothing but industry. I always knew bees were not interested in stinging people, but looking at that hive hard at work surrounded by so much pollen, I really felt it. The bees just couldn't care less. We bought some honey from the farmer, who let us refill our water from his own personal spring (on which he proudly showed us his fathers' initials carved in stone beneath proving the progeny of the private family spring). They usually bottle it and sell it, but as with all springs around here it just keeps gushing whether it is used or not, so it cost him nothing to let us drink.

So armed with honey and water, and navigating some rather large roadblocks (see above) we made camp outside Sterzing and made our way down into the town.

Our early arrival would have been cause for great joy if reality had been tweaked slightly – but right now we were rather peeved by our efficiency. We had set up a post-restante at Sterzing and our package was not due to arrive for about a week, making it a rather long stop-off when all we really wanted to do was continue walking south. If this was our only problem, we would've been OK. Julia had some work to do so we needed to stay put for a while and we had found a very good secluded campsite that we could go back to. It was just at this point we ran headlong into our lack of planning.

The next morning in town we failed to find internet. Sterzing is quite a large place, and it did have a coin-operated internet machine in a coffee shop, but that was it. Julia's rucksack was just beginning to rip, and we really needed a new one. Sitting in a place that did pizza for lunch suddenly it all came flooding into our brains, all the little things we would change if we could. Get a better knife for cooking, make a special tiny chopping board that doubled as another lid for a saucepan, get Julia's taxes done, sort out a job interview for the winter, get Julia some more socks, a new penny whistle, get a new wooden spoon, earn a bit of money to offset the outrageous spend so far. The list went on...

...the end result of this was that it was just a better idea to come home and sort our lives out than stick around. It was going to be cheaper, easier and less stressful. So that's what we did.

It seems I only get to write a journal entry at moments when something has gone wrong. Unfortunately for anyone I've suckered into reading this, plans are afoot to ensure that this will change. As Julia was finding it very difficult to get reliable internet access via third parties and as all she wants is word-processing and handling small files, we've got a cheap and light netbook and strapped the laptop battery equivalent of a nuclear reactor to the backside of it – giving it a tested eight or nine hours of battery life. Combine this with an Italian 3G SIM card (got the dongle here) and we're ready to go (although watch this space, I forsee trouble actually making this work).

So, we're off again on Tuesday with a slightly better kit and a bit more knowledge. We've also managed to dent the deficit too. If you look at the number dated 24/5/2009 you'll see for the first time it's gone down. This doesn't include an extra few hundred of work that Julia has done and will be paid for over the next couple of weeks and so it's (and I say this with slight shock) only going to look better in a week or two's time.

We've also had to get a bit realistic about 'never coming back to the UK ever! No matter what!'. Really, to make this work we'll need to come back every now and again to earn a bit of money or pick up some better clothes and maybe some books if we get a stationary job for a few months. Even at this early stage, I think that we're beginning to get an idea of how this might go.

For the first time since this started, I think this cost-neutral travelling lark might actually work!

The road to the Jaufenpass, via Tyrolian History 101.

After getting back to Italy, the following few days were spent in a limbo between work and play...Julia had some work to finish and to find a power socket we were forced to trek into the library every day. It was a strange modern building that was a bit like an elongated greenhouse filled with odd overgrown plants and trees and had been built as a complex with the town theatre, but the most interesting thing about this library (I wonder if anyone's personal interest has sustained them this far) was the (wait for it) books.

Now I'm not just being facile here. The Italian province of Bozen-Bolzano is up there with the CAP and the 'not-a-constitution, honest' as one of Europe's all-time political fudges. This thoroughly German-speaking province was promised to the Italians by the British and French in exchange for their entry into the First World War. By the end of the war the province's former owners, the Austro-Hungarian Empire (a huge, horribly messy ethnic patchwork of an Austrian-ruled empire in eastern Europe), was in a state of collapse. The winds of change brought an old idea wrapped up in new words to the European sphere, courtesy of the Americans. Self-determination for all people was, in simple terms, the concept that ethnic areas should be free to form their own nations and choose their own forms of government. The principle here was that if everyone lived in a country to which they felt they belonged and were governed as they chose, there would be fewer reasons for conflict within and between nations, and everybody would live happily ever after.

What the hell am I talking about? Well, the promise made to the Italians at the start of the war was the old-fashioned European diplomacy of give-and-take-and-take-some-more, and it didn't sit well with this crazy, liberal, new-world 'can't we all just get along' mumbo-jumbo. Italians had fought and died for three years in one of the most brutal theatres of the war, and Italy wanted her payment – she wanted her 'natural borders' across the middle of the Alps – this is diplomatically equivalent to me saying to my neighbour 'That tree down the end of your garden logically belongs to me because it commands the strategic approaches to my tomato plants.'

International relations being what they are, the Italians got the province, and then proceeded their 50-odd year attempt to make it Italian. I turn to stereotype when I ask you to guess how much success a sporadically repressive Italian government had against a centuries-old German culture. Needless to say, the one church I've been inside only had a German hymnal and the owners of the hotel we're staying in have given us no hint that they speak any Italian.

The heavy-handed nature of the Italians can be characterised by this rather old plaque below...

So what? Well, that someone clearly felt strongly enough to replace the German name of the town with the Italian one on a 13th (?) century monument. Here it is closer below, just to labour the point just a little bit more...

...it isn't entirely ancient history either. Austria only withdrew her international protest at the UN about Italian treatment of ethnic Germans in 1973. OK, that's hardly last year, but it took a long while for the current system to emerge – which grants administration of the region to an autonomous authority based in Bozen-Bolzano, and grants the majority of the province, which is still German-speaking, security that their culture will no longer be systematically attacked by the state.

With the creation of the autonomous region and now open European borders the only reminders in some of the villages that this is not Austria are the post boxes and the Italian half of the road signs. Pretty much all non-official signs are entirely German.

Back to the books...if you remember that far...It's an entirely bi-lingual library. Possibly a bit too much background info for such a small point, but it highlights the slightly weird nature of a region that I keep forgetting is not Austria.

So, back in Sterzing-Vipiteno, we spent a couple of nights in our most secluded camp yet while we sorted out some work Julia needed to finish and got our 3G mobile internet organised. It wasn't great fun (apart from the library, of course) and was compounded by the fact that the day we wanted to set out was the first day of a three-day public holiday (Sunday, nothing opens...Monday, Penticost...Tuesday, Italian Republic Day) and so we were quite heavily laden with food. On top of that it remained to be seen whether we had adequate fitness left in us after a couple of weeks of eating cake and lazing about in Norfolk to make a proper go of it.

I have no shame in saying that it was a great pleasure to me that Julia was feeling unwell and a little down when we started walking, rendering her incapable of resisting a bona-fide pay-for camp-site with attached toilets, showers, and most importantly, pizzeria(!) that night that was perfectly placed as a starting point for our next target – walking over the Jaufenpass.

OK, that's not the pass, that's the Jaufenspitz, but it's only a few hundred meters away and far more dramatic. At 2099m the pass was a lot higher than Brenner (1370), and the way we'd decided to walk it involved a steep climb in the morning followed by a picturesque walk along a high ridge called the Platschjoch that in high summer is teeming with walkers but at this time of year, and in perfect weather, the only sign of recent human activity along the whole route (until we got to a roadside restaurant about 200m from the pass itself) was this...

OK – the rest of this I'll leave to Julia, but I hope you enjoyed my start...Historical sources include my brain, which has been known to be unreliable, and wikipedia, from which this article will lead you further if you are interested, which has a similar reputation. Any general changes to your life's philosophy based on what is written above are entirely your own responsibility.

Day one of the pass or 'Walking vertically'

The walk up to the Jaufenpass, our next target, was going to take us up 800m along a roughly 4km ridge, then up another 300m before plunging us back into civilisation.

The walk, which looked promising on paper in terms of potential views, involved ignoring signs for the Panoramaweg which wanted to take us through the valley to the left of the ridge we wanted to walk along. The reason for this became clear around half an hour into our ascent. We had expected the way to be steep – we had to climb some 800 metres in not much horizontal distance. The path achieved this by including stretches that were almost vertical. The path wound its way up but sometimes needn't have bothered. Walking sideways along a vertical slope is not much easier than walking straight up said slope. This was the toughest ascent we had yet encountered – it was a good thing that we had stayed at the camp site the night before, giving us the whole day to make it up to the top. In fact, we had planned to make it to the ridge then walk back down to a village half way along in order to be a bit lower when we camped (and therefore a bit warmer). I really didn't want to walk back down ¾ of the height we had walked up to get to the ridge and have to do it all over again the next day. In the end, we didn't need to, but more of that later.

Lunching after two hours of really hard slog, I was concerned. It felt like the top of the mountain would never come. We couldn't see it and were taking a long time to get anywhere. Would our two days worth of food be enough? We pressed on, with bags so laden down that at one point, when I slipped and ended up crouching on the back of my legs, I was unable to get up. Equally, I couldn't turn over to get up with my hands and knees or lean backwards or forwards due to the angle of the slope. Luckily JP was able to help me up else I might still be there!

Some way up, we reached our first mountain meadow. It was a lovely sight – JP called it the loveliest place we never camped. It was perfect but we hadn't walked nearly far enough. At this point, the slope having decided that its angle was not going to put us off, the vegetation decided to try to convince us that we had taken a drastically wrong turning and were somewhere in the Amazon rainforest. OK, so I've never actually been to the Amazon rain forest (ask me again in five years time) and I doubt you get the sound of cow bells in the distance but clearly we were walking a part that had not been walked for a while, perhaps since last year – and was more like jungle, with something related to lilly pads covering the floor.

I was beginning to wonder what else could be thrown at us – were we about to have to wrestle a bear or would the Sphinx arrive, demanding the answer to a riddle before we would be allowed to reach the top of this flippin' ridge and its apparently promised lovely views? The part we now know was nearly at the top was particularly tiring as it would go flat just long enough for us to think that we might have reached the ridge and then would hurl itself upwards before us again. The thick wood ahead of us continually prevented us from seeing how far there was to go. And then, there it was. We burst through some more Christmas trees (they are everywhere here) and saw, no, not an amazing view, but a tiny sign which, after close inspection, informed us that we had reached the Gostjöchl – at 1799 metres, this was, more importantly, almost the highest point we would pass. J-P, who is 'funny' apparently, asked if I could jump a metre to make the figure round. This blog requires me to have made a witty reply, and believe me, I'm still trying to think of one but instead I gaped and him and then demanded to know where the views were. All I could see were trees and a lot of ants. It became clear, however, that we had hit the ridge proper and as the trees cleared, we could see snow capped mountains all around us. The views were every bit as stunning as the map had suggested and the hard slog turned out to have been completely worth it. Bizarrely, the ridge appeared to be trying to emulate Scotland – wide rolling meadows with heather everywhere. We didn't meet a soul all day and were so far from the bottom that it was almost silent. Thorough atheist that I am, I had to allow that if there is a god, s/he/it has very refined taste. If you had these

wouldn't you want to put them everywhere? I don't think I would have been as restrained as nature but the effect was stunning. No wonder this is a hugely popular walk during the summer months – it's just a mystery that we were the only ones up there at the time. The Austrians/Italians seem to stick to their season timetables (where summer starts at the end of June) very strictly. This may be sensible as the weather on the day of writing this blog post is foul and not one for walking.

Anyway, we bumbled along very happily from this point, exploring a hut and generally staring around us. The question of where we were going to sleep – being at the top meant it would be cold and there would be precious little protection from any wind – was luckily solved for us when we stumbled across another hut that had not been locked. It appeared to be some sort of summer eatery that had been badly treated by whoever had been there before us. Some floor boards had been ripped up and the toilet smashed. However, it suited our purposes and we slept on the floor indoors having had a very relaxing evening – the sun took ages to go down (well, we were 2 km up!) and were ready for bed much earlier than usual as there was little set up to be done). I spent part of the evening persevering with Catch 22. I brought it with me from Norfolk as J-P has two copies (and Annie another) so I figured one wouldn't be missed. I've heard about this 'classic' and knew about the catch but not much else. So far I am not sure what I make of it. The style of writing is extremely funny at times but I'm not sure there's a plot – I'm some 170 pages in and I'm still trying to work out where it's going. It appears to be more a collection of events with a lot of characters to keep track of. Lovers of the book, fear not, I shall keep trying but for now, all it gets from me is a 'hmm...'.

Day two of the pass and beyond or 'The epic fly and the ankle epic'.

Day two of the Jaufenpass brought us over the pass, down the other side, and possibly on the plane home again, shattering what remains of our pride...read on to find out why...

It wasn't the most comfortable night but the hut ensured that we were warm and dry and didn't have to waste time going down, and then back up, the ridge. The next day we set off with our primary concern being to find our next water source. I only realised why J-P wasn't worried about this when a sign informed us that we were, at most, around 1.5 hours from the end of the ridge and a hotel/restaurant. That sorted, the morning passed very pleasantly. When we reached the Sterzinger Jaufenhaus, at the pass, J-P announced that he was going to buy me lunch as an anniversary present, his reasoning being that by buying it then, he would be able to take me by surprise. We had a lovely lunch, only slightly marred by J-P finding a fly in his lasagna. It wasn't a small fly or just a bit of a fly, but a large and completely intact, little monster. The waitress whisked it away and we were left to ponder its fate. After some enormous slices of cake – even J-P was almost defeated – we were presented with the bill. We had prepared to fight our corner as we didn't think we should have to pay for the lasagna, or least not for all of it (even my English side came out to play at that point and prevaricated) but the wind was neatly taken out of our sails when the waitress informed us that the offending item was not on the bill.

After lunch we headed uphill again, hopped through the pass – our highest bit of walking yet, at 2099m...

We noted the sheer number of bikers out in force that day and contemplated the downhill ahead us – our next village was 900m lower than we were and the next town was 600m lower again. Going down is still exhausting on the legs but we were grateful to have enough breath to talk and camped that evening with no major upsets, barring a dog that had growled at us rather menacingly as we had walked past 'its' house. Normally this doesn't upset me but I've never before had the impression that a dog was actually going to attack me and I felt this one had not yet made up its mind. However, all was well.

The next morning, we carried on walking downhill. All was going well until we reached a stretch of road. As I walked in front of J-P, I heard a sudden scream and whipped round to see that he had fallen. All of you who know J-P's weakness can probably guess what had happened – yes, he'd turned his ankle on an uneven bit of road and, not using his trekking poles due to being on a flat road, had fallen straight down. He says he could tell immediately that it was bad and we couldn't help but recall the Epic of the Sprained Ankle of last year which managed to take some 3 months to heal. This was very bad news.

I persuaded J-P to move off the road and onto a nearby path. We sat and waited, hoping somehow that sprain might sort itself out but 30 minutes later, J-P still couldn't walk and it was clear that our plan would have to change. Luckily, he had fallen not far from a hotel and, when I went to them to explain, one of the managers kindly drove over to pick him up. J-P went to bed with the idea that he would rest completely and that the next day we would decided whether we would have to fly home and how we would get to the airport if he couldn't walk at all. I spent the day ferrying ice and painkillers/anti-inflamatories to him and elevating his foot to ridiculous heights. We were both very upset at the thought that we might have to fly back. If the ankle took as long to heal as last time, and it had been a nasty wrench, that could mean the rest of the summer would be spent waiting for him to get better. We've both been enjoying the walking enormously and the two days going over the pass were possibly the best we've had so far. We'd finally sorted our kit out and were happy with everything we had; it seemed cruel that just a week in, we might be forced back again.

That was Thursday. We are still at the hotel today (Saturday) and plan to stay here two more nights. On Friday, J-P's ankle was noticeably better and we wondered whether if we stayed put for a while, whether perhaps, just perhaps, we might be able to get back to walking in a week. We still don't know whether this will happen but J-P's ankle is still improving. The hotel is not too expensive and in any case, we've agreed to a bit of financial jiggery pokery that means this stay won't affect our walking budget. We discovered back at the pass that we had each decided to treat the other to a stay in a hotel for our anniversary. This, and the fact that the weather has turned bad (thick fog and heavy rain) and is forecast to stay for the weekend, means that I have dropped my plan to move J-P to a camp today where he could recuperate and instead we have agreed that we will split the cost of the four nights between us as our anniversary gift to each other, leaving our budget intact and giving J-P's ankle four days of complete bed rest. We don't think we'll be able to start walking again properly on Monday, but if we can make it to a camp and then maybe, in a few days, slowly start moving again, I think we'll both be happy.

So...what's going to happen to destroy this particular set of plans? Could the photo at the top of this post be J-P's last on the trail, of his hastily discarded boot and map?

Through the Passer Valley - “That's it, I'm going home!”

Thursday the 4th of June: 11am
On a hot summer's day made for falling in love on a morning's gentle skip downhill from the Jaufenpass we hit our first flat road for the past two days. It was a bit of a relief. “Crunch!” I heard, collapsing suddenly to the floor. I had sprained my left ankle on a hole in the road. Screaming in a rather disturbing way I told Julia “It's over, we're going home!”. I was on my back for two days, and I'm still limping today, or I would be...

Thursday the 11th of June: 11am
Carefully manoeuvring down from our first camp site since starting up again after the injury, coming down through a steep sun-bathed grassy vale, “Crunch!” I heard, collapsing suddenly to the floor, now cradling my right ankle in pain. Keeping very quiet and hoping my camera was still working I saw Julia come up to me, throw her pack off and say “That's it, we're going home!”

Well, lying there with two hurt ankles and frankly surprised after checking that my camera was in fact still working, I reflected that I was only a few metres from a road and a taxi to anywhere, and I was hovered over by an attentive and concerned Julia. Concurrently, we weren't too far from the place I'd spent a week in recovery. With mobile internet we could have a flight booked and be on our way home in hours.

Given the situation, I considered the only reasonable thing to do was to strap my new high-powered ankle support to the newest injury and get going again, happy in the knowledge that at least this meant I would lose my limp for a bit.

Now I knew this new injury wasn't half as bad, but it conformed to the strange correlation to type that my ankle injuries tend to – explicitly that I am fine going uphill, but downhill I am slower than an amputee snail. With an almost 1km to drop over a distance of not much more, a walk signposted as “2 hrs 10mins” took us just under two days under alternating blazing sunlight and torrential rain.

Sitting at the well in the center of town looking at my bruised feet and having bought a second high-powered ankle support, we considered our options. We could book a hotel room for a few days to allow me to try to recover properly, we could reason that it would cost about as much as that to return home and let me recover at my leisure seeing as my last ankle sprain, in January of last year, had me off my feet for two weeks and off work (active driving and walking around outside actually doing things work, you office-bound types!) for two months. We checked out flights and reasoned that we had reasoned correctly. We also thought about having a short city break and walking a bit without packs to see if that would help. We started bickering, got in strops, fought over who would call an end to the whole thing and ate some cake (even that didn't help much!). In the end I just got bored and decided the easiest way to make all of this go away was just to strap up and start heading south.

What followed was a minor revelation. The combination of newly flat going, regular breaks, and knowing that I was way too afraid of humiliation to give up walking just because I couldn't walk, meant that to the eternal bewilderment of both of us we're still out here!

The next two days consisted of a self-imposed exile from the wonderful tree-strewn steep trails we've spent the rest of our time on as my ankle injuries made it prudent to travel on the flat for a while. As it happened there was a bicycle and walking track following the path of the river which made it easy. It meant we would have to share the road with the simply absurd amount of people here who have amazingly expensive bicycles and Lycra jumpsuits (coming across, for instance, one family aged from about 8 to about 60, all kitted out in matching orange and yellow Lycra, and all wearing a kind of collective superior visage that ranged in effect from anthropologically intriguing to educationally concerning depending on whether it was the whiskered grandfather or the skinny whelp you happened to glance at. Then again, we're a bit oddly dressed sometimes too...)

It was at about this point that we looked around us and discovered that it had become summer while we weren't looking, and it was bloody hot. Going to sleep at night we discovered that our sleeping bags were open. Going into the shops Julia found to her great delight that Peaches were in season and ripe almost to melting, I found that my sandals were suddenly the first thing I was reaching for in the evening, and without as much as a whimper, the specter of going home quietly slipped away.

"That's it, I'm staying here" - an update

This isn't a proper blog post as such and will not contain any of J-P's fabulous photography but I thought you might all want to know that we are back in the UK.

(At this point, J-P would write 'click below' to read more, but I think you're all bright enough to work this out for yourselves.)

After struggling for some time with J-P's ankle, we eventually realised that hoping to continue on his favoured surface (flat) wasn't really going to be doable. J-P can walk well enough at the moment but not with a heavy pack or for long periods and walking while he was almost continuously in pain did not seem pointful. We came home last Thursday having spent a few days on holiday in Merano and are now living in Norfolk again.

I can thoroughly recommend Merano as a holiday destination. The location is wonderful and there is an awful lot to do. The area (low and surrounded by hills) is good for walking and riding. There is a campsite in the middle of the city and bikes can be hired, free, from several locations. There are also the Merano Terme which I visited three times(!) and which are luxurious. The water in Merano is naturally rich in radon which is apparently very good for you. We had a wonderful time learning about the area and its ice creams. The title of this post did become our cry for a while. Alas, it was not to be but we will return.

Our plan is to stay here for a few weeks to allow J-P to recuperate and then return to our travels. The 'walking down Italy' plan is postponed to another year but we will be returning to Italy to start with. We will be doing 'workaways' for the rest of the year - see www.workaway.info. It involves volunteering for 5 hours, 5 days a week, doing whatever people require, be it babysitting, carpentry, teaching, gardening and more. In return, we will get food and board. We've arranged a placement in Tuscany for August, before which we hope to finally visit my family! We will then go to Greece in September to work in an animal sanctuary on one of the islands. I am still working out where we will go after that.

To all of you who have commented on the blog or emailed us on our travels, thank you. It's much appreciated. I hope we will have more exciting things to tell you about soon and in the meantime, don't forget that if you're looking for a wedding photographer, an excellent one has just re-entered the country! Find him at www.jptreen.com