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.