Legs and Borders

Rainy day spend walking along the canals and lakes. After a decent breakfast at the holiday park (avocado, banana and Korean rice noodle salad) I started tramping around 6am. Trail was still running along Alps2Ocean cycling route and it was easygoing. It begun to rain at 10am. I caught up with Paul before midday he wasn't feeling it, I knew his tent wasn't rainproof anymore, he even bought couple of bin bags to put over it in case it did. I haven't seen him for the rest of the day and there was a lodge along the trail so perhaps he chose to go there rather than risk getting wet at night. It carried on raining and it was cloudy for the rest of the day, I stopped halfway through the first of three climbs we had to do on this section. It was next to a stream in the forest. It wasn't a campsite but it looked like people camped here often. Tomorrow trail was crossing a fairly big river called Ahuriri which after two days of rai...

Rainy, windy day, luckily trail wasn't running high so it wasn't an issue. In the morning I tried to find a moment when the rain would die down so I could wrap everything up, I kind of did but most of things got damp anyway. It didn't stop all the way to Havelock. Once here, I've topped up the food in "4Square" I needed around 5 days worth in the backpack, bough an additional salami and cheese as the next town St Arnaud had an expensive shop, up to a point where most of hikers would sent a resupply box there. I was banking on using food they left behind, as usually with resupply boxes people would mail more than they needed and did not want to carry the excess. While I was sorting the food, I got approached by Jo and Ella. Two students from Wellington, they've been en route to a techno festival on the South Island and once there, they were planning to get stoned on various drugs. I think Jo was already high on something as he kept o...

"Where are you from!?.. Oh, hail Poland!" Some Random Idiot "In the Basque country they call this rain 'chirri mirri'. It doesn't get you wet, until it does" Nil Today definitely had layers, like an ogre. It started well and fairly late, I didn't leave the hostel until 7:30 but managed to catch up with most of my friends and called my grandfather who was getting worried because apparently volcano in Malaysia exploded and he though it was somewhere near. The downsides of being on the other side of the planet. After leaving the coziness of the hostel behind I started walking through the city along the TA stopping quite frequently to take a picture of a murals scattered along the walls. I went past Hamilton's "Les Mills" which would make any theatre nerd chuckle and had a latte in one of the cafes. Towards the end of city some random idiot asked me where I'm from and Nazi saluted me when ...

Weather was still miserable in the morning so I was walking in fog and rain until about 10am when the sky started to clear and the sun made an appearance. By then my shoes and trousers were fully soaked, it reminded me of certain days walking through the Sierras where getting wet was a part of the deal. In the contrary drinking water was difficult to find for most of the day, there were only two reliable sources for about twenty miles, which is odd because we are walking now through a green corridor and the rainfall in Oregon is considerably higher than in California. The terrain as anticipated got much easier, the time of steep ascents is now postponed until Washington or so I hope. The path is also mostly a soft forrest floor, with very few dead fallen trees obstructing it and hardly any stones - it can be overgrown by weeds sometimes which during rainy days like today can make you very wet. Todays green corridor didn't have many opportunities for landscape photography, so I'...

"One of the biggest problems while hitchhiking is having to talk to people making them feel like they didn't make a mistake picking you up. Even entertain them almost all of which is a great strain if you going all the way and don't plan to sleep in the hotels" Jack Kerouac. Great day with not so good ending. It was  rather easy in terms of hiking, not that much elevation gain and mostly going downhill to the town of Belden where I could have and potentially should have called it a day. The difference was that I met people I decided to hike out with. First if them was Mooch, an American girl living in Lake Tahoe, who actually hiked with Tom (I walked my first two weeks of PCT with him) I learned from her that his trail name is Cheeks, indeed because of his glorious butt cheeks! She also hiked with Tank Top, met Mama Troll and Courier etc. so we had a lot to talk about. Second person I met in Belden was Cuppa, a British guy from Manchester - very interesting person, he...

I count today as the second worst (after descending from Sonora Pass) day on the PCT. I knew it will rain but forecast said that it will be just a light shower and perhaps it even was, somewhere down below, but at 10000 feet elevation it was a hell on wheels. I started walking at 5:10am and as I was getting closer to the Tinkers Knob peak it started to rain, nothing heavy to start with just a light shower as anticipated, after half an hour clouds moved on top of the mountain obscuring the view and the heavy rain and wind commenced. On couple occasions wind pushed me away from the trail, snow got even more slippery and I fell and slid twice and had to plunge my fingers into the snow in order to stop sliding off the mountain, but the 'funniest' thing happened when I jumped off the snow on to a table sized flat rock in order to drop down to the trail and it started to slide down with me on top for couple of metres until it finally plunged itself into the trail. I was wet to the bo...