Pesadilla en el aeropuerto con final feliz

You know those dreams where you’re trying to get somewhere but none of the corridors are the right ones, and doors turn into chutes or rafts and for the love of god you cannot get your phone to work? And how those dreams happen a lot in airports? Well. I finished the W trek on…

Las Cuernos: the horns

“Always travel lighter /than the heart.” The last line of Lorna Crozier’s poem Packing for the Future echoes as I walk. I have my whole pack today, light enough as I heft it in the Refugio, silting heavier as I go. It’s not that far, today, a relatively flat stretch from the park entrance, where…

Me encantan mis palos

When I climbed Kilimanjaro in 2009, I learned the only full sentence in Swahili that has stayed with me: napenda fimbo yangu: I love my stick. I didn’t have a guide to give me soothing Spanish lessons while I hiked the Mirador las Torres trail in Torres del Paine park in Patagonia today. But I…

Perspectives

On a bike, everything is relative. Five kilometres downhill on a calm day is a completely different experience than 5 km ascending with a headwind. A five degree drop in temperature makes a climb suddenly light, the opposite a gasping trial. You feel these shifts with every nuance on a bike — and they are…

Transylvania

Someone sent me a text the other day asking about the ease of traveling in Montenegro. That wasn’t her language, but it was what it boiled down to: how easy it is to get around, availability of vegetarian food, English speaking, friendly to queer women, friendly in general. It made me think hard about what…

You must be careful for bears

In my first two hours in Romania, five different people told me to watch out for bears. Monday was a long travel day, first a drive from Monténégro to the Dubrovnik airport, a flight to Vienna, a flight to Bucharest, an unpleasant hour in a disorganized airport and then a taxi ride to the old…

Serpentine road

At the top of Lovćen mountain, there is a mausoleum to the « greatest Montenegrin, » Petar II Petrović Njegoš. From my hotel in the national park, it was a gentle climb to the turnoff for the mausoleum, then a less gentle 2.8 km, then a steep final 200m. I hopped off, doing that uphill…

Rastish to Virpazar, then Lovcen Park

There were four climbs. I was anxious about today, which Drazen had told me was « very difficult ». The overheated, close to breaking, feeling of walking the bike up the last steep climb yesterday afternoon burrowed into my brain. I looked at the gradient diagram before I went to sleep. A mistake. Sleep was…

Stari Bar to Rastish, with a detour to Albania

The Balkans are green, even in the blasting heat, layered with ancient VW Golfs and a history I can barely even imprint on with my finger. When I was doing my PhD, I was the student reader on a dissertation written by a colleague from Montenegro. She was writing about post-traumatic activism among women who’d…

From Virpazar to Stari Bar

The dog ate my sandwich. Well, actually I gave it to him, when he lumbered out from underneath the concrete bench beautifully placed at a viewpoint about 2 km from the highest point of my ride today. It was all uphill, that first 22 km, mostly gentle but seriously constant. First on a narrow shaded…