Blame Canada

By the next day the rain was pouring down with no intention of stopping, so the hostel was full of bored hikers. One old guy who'd railed against 'fairweather hikers' the previous evening had already set out, but he was alone. He must have been slightly insane too, as he'd had a heart transplant not too long before. It had earned him the trail name 'Newheart'.

Everyone on the Appalachian Trail gets a trail name (well, everyone except the boring guy with sleep apnea). It's all part of the culture, and when you're swapping stories about some character you came across in Virginia, everyone knows who you're talking about. Take, for example, 'Lo-Jack', whose mum made him carry a GPS device of the same name just in case he ever got lost.

Even Nina and I had trail names - we took ours from 'Winnie the Pooh'. I was always worrying about what could go wrong and wasn't a big fan of taking risks, so I was Rabbit. Nina bounced along the trail and was endlessly optimistic, so she was Tigger. Not the toughest-sounding names in the world, but hey, we're girls.

So when we befriended some other hikers on that rainy morning, they introduced themselves by their trail names. There was Squid Jerky, who got his name from the dried seafood he ate on the trail, sent to him by a friend in Korea; then there was Lost Baggage (LB for short) who was constantly leaving things behind him on the trail; and finally York, who called himself that because he had family in England. Even though they lived in Stoke-on-Trent.

We were all sitting around eating breakfast and watching crap TV. There was some show on that involved animals doing lame tricks, and everyone was taking the mick out of it. The junky food, the excessive coffee, the rubbish TV, the ruthless cynicism: I felt like a student again.

But we couldn’t sit around the hostel eating junk and watching rubbish all day, so we decided to go to the cinema and do it there instead. And boy, was it rubbish. We saw ‘The Brothers Grimm’, which was incredibly confusing and not particularly enjoyable - the cinematic equivalent of a bad trip. If it wasn’t for the fun we had tearing the film to pieces afterwards, it would have been a complete letdown.

By the time we got back to the hostel, Nina and I were starting to get itchy feet again. We’d stuffed ourselves with pizza, popcorn and ice cream, and done no physical activity after four days of hiking. There was still time left before we had to get back to real life, so we made a decision. We’d drive until it stopped raining, then find a place to hike. First stop was the Adirondacks in New York State.

So we dropped the hikers off and headed west. After six hours of driving and failing to find a cheap hotel, Nina and I pulled over to the side of the road and slept in the car. We smelled, it was cold, and it was raining outside, but we didn’t mind – it was almost like being in the mountains again.

It’s my firm belief that the reason so few Westerners take God seriously is because they take so few risks. It’s kind of hard to see God at work when you’ve holed yourself up in front of the TV with a bag of crisps. What’s He supposed to do, change the channel for you? That’s why faith is way more prevalent in countries where even clean water is a miracle.

A lot of people laugh at outdoorsy types who describe their experiences as ‘spiritual, man’, but it’s true. You can’t climb a mountain, or view the earth from 10,000 feet before plummeting towards it with only a piece of silk to break your fall, without knowing God is looking out for you. It’s the same for hikers, and it was especially true on our last day on the mountain.

Nina woke up in a bad mood, so I should have known instantly that something was wrong. But I figured it was just the rain (damp gets to everyone after a while) and got on with packing up the camp. It gradually became clear, though, that Nina wasn’t feeling herself at all. She had that ‘just driven 12 hours to New Hampshire’ look again.

“My stomach’s getting pretty sore, Suz,” she said eventually. “I’ve had this before and it always turns into cramps. Usually they’re so bad I can’t even walk.”

Remember what I said about the wilderness? About dying of exposure before help comes? About being invisible to helicopters below treeline (which is where we were)? Nina looked scared, and with good reason. If she couldn’t walk, it would take me a good few hours to get down the mountain and raise the alarm.

The only thing she could do was take painkillers and hope they kicked in before the cramps did (they never kicked in after, apparently). Then we prayed and started walking.

For twenty minutes, it was all pretty nerve-wracking. At one stage Nina stopped for a breather and I went on ahead (catching up with me is pretty easy, even with stomach ache). After a few minutes, though, there was no sign of her, I yelled her name. Silence. I yelled it again, using my best stage projection voice. What if she was sitting in agony on a log somewhere?

But after an eternity her voice floated down the trail in reply, followed by her Cheshire grin and then the rest of her, uncramped.

“The painkillers kicked in!” she said. “My stomach’s slightly sore and that’s it. This has never happened before!”

The relief was so great that, for a few minutes, my legs stopped aching. The foot of the mountain was only a few hours away on an easy trail. Gravity would get us there and then we’d have showers, hot food and real beds. Life was good.

Getting out of the wilderness after four days was much weirder than I anticipated, though. Not that I wasn’t looking forward to it – I had the legs of an eighty year old and my shoulders and hips were bruised from the backpack – it was just very strange. After several hours walking through an ethereal forest where the trees stretched their limbs through the mist, inviting us to fall asleep (it was tempting) and meet our doom like in some weird German fairy tale, we found ourselves in a field. While our eyes told us it was deserted, our ears told us we were twenty metres from an interstate highway. As we got closer to the end of the trail, we could hear voices. We were back in civilization.

The voices belonged to a group of fresh faced teens who were about to take on the mountains. Their gear was new and clean, they didn’t smell and they had actual energy. As Nina and I walked past, their chatter died away. I guess the thought of looking like us in four days’ time was a pretty sobering thought.

Stepping out onto the hard shoulder of the interstate, I realized the hard work was pretty far from over. We still had to hitch 16 kilometres back to the car, and nobody seemed particularly bothered about stopping for us. We started walking. My backpack felt like it was about to dislocate my shoulders. Nina needed the bathroom. It was all a huge anti-climax.

And still we trudged, and still the lone drivers in their SUVs whizzed past us. Our feet were killing us (it’s amazing how hard pavement seems when you haven’t walked on it for a while) and we were dehydrated. But just as we were really starting to flag, just when it seemed like we’d be walking to town in the dark, someone stopped for us.

Moving along at 80 miles an hour seems like warp speed after days on foot, especially when you’re in the back of a pickup truck. Nina and I whooped and cheered as the wind blew through our hair and we saw the trail disappearing behind us. Soon we were in the nearest town, where we scored another ride in a matter of minutes. Before we knew it, we were back at the car and the hike was over.

One of the best things about hiking is how much it makes you appreciate the simple things in life. Nina’s humble Civic seemed like a gold-plated chariot that would whisk us away to a world of hot showers, non-dehydrated food, and soft dry beds. We booked ourselves into a hostel and, once we were clean, headed straight to J’s. The food was even better than it had been four days ago.

Then it was back to the hostel to hang out with our fellow hikers, sharing tales of bravery, hardship, and narrowly escaping death. After five minutes of getting to know people, though, I realized I had very little to contribute. Almost everyone in the hostel was thru-hiking the Appalachian Trail, which ended just 300 miles up the road having snaked its way through mountains all the way from Georgia. They’d been hiking most of the last 5 months. I hadn’t even done 5 days.

I was also put off by some obscenely boring bloke who’d done the Appalachian Trail two and a half times and its west coast equivalent (the Pacific Coastal Trail) twice. My first question to him was: why?? He then launched into an essay about how there are three types of people who do the AT, and which of them stick it through till the end, and the percentage who do, etc etc. He was one of the people trying to figure out where their life was going, and had spent five years walking and thinking. Five years!!! What a total waste of time! Maybe I’m being a bit harsh, but spending five years in the woods just seems like a bit of a cop-out to me. I guess it’s his life, though.

The other two types of people are college grads and retirees, both of which were represented at the hostel and spent the rest of the evening talking about trails and hiking gear and weather conditions. Boring guy dominated the conversation with tales of how he’d caught sleep apnea or something. Eventually I couldn’t take it any more and trooped off to bed. Just as I was falling asleep, I noticed a lightning storm brewing over the mountains and was very glad I wasn’t there. There are some people who can hike for months in all conditions, eschewing showers and beds and bars and cinemas and shops and all the other things that make up modern civilization - but I am definitely not one of them.

I woke up after a restless night to find the entrance to the tent thrown open and the wind blowing wildly in. Nina was crouching there exclaiming enthusiastically over the view.

“Hey, Suz, you’re awake. You just have to come and see this!!”

What time was it? And how could Nina be so unbelievably perky? Had she found some catnip or dubious mushrooms or something? “Gimme few mins,” I mumbled irritably.

But eventually I poked my head out of the sleeping bag, overwhelmed by curiosity (having hiked two days without a shower, that wasn’t the only thing that overwhelmed me). The wind slapped me in the face. It was seriously cold.

“Look at the view!” she breathed. “It’s like heaven!!”

I had to admit, it was pretty impressive. The huge hump-backed mountains plunged like whales into the early morning mist that obscured the valley. The dew glistened on the grass outside our tent. And all around us, rising up from below to snatch the view from our sight before engulfing us and then rushing down the mountainside once more, were the clouds. We were sitting on the edge of a giant cauldron.

But I would be unimpressed by Elvis if he showed up at that time of the morning, and was way too tired to sit there in awe.

“Heaven’s cold,” I muttered cynically, and sank my head back into the sleeping bag.

Unfortunately, lie-ins aren’t really an option for the hiker. Late starts can make the difference between having a nice leisurely time setting up camp and cooking your dinner, and stumbling in the dark chewing an energy bar for tea before lying down to discover you’ve set up the tent on a large tree root.

Even with our self-imposed discipline, though, we still ended up getting a late start. And by this time, we were noticing something a little more worrying. The clouds that had looked so pretty at first light had become a permanent fixture. The weather was turning.

‘People have died above timberline from exposure. Turn back at the first sign of bad weather.’ The words from the cool warning sign at the trailhead were coming back to my mind. And this time they weren’t cool. But how could we turn back? Where would we go? Two days back the way we came, down Tuckerman’s Ravine which was a death sentence in bad weather? Or through the Great Gulf Wilderness, also two days over trails which were practically unmarked?

Nope – the only way out was forward. This was two days as well, but at least we knew the way and the trail was (relatively) good. At Mount Madison there was also a hostel where we might be able to stay. At the very least they’d have soup. We decided to go for it.

It wasn’t too long before the rain started pattering down and we had to put on our waterproofs. I’d learnt from our practice hike in the thunderstorm and had bought every Gor-Tex and polyester item imaginable so I wouldn’t get soaked again. I’d also wrapped everything in my backpack in a plastic bag. This time, we were ready.

Even with our waterproofs on, though, it was surprisingly cold. When you’re above treeline and it’s raining, hypothermia is a real danger (hence the warning sign). Just stopping for thirty seconds for a drink of water brought on uncontrollable shivering. There was no room for tiredness, moaning, self-pity, or anything else that would make you sit down and give up. Sitting down and giving up meant hypothermia, which could mean death. We had to keep moving.

So we just trudged, on and on across boulders that looked like the surface of the moon against the grey sky (left). It was not a friendly trail – often the boulders weren’t even flat, so the only option was to teeter on a sharp edge while finding somewhere to put your other foot. Sometimes you had to wedge your feet between rocks, or slide down them, or take a massive step down and land with knee-jarring force. I lost count of the times I turned my ankle over, with a stab of (thankfully brief) pain. We were just a wrong step away from immobility and – you guessed it – hypothermia.

But fortunately finding safe places to step consumed all our thoughts (they should have added ‘turn back unless you’re a mountain goat’ to the warning sign). Eventually it became mechanical, and we only stopped if we needed to look at the map (which was frequently). We weren’t hungry, we weren’t thirsty, and we couldn’t see the sun. We had absolutely no idea what the time was. We didn’t care. We just walked, knowing eventually we would find soup.

Hiking in the rain is miserable, like winter without Christmas. The amazing vistas and clear mountain air that are such a reward on other days simply aren’t there. The Grand Canyon could open up beside you and you wouldn’t see it. The wind can be fierce – on the summits, especially, the gusting wind would threaten to topple us so we had to crouch into the rocks until it died down again. Sometimes the wind was behind us, pushing us as we tip-toed across razor-sharp rocks, like a sadistic cowboy shooting at someone for fun: “Come on, girl! Move those feet! I wanna see you dance!”

But the worst part, the very worst part, the bit that made me want to go home and curl up on the sofa more than anything else in the world, was when we found out our waterproofs weren’t waterproof. It was a gradual realization – first my t-shirt began to cling to my skin, then my pack got heavier, then my boots began to squelch. While the bin liners kept the contents of my pack bone dry, the ridiculously expensive polyester and Gor-Tex crap cheerfully allowed the rain to saturate me. It was so depressing.

[Above: The rock cairns that showed us the way, and an absolutely drenched me. I'd stopped noticing the rain by this stage, hence the smile. It's amazing what you get used to when you're completely insane]

My inspiration though (apart from the promise of soup) was Nina. The wetter and wetter she got, the more effervescent she became. It was like walking behind an Alka-Seltzer. She bounced along the trail, guiding the way in her big yellow waterproof, picking wild blueberries while I caught up (honestly, anyone who can bend over to pick those things with a 50 pound pack on - see left - deserves a Victoria Cross). Then, when I eventually got to her, she would fill my hands with blueberries and start walking again. This had the effect of waving a carrot in front of a donkey, and kept me moving.

And so we worked our way towards Madison. We were less than a mile from our destination when we realized we were lost, thirty metres down a cascade of thigh-wrenching boulders which we had to climb back up again to retrieve the trail. I could see hikers on the right path, heading towards the hostel and hot food, and sprang back up the mountain in a desperate attempt to follow them. Nina followed slowly behind, the damp and the dreariness finally finding a chink in her stoic armour.

But after half an hour of peering desperately into fog, of wondering if this was the right trail or if we’d walk into a crevasse sometime soon, of deciphering cairns that guided our way as they marched into the mist, the hostel appeared.

I’d never been so happy to see a large shed. Inside were lots of very very dry people, who’d obviously given hiking a miss that day, drinking hot chocolate and steaming bowls of soup. Nina and I looked at them like tramps gazing through the window of McDonald’s. They were so dry.

I went and ordered bottomless soup and hot chocolate, then asked kitchen guy if there was anywhere we could put our tents.

“Sorry, you can’t camp near the hostel. There are tent platforms just under a mile down the mountain though.”

My heart sank. “Oh…how much is the hostel then?” It was only a mixed dorm of twelve bunk beds – how much could it be?

“Seventy-eight dollars”, he said, completely seriously.

Excuse me? How much? Seventy-eight bucks for a bunk?? It turned out that didn’t include breakfast, which was an extra ten dollars, and, by the way, wasn’t available to non-guests. So $78 buys you the right to get fleeced at breakfast. So much for the egalitarian spirit of the Appalachian Trail. Seems like no-one can resist ripping off people who have nowhere else to go.

But Nina and I did have somewhere else to go. We hiked that last mile, stumbling through the drizzle, chewing an energy bar for tea before lying down to discover the tent platform was fairly far from horizontal.

[Right: abstract shot of our stuff drying on the tent ceiling - including our mascot, Blake]

We made a mutual decision to get off the mountain the next day – what with rip-off hostels and thunderstorms on the way, the Presidential Range was no longer somewhere we wanted to be.

After the first night of camping, I developed a policy of dehydrating myself from dusk till dawn so that, no matter what, I wouldn’t have to leave the tent and go pee in some dark and freezing wood. There’s nothing more terrifying (okay, there is, but give me some poetic licence here) than feeling your way through the pitch black to a stinking latrine, desperately trying not to think about the Blair Witch Project and seeing the woods loom around you like arboreal zombies.

So I was pretty grateful when dawn finally came. Not that it made me want to get up – it was freezing out there. My hiking inexperience, if it hadn’t shown already, was definitely making an appearance now. I felt like a slug and was about as slow. As Nina zoomed around making breakfast, I was puzzling over my pack like it was a Rubik’s cube, wondering how I’d managed to fit it all in the day before. Turns out the answer was extreme compression and a willingness to crush the melba crackers.

By the time we got out of there, it was 10am and the sun was high. It was already starting to get toasty and we still had 3000 feet to climb (in just under 2 miles – if you’re feeling particularly Pythagorean you can do the math) to the summit. We could already see the sides of the ravine rising up before us like massive waves of granite. They seemed to challenge us: “Come on, come and get us. Give it your best shot.” And so we did.

The ascent was astoundingly steep, at an angle of about 45 degrees. And our packs weighed between 40 and 50 pounds (about three and a half stone). But looking back, I don’t remember feeling the weight of my pack. I don’t remember feeling tired. I just remember sunshine, adrenaline, incredible views, and pushing myself harder than I’ve ever done before. It was like someone from a motivational poster had invaded my body.

I do remember feeling slightly afraid, but for once it didn’t stop me or make me slower. I just didn’t (couldn’t) look down. Looking across was okay, to our previous night’s camp and the mountains beyond, fading into a pale blue as they met the sky. But other than that, I looked up, to the day hikers and teenagers with their tiny knapsacks as we overtook them. Everyone commented on the amount of stuff we were carrying. And still we climbed. It was, in all senses of the word, unbelievable.

At the top of the ravine, Nina and I took a break and sat down near a patch of wild blueberries. Blueberries are cheap and plentiful in Canada, but the only way you can pick wild ones is to climb to them. So really they’re a special reward for hikers. Delicious, sweet and refreshing, they’re like magic pills that encourage you to keep walking.

And so we pressed on to the summit, up a slightly easier path (which isn’t saying much) consisting of the ever-familiar boulders. People climbing down kept saying “you’re almost there,” and other encouraging things. One guy told us we were looking very refreshed. Once we’d climbed past him a bit, Nina said he was probably just being nice. “No, I really meant it,” said a voice drifting up from 20 metres below. Mountain air carries sound exceptionally well.

With a last spurt of energy and a huge sense of elation, Nina and I climbed over the last few boulders onto the summit of Mount Washington. And were instantly met with cars, motorbikes, screaming kids and loud tourists taking photos. This is the very weird thing about Mount Washington. You can drive up it (or take a train if you’re feeling especially adventurous). People actually have bumper stickers saying “I drove up Mount Washington.” What kind of a claim is that?!

It was all incredibly disorientating. Everywhere there were fat Americans yelling at each other (“SAY, DORIS, YOU GOT THE BATTERIES?”), girls in high heels (I’d almost forgotten what they looked like) and kids with brown goo smeared across their faces. We found a sign saying “Mount Washington State Park” (pictured) where some woman in flip-flops was pretending to flex her muscles for the camera as if she’d actually climbed the thing. I felt like a PhD grad looking at someone who’d bought their degree off the internet. We were surrounded by cheats.

But nothing could take away the fact that we’d climbed a mountain. And when we walked into the summit’s restaurant with our packs, getting admiring looks from all the pizza-munchers, the only pros in a room full of novices, it was even better.

Self-congratulations aside, though, we still had a long way to go. Local restrictions mean you can’t camp above tree-line (with no trees for shelter your tent can get blown off the side of the mountain), so we couldn’t stay where we were. But it was already 3pm, way too late to set out in the opinion of a Mount Washington ranger. According to her, we had two choices: take the train down the mountain or die on top of it.

Nina and I decided to take our chances (there's Nina above, watching one of the last trains disappear down the mountain). Admittedly I took some persuading, but Nina said our original plan (to walk over the next mountain and then find somewhere to camp), was still workable and I believed her. Just to make sure, though, I offered up a quick prayer for a decent place to camp. Nina overheard me.

“Don’t pray for a decent place to camp,” she said. “Pray for an amazing one.” So I did.

Some would call it trail magic, but we called it an answer to prayer. After hiking Mount Adams, we took a side trail down to the valley and got lost. In the best way ever! Our path took us to a perfect camp site, about 200 yards (the recommended distance) from the actual trail. It overlooked the Great Gulf Wilderness, a valley surrounded by the crescent of the Presidential Mountains and completely, utterly, devoid of human life. And conveniently situated nearby was an enormous patch of wild blueberries.

So we set up camp there (pictured). Perfect as it was, though, there is something slightly unnerving about being in complete wilderness. If you break a leg or even twist an ankle, you can die of exposure before help comes. Further down the mountain, under cover of trees, no helicopter can see you. And like I said, there isn’t anyone around for miles and miles and miles and miles.

I can see why some people freak out when they’re on their own in the wilderness. When Nina went off to do the washing up, being alone started getting to me after only five minutes. It didn’t help that there were no tall trees around so I had to hang the bear bag off the nearest cliff (the chances of falling were probably about the same as being eaten by a bear). Once I’d finished, I went to find Nina. She was nowhere to be seen.

“Nina!” I yelled across the valley. No answer.

“Neeeeeeeenaaaaaaaa!” I yelled again, my heart pounding. How could she not hear me??

“I’m washing uuuuuuuuup!” came the cheerful reply a few agonizing seconds later. Thank God – I realized how lost I was up there without Nina, like a kid in a shopping mall. So much for my bravado earlier in the day.

But even when Nina came back, I could still feel the silence and the solitude pressing in on all sides. You don’t realize how much noise we put up with every day until there’s no noise at all. In fact, your mind can’t quite fathom it and starts making up noise of its own. As I slept that night, I swore I could hear a radio blaring far away. And even as I walked the trail the next day, I was constantly turning around to look at chattering hikers who weren’t there. It was all decidedly eerie.

Unpredictability is one of the big features of hiking. Things never quite turn out as planned – paths are lost, weather turns bad, ankles are sprained. The trick to survival is to be flexible, and sticking to Plan A is one of the main causes of death in the mountains.

Take, for example, a group of mountaineers who attempted to climb Everest in May 1996. They had all paid about $65,000 to be guided up there and were in view of the summit. So when their guide said the weather was turning and they should go back, they told him to go to hell. By the end of the day, that’s where they’d all gone. Stranded near the summit in freezing conditions, nine of the climbers got hypothermia so badly they lay down and died or simply walked off the mountain in confusion. One of the survivors lost his nose to frostbite. All to get value for money and a cool story for their friends.

It was stories like this that made me a bit wary of climbing Mount Washington. At 6,000 feet, it’s hardly Everest, but it still has its share of stories (all conveniently bound in a book called ‘Not Without Peril’). The hikers in these stories aren’t all stupid or unprepared – some are just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Each of them illustrate the fact that, when it comes to hiking, you just never know.

Nina and I discovered this before we’d even set foot on the trail. We were all ready to go – we’d tested the stove (which burned the hair off my right hand when it spurted out flame a little too enthusiastically), packed our bags, and were just about to put our boots on when Nina started frantically searching the car.

“Oh no,” she said.

“What?”

“Oh no.” Nina has a habit of panicking for 30 seconds, letting me wait in agonizing suspense before telling me what’s wrong (although I found myself showing the same nerve-frazzling tendency).

“Please tell me my boots are in the car.”

Oh crap. You didn’t leave them at home, I thought. You didn’t –

“I left them at home. They were by the front door and I walked straight past them. I’m so stupid!” she wailed.

After a brief period of reassuring her that she was distinctly not stupid, it was a simple mistake, we could do something else and have just as much fun, etc etc, Nina’s determined streak shone through (it was never hidden for very long).

She decided she’d rather chop off her right arm than drag me all the way to the mountains and not be able to climb them, so she forked out for a new pair of shoes. We were still on plan A.

So it was on that gorgeously sunny Friday afternoon that we found ourselves standing at Pinkham Notch, head of the trail to Mount Washington. On the advice of a local ranger, we would hike halfway up, camp, then hike to the summit the next day (it was already getting late).

We made our way to the visitor centre to buy a compass (last-minute insurance) and came across a model of the Presidential Range. I looked at the path up Mount Washington. It all seemed fairly feasible until the path went up the side of a ravine and to the summit. Here the slope was almost 45 degrees. I breathed in. Clearly I wasn’t the only one taken aback, because the white dotted line indicating the path had been worn away by countless people pointing at it in horror (‘Blimey – we’re climbing that?!’).

But that was for tomorrow. For today, I’d be pleased if we could just get to the campsite. And so we set off, with warnings from Nina that we’d feel like dying after half an hour.

[The warnings weren't just from Nina - see right]

To my surprise, I didn’t feel like dying after half an hour. In fact, I didn’t feel like dying at all. Instead, I felt like I was about to collapse after about fifteen minutes, and carried on feeling like that until we got to the camp. The trail, meanwhile, was not the nice pebbly path sloping gently upwards that I’d been expecting. Instead, it was a large pile of boulders that went on forever.

The pack that had felt so light when I packed it in the motel room was now tugging ruthlessly at my shoulders. It had the weight and behaviour of a small child, one who didn’t feel like a piggyback any more and was playing at kicking my kidneys instead. Throughout the hike, I found my pack would get heavier or lighter according to my mood. If I was feeling positive and energetic, I couldn’t even feel it (I would discover this the next day). If I felt very tired, or we were lost, or the weather was bad, it would feel like I was lugging bowling balls. This was definitely a bowling ball moment.

But there were moments of relief. I saw my first wild chipmunk (they’re almost as common as squirrels over here, so Nina was slightly bemused at the fuss I made), and every now and again we would get a peep of view between the trees. It showed us how high we’d climbed and helped spur me on.

And, to my great relief, we got to camp before sunset (hiking in the dark is something I never, ever want to do). After negotiating a path even more ridiculously rocky than the trail, we found an open-fronted shelter where we could stick our sleeping bags. Two people had already occupied half of it – Pearce, an American guy, and his Spanish girlfriend Elena. They were overwhelmingly friendly and helpful.

After dinner, my first real initiation into camping began. A bear roaming around the camp is definitely something to be avoided, and the best way to do this is to put all your food in a bag and string it up between two trees, far away from the tent or shelter. This is way easier said than done, especially with five days’ worth of food. As Pierce and Nina sat in the shelter peeing themselves laughing, Elena and I (both complete novices) tried to lob a rock wrapped with string over a very high branch, so we could tie the bag with one end and haul it into the tree. It was dark and we were crap shots, so it took about half an hour. But, eventually, we did it! And it turned out Elena was a sailor so we had the knots thing down. The camp was safe, thanks to us : )

So with our earplugs firmly wedged in our ears (when you’re in the woods, cracking twigs and rustling leaves can keep you up all night), and with the stars freckling the late night sky, we settled down to our first night in the wild. Tomorrow, we would conquer a mountain.

One of the best things about North America is its size. Its people are bigger (both in personality and size), its wildlife is bigger (raccoons, bears and caribou compared to England’s squirrels, foxes and deer), and its land mass is completely enormous.

This makes possible one of the great legends of North America: the road trip. Unless you drive into mainland Europe, road trips in England are pretty insignificant; no motel stops, hardly any decent coffee shops, and by the time you’ve started singing show tunes you’re already in Slough or wherever.

So I was looking forward to my initiation. Although Nina and I weren’t in the best shape at half past five that Thursday morning – I’d had two weeks of sleepless nights, plagued by dreams of wandering through fog in hypothermic confusion while desperately calling Nina’s name, and Nina had the worst flu in the history of man.

But coffee is a wonderful thing. So after a brief stop at Tim Horton’s (our last decent coffee for a week – it’s notoriously bad across the border) we were off to America.

By lunchtime we’d reached Montreal, where we took a break and enjoyed Canada’s answer to Europe. Even though I’ve only been here six months, it was still a novelty to see buildings more than twenty years old and walk down narrow cobbled streets. Trouble is, the European feel extends to everything. Entrance to the city was via a vast traffic jam, and getting out took about an hour because the signs are crap and the roads resemble spaghetti.

There was a beautiful main square, though, complete with all the things you’d expect to see in St Tropez like caricature artists, street clowns and some guy playing Celine Dion on the sax (no luxury yachts, though). We stopped in a little café and watched the world go by, feeling like tourists in our own country. Even the language was different. It’s one of the many things I love about Canada.

But we were soon to be in the not-so-different world of New England. One wave of my American passport (they didn’t even look at my photo – and Nina got across with nothing more than a smile) and we were in Vermont.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve always had a distinct picture of Vermont. It goes like this: beautiful white steepled church, nestled in trees that are every shade of red, yellow and orange, with green hills rolling across the landscape. That’s Vermont.

And sure enough, that’s exactly what it was like. Okay, so there was only the odd red tree (glorious technicolour doesn’t show up till the end of September), but otherwise it was perfect. The setting sun turned everything pink, including the churches. Little villages with more white steeples kept surfacing from the valleys. We were driving through a postcard.

Eventually we arrived at St Johnsbury, close to the border with New Hampshire, and decided we should visit some sort of information centre. Amazingly, the town had one and it was open. We peeped in to an enormous entrance room with leaflets covering every available surface. At first it seemed as if no-one was there – just a very very huge moose head, about the size of a baby elephant’s, hanging off the far wall. But as we walked closer, we noticed something under the moose head. A tiny white haired old lady looked up at us, her face crinkling into a smile.

She couldn’t have been more glad to see us if we were family she’d been expecting, and was a mine of information. Nina commented on the moose head.

“Oh yes, it is quite big,” she laughed. “I just hope it doesn’t fall on me.”

By the time we left the town, I was going into driver’s hypnosis and Nina was strung out on aspirin. We’d planned to get to the trail head and camp there for the night, but the prospect of hiking in the dark with a feverish friend was not one I particularly relished. We drove into Berlin, New Hampshire (Americans also love original place names), in the shadow of Mount Washington, and looked for a motel.

Well, Berlin turned out to be a perennially useless place to get anything. Not only was the motel hideously expensive and staffed by people who’d attended the Basil Fawlty school of hospitality, it had an outdoor shop which sold none of the equipment we needed and a cinema which was shut. All the time. We headed down the road to Gorham.

After getting a slightly less hideously expensive motel, it was time to find a restaurant. By this stage, Nina was in seriously bad shape. She was burning hot and cold, felt nauseous, and her eyes were actually gumming up. I don’t know how she conned me into letting her drive (was I insane??) but she did.

There’s a phenomenon in the wilderness that hikers like to call ‘trail magic’. Whenever things seem really bad, or you’re just too tired and exhausted to hope that circumstances will let up, something absolutely amazing happens. It’s just another name for divine intervention. And we felt it when we reached J’s Corner.

We shuffled into the restaurant to be told the kitchen was shut. Nina said she was about to cry (to be honest, her eyes were in such a state it would probably have been a good thing), so the waitress went out back and asked again.

“Yep, we can do you something,” she said (God bless American customer service!).

We gratefully chatted to the waitress and said we’d been on the road for twelve hours straight. She took one look at Nina, who looked like she’d just been exhumed, and said:

“Was she driving?”

So I guess we weren’t looking our best. But we perked up once the food came. It was amazing! Big bowls of thick chunky soup with steaming baked potatoes. It hit the spot so exactly that Nina and I just made ‘mmm’ noises as we ate, as a substitute for actual conversation. The other customers looked at us very weirdly. But we didn’t care – we had full bellies and a bed for the night. And for a hiker, that’s about as good as it gets.

Last Friday, Nina and I decided to do a practice run for our hike this week. A couple of days previously I'd walked 6 miles and suffered nothing worse than slightly sore feet, so what could possibly go wrong? We planned to walk 6 miles to the cinema in the next town, where we would meet Nina's family to catch a movie.

Our plan, seemingly so simple, turned out to be hopelessly ambitious. We were only halfway to the cinema when the movie started. We lost the trail, climbing vertically up the Niagara escarpment (excellent practice for mountain hiking) and coming smack up against a fence backing onto a very rich person's garden. On the other side of the garden was the main road. Unwilling to climb back down again, and not knowing how we would find the trail anyway, we decided our only chance was to trespass.

We scrambled over the fence, desperately trying not to giggle and hoping the rich people didn't have dogs. We tippy-toed across their extensive driveway and made it to the front gate, closing it with a sigh of relief. That's when we saw the sign: “DANGER – Do Not Open. Dogs on Loose.” Thank God the rich people were on holiday (either that or the sign was bluffing).

The film trailers had already started and there was still a long way to go, but it was only along residential roads so we decided to finish what we’d begun. That’s when God decided to unleash His fury on southwestern Ontario.

As a tornado raged 100 kilometres away, Nina and I marched on through a monsoon. The horizontal rain made a laughing stock of my ‘waterproof’ jacket and rendered Nina’s umbrella useless (although that still had a purpose as a potential lightning rod). It whipped our legs sore and turned my backpack into a large (and heavy) sponge. Everything was soaked. We couldn’t have been wetter if we’d jumped into the nearest swimming pool.

As the roads turned to rivers and each driveway became a waterfall, we squelched on, flagging down passing cars in the hope that one of them, any of them, would stop. They didn’t. And just as I was beginning to get seriously worried, just as I was descending into waterlogged hopelessness and considering banging on someone’s door for help, we saw a Tim Horton’s ahead. Canada had saved us.

Once we were out of the storm, it was easy to laugh at what happened. Standing in a steadily growing puddle at the counter in Tim Horton's, ordering hot chocolate and bagels, getting stares of disbelief from everybody, it all seemed like a hilarious anecdote. We laughed even more when a member of staff picked up a ‘Caution: Wet Floor’ sign and wordlessly placed it at my feet. The crowning achievement of the day: I’d become a health and safety hazard!!

But being in the storm wasn't so funny. And at least the rain and wind were warm – what about the rain and wind in the White Mountains? What would happen if we got soaked up there? Where there were no cars to flag down, no Tim Horton’s, nobody we could call? What about Mount Washington, which has had the fastest wind speed and the lowest wind chill ever recorded? What about the 122 people who’ve died there of hypothermia? And then there’s the bears. Forget about guard dogs, what about the bears??? There are 5000 of them in New Hampshire alone!

Yet in spite of all that, and in spite of several sleepless nights imagining various ways I could stumble to my death, I still really want to trek the White Mountains. We even have a route now: the Presidential Traverse! Hiking the entire Presidential Range in one week! Eight mountains over 4000 feet! Here’s what Bill Bryson says in A Walk in the Woods:

“The White Mountains have 35 peaks higher than 3000 feet. If Ben Nevis were on the Appalachian Trail in New Hampshire, it would just squeak into the top 10. Snowdon would be swallowed without trace.”

Certainly sounds character-building. So wilderness, here we come! And, just for the record, I love all my family and friends very much, and I bequeath my worldly goods to Joe. If I don’t blog again before I go, expect an entry in the first few days of September. If there isn’t one, it means Gentle Ben has had me for supper.

Saturday distinguished itself as the day in my life spent entirely in a robe. Okay, I’ll explain. First of all, I played Mary telling a story about Jesus in our church’s video for kids (here I am dressed in not much more than a sheet, drinking coffee through a straw to avoid smudging my very un-Marylike lipstick).

Then, in the evening, we went to a Sikh wedding where I wore my friend’s beautifully coloured, but marginally oversized, pyjama suit (below). Actually, it was the reception rather than
the wedding, but it was still brilliant fun. The bride and groom arrived about an hour late, and were immediately treated to a performance involving folk dancing girls and boys doing bhangra. The girls were of, shall we say, varying quality, but the guys were absolutely brilliant.

There are many words to describe my life at the moment, but boring is not one of them. Take this weekend as an example: today I helped out in the shelter; tomorrow I'll be doing a video shoot for our church's kids ministry; and tomorrow evening I'm going to a Sikh wedding. Sunday I might be watching Joe do amateur motor racing in a Ferrari. And the weekend after I'll be preparing to hike the Appalachians.

I was thinking about this when I bumped into my Turkish friends at the library the other day. We were standing there exchanging rudimentary Turkish, when some people I knew from the shelter walked by. They heard me speaking some strange language and glanced at me in bewilderment; had the Turks seen the shelter guys, who are punks, the look would probably have been returned. I wondered who would come if I threw a party of everyone I knew here in Canada: Turks, punks, Argentinians, wiccans, pastors, natives, drug addicts, Italians, film-makers, animators, journalists, missionaries, possibly an Iraqi. My life at the moment is endlessly varied - I love it!

The Iraqi I mentioned above is a car dealer friend of Joe's. He left the country before the war started, and was telling us about Saddam Husseins's sons. By all accounts, they were complete nutters. They killed this car dealer's dad just for complaining about some money he was owed. They would give presents to people, then claim the present was actually stolen and have people imprisoned and tortured for it. They would have celebrities over for dinner, then set the dogs on them just for a laugh. After his dad was killed, the car dealer had to leave the country, taking his entire family with him, or they would have been killed too. Whether or not the means were right, and despite the ensuing mess, it was definitely a good thing that Saddam was kicked out.

Anyway, here are some more photos of how totally excellent summer in Canada is. We spent last weekend at Joe's parents cottage on a lake, going out on their speedboat, eating way too much, playing poker (socialising at the shelter means you get good at cards), and generally having a brilliant time. If this doesn't persuade you lot in England to come and visit, I don't know what will!


[Left: me on a very glamorous speedboat, wearing a very dorky lifejacket, with my little niece]











[Right: us eating a delicious Italian lunch outside the cottage]

You'd think that, moving to a country that also speaks English, I'd have no communication problems in Canada. And, pretty much, I don't. But when I do have them, they drive me nuts. Take the last couple of days, for example. Yesterday I was working on the door at the shelter, taking everyone's names as they walked in. When I asked for their surname, though, there was puzzled silence. Apparently Canadians don't use the word 'surname' any more. It's old-fashioned. I kept having to remind myself to use 'last name' instead. So doing the door took twice as long.

Today, I was on the bus and rang the bell to get off at the next stop. I was halfway down the bus, and the driver yelled at me, "The next stop isn't for 3 blocks [a long way]. Didn't you know?" Errr...no, I'm not intimately acquainted with the bus routes of Hamilton. I believe that means I have a life. Sorry about that.

Stuff like this hardly ever happens, so it's no big deal, but I still get frustrated by it. Especially as Joe doesn't experience it (being Canadian) so has no idea what I'm on about when I try and tell him. Doubly frustrating.

Oh well - looking on the bright side, I did buy my brand spanking new hiking boots today! Yay! Apparently they take 2 weeks to break in. I have a week and a half. Uh-oh.

[Left: My hiking boots. Shiny and new!!]

There was all sorts of other paraphernalia in the camping shop, which I found fascinating but utterly useless. There were ludicrously expensive hiking socks with manly straplines like "Rugged. Canadian. Original." Um - Canadian socks are original? There were snakebite kits with "easy-to-use lymph constrictors" and other scarily mind-boggling features. There were absolutely disgusting dehydrated meals, including chocolate fudge cake and something called 'Tex-Mex' which was apparently spicy scrambled egg (probably more useful for inducing vomiting in the event of a snake bite). Finally, and my personal favourite, was a tiny tiny all-in-one espresso maker which made just enough coffee for one person. Although, to be honest, if you need espresso that badly when you're out hiking, maybe you shouldn't be going out into the wilderness for seven days straight. Especially not on your own.

For a few months now (actually, ever since I arrived in Canada) I've been thinking how great it would be to explore a bit of this massive continent, and see what kind of place I've moved to beyond the concrete sprawl of southern Ontario. It struck me as an especially good idea in the absence of a job. But unfortunately I haven't managed to find anyone else in the same situation who I could travel with. Until now.

My friend Nina not only has her summer holidays (and therefore the rest of August) free, but loves travelling. So we're going to...wait for it...hike the Appalachian Trail together!!! This probably means nothing to most of you, so I'll explain. The Appalachian Trail runs 2100km up the eastern coast of America, from Georgia to Maine, over (for Brits) towering mountains and through townships of toothless inbreds who all call each other 'Mum'. It has maple trees and blueberries and all sorts of other funky north American stuff, not to mention slightly less funky stuff like bears, wolves, snakes, and various other things that can kill you.

[Left: the Appalachians. Wow.]

It's the subject of Bill Bryson's book "A Walk in the Woods", which I started reading today in a fit of enthusiasm and excitement (it'll probably last until lunchtime on the first day of hiking). I'm only on chapter 1 so he's still in the preparatory stages (like me!) and not really sure what he's letting himself in for (again, like me):

"Nearly everyone I talked to had some gruesome story involving some guileless acquaintance who had gone off hiking the trail with high hopes and new boots and come stumbling back two days later with a bobcat attached to his head or dripping blood from an armless sleeve and whispering in a hoarse voice, "Bear!" before sinking into a troubled unconsciousness."

Hm. Admittedly we're not walking the whole trail (just the White Mountains part in New Hampshire - we'll be gone a week or so), but if the whole thing wasn't so cool and exciting I would definitely have my reservations. Nina's an experienced hiker. She's German (think Von Trapp family), and pretty fit. She also doesn't eat a whole lot. I can just picture hunger clawing at my stomach at lunchtime on the first day, while Nina strides ahead, energised by nothing more than lungfuls of fresh air. Help!!

[Below: Nina. I'm hoping her endless optimism will carry us through]

Canada has a great habit of having a day off (our version of a bank holiday) every month throughout the summer. There was one in June, one in July, and one last Monday (it's just called a ‘civic holiday’, because it's not to commemorate anything in particular, although different areas have given it their own names – very typical of Canada).

Anyway, it was a long weekend, and our friends Nick and Izzy were over from England, so we had a great time. Panoramic views featured heavily as we spent Sunday night up the CN Tower (Toronto's landmark, and the tallest freestanding structure in the world - incidentally, if a Canadian tests your general knowledge by asking you where the longest/ tallest/greatest/heaviest thing in the world is, the answer is always Canada. Every Canadian knows these statistics. Don't ask me why).

[Above: Us up the CN Tower. Check out the view!!]

On Monday we climbed up the Niagara Escarpment in Grimsby. The views from there are phenomenal, and it’s 30 minutes’ walk from where we're going to live - !! The walking trail goes all the way along the Niagara Peninsula (about 2-3 hours’ drive), and is surrounded by lush forest most of the way. I can feel some serious treks coming on : )

[Left: Joe enjoying the view. This is practically our back garden!
Below: Me and a view of Grimsby/Lake Ontario. Halfway between my left elbow and the right hand edge of the photo is a yellow dot. That's where the Grimsby News, one of my freelance papers, is]

Anyway, enough of the rambling. On Tuesday it was back to the shelter in Hamilton (yup, life is pretty varied at the moment). I was chatting to someone I'd spoken to several times before, but I'd never realised he was an Indian (ie Native Canadian). Until I got to Canada, I thought all natives had long hair and weathered reddish-brown skin (I wasn’t quite naive enough to think they all lived in wigwams), but a lot of them just look Italian or Spanish.

Not only was he native, but this guy was also an Acadian. I'd actually read about the Acadians – they’re a mixture of native and French, who lived on the very east tip of Canada until the British colonised that part in about 1755 (history buffs can check out this website: http://collections.ic.gc.ca/acadian/english/toce/toce.htm). The British forced all the Acadians to leave, displacing about 10,000 people and ruining an entire culture. There’s now only about 600 of them left, and I was talking to one.

He was explaining his culture and traditions to me, and I was completely fascinated. This guy is usually pretty quiet and shy, and this was the first time I'd really seen him light up. It's those kind of times I really enjoy at the shelter : )

The poetry workshop was a bit of a disaster though. I’ve seen other people try to speak there, and usually most of their audience goes outside for a fag for the length of their talk. The same happened to me – I was down to five people before I even opened my mouth! : ) I guess not everyone wants to vent their feelings in verse, although one or two people seemed interested so you never know.

Anyway, I’m pretty knackered (still getting used to the early starts!) so I’ll be off now. I’ll try not to melt before my next blog (it’s 33 degrees here today!!).