Window Wednesday - Hotel room, Courmayeur, Italy
Hotel Croux. Courmayeur, Italy 2017
The tea leaf reader sits in a cloud of white tulle skirt and delicately holds my china teacup in her hands. I’ve already drunk the rose flavoured tea, and now she slowly turns the cup around, studying the forms of the petals and leaves that have collected at the bottom, interpreting them and what they mean for my future.
“There’s a plane,” she says softly. “There’ll be overseas travel. And there’s a boot. It could be interpreted a couple of ways. Perhaps you’ll do a lot of walking…”
She saw many things in my teacup that day. I wrote them down as soon as I got home and much to my surprise, in the next twelve months, most of them came true. The boot however, was the big one, and what it signified was one of the best times of my life.
When the tea leaf reader showed me my future, I’d already been dreaming of walking long distances. I wanted to do the Tour du Mont Blanc or TMB — a circular route around the Mont Blanc massif, ten days hiking through the alps of Italy, Switzerland, and France. Sure, it was on a different continent, on the other side of the world, and I hadn’t done any hiking before, but travelling and walking were two of my favourite things. It was all doable.
A sense of direction — that’s what I lacked. I got lost in car parks. I needed a hiking buddy, someone who could read a map, or if all else failed, someone who was happy to get lost with me. Getting lost is far less scary when you’re not alone.
“If I could, I would," people said. “Sounds amazing. How about next year?” “I’ll let you know.” And so it went, until a month or so later I shared a car ride to a wedding — four girls, all friends of the bride, and one of them said, “Sure, I’ll come.”
Four months later the two of us stood at the window of our hotel room in Courmayeur, Italy, mesmerised by the snow-capped mountains we’d start to hike the very next day.
We would be doing the Tour ‘in comfort’ as they say. We would hike with just our day packs while our main packs would be transported every morning to our next location, ready at our accommodation when we arrived. We’d refuel with restaurant meals and a glass of wine, and ease our aching muscles in hot showers and proper beds.
It would be another 11 days before we’d return to that same hotel in Courmayeur. 170 kilometres of hiking long ascents and descents through green fields, cows and wild flowers, forests, snow, and craggy peaks – comfortable in our well-worn boots and new-found friendship, eager for more, and never looking at life the same way again.
* * *
The stories of the trail itself are for another time, but they remind me of the older American couple we came to know as our TMB family, or TMB mum and dad. They were hiking the same circuit and there were stages when they would join us, turning our little hiking partnership into a chatty family of four.
One day as our hiking poles chinked over gravel paths, our TMB dad told me he hated the way people often start a story with ‘When I was…’. He told me he hates that kind of storytelling because no one actually listens to the stories other people tell. Instead, people start thinking about the time they did the same thing but better. Or they start thinking about a time when they experienced a similar situation, but one that was scarier or more dangerous or more amazing. That’s why he prefers to know what people learnt on their travels.
With this in mind, when I arrived home in Australia, I noted down a few of the things I’d learnt on the TMB:
1) I will never again scoff at people using hiking poles. Serious hiking requires serious help and my hiking poles have become my new best friends. However, they did make me look like Kermit the Frog when I was trying to use them with gloves only half on, because I couldn’t get my fingers into the gloves because I couldn’t feel my fingers due to a near-frostbite situation (please consider the lack of full stops and coherence in previous sentence an indication of the frustration and panic felt during this episode).
2) A compass bought in the southern hemisphere will not work correctly in the northern hemisphere and vice versa. Luckily I was prepared for this, and bought my compass in the correct hemisphere. It’s also lucky that I didn’t need to use my compass because they don’t come with instructions and I forgot to google how to use one.
3) Blue lips are no joke. They are proof that nature and its weather cannot be fought. While we had dry, sunny and mainly mild weather conditions most of the time, we also experienced storms and floods which made us think we may never make it down the mountain.
4) Always carry a garbage bag. They make super duper ponchos in emergency situations such as when a random a-hole steals your waterproof jacket at the top of a mountain in a storm.
5) My hiking boots are the comfiest shoes I’ve ever owned. All those laps I walked around the inner-city suburbs of Melbourne in my boots to wear them in before the hike were well worth it, despite the embarrassment of being honked at by passing cars.
* * *
It’s been four and a bit years since I stood gazing out that window of our hotel room in Courmayeur, and though my hiking boots are sitting in the bottom of my cupboard, I’m dreaming again of snow-capped peaks and cow bells. Perhaps it’s time to re-visit the tea leaf reader…
