During today’s walk I saw calves and their mothers. Their mothers were mooing me away but I was taking video so I didn’t move until one after another started to approach me. By then I had the footage I wanted to have. I had a strong fence fixed with wooden posts and a bush between myself and the cows so I calculated that the risk was low enough not to bolt.
@richardazia
Yesterday I went for a walk in the rain. I walked for two hours, took pictures and listened to Echo Der Zeit and this episode of the Thru-Hiking podcast. Gretel Scarlet was the interviewee. She talked about South Bound (SOBO) hiking the PCT.
It’s interesting to see how different her attitude was to most people’s, how being a dancer, and someone who considers nutrition, speaks differently of food and injuries.
Thanks to the rain most people stayed indoors. This was a good opportunity to walk along routes that I have been avoiding for weeks due to the pandemic. In the process, my trousers and shoes got soaked so I was squelching along. Even cars were not that frequent. I crossed two people during my ten-kilometre walk.
I walked through a wooded part and the trail that I usually follow was now a river. I had to step to the side of the path to avoid walking through the “stream” that it had now become. My shoes were already wet from walking through some tall grass earlier on.
I used to be a cold water diver so being wet doesn’t bother me. I was comfortable for almost the entire walk. It’s only during the last kilometre when I turned to walk into the wind that I started to feel cold and tired. By this point my trousers were soaked and the humidity was moving upwards.
I had considered making the route longer when crossing the last village before home but decided not to. I didn’t want to have to walk along the road when agricultural paths were clear of people. In light of how I felt on the last leg that was a good decision.
@richardazia
Today I ran and then walked a reverse journey of what I did yesterday. I wanted to take a picture of the corkscrew tree. It would have required for me to wait for two slow walkers and their dog to pass and because they insisted on walking two abreast it made more sense to turn around and take an alternate route.
Although my attitude may seem extreme there has been an increase in the number of cases. At least three times today I would have been within people’s personal space if I had not turned around, found a snicket through a forest, or stepped into a field. I look forward to the weekenders being back in their home offices on Monday. They shouldn’t be allowed in the wild. They lack common decency and courteousy.
I watched Darwin speak about how quiet the AT has become as a result of the order for everyone to vacate the trail being given. This season will be a different one, if it takes place at all. It’s a shame that thru-hiking isn’t allowed. In theory they could easily sleep in tents and eat take away on the rare moments when they’re in town.
I also watched this fifty minute video of a successful thru-hike in 2019. It looks like this was more of an adventure than other videos I’ve watched. It also looks like a lot of fun. I still dream of doing multi-day hikes again.
I also listened to the Thru-Hiker episode with Tip Tap as an interviewee. I’ve been watching the videos but I’m
I think i finished the journey videos but I’ve lost track as a result of watching so many videos on this topic.
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For this 40th blog post on the topic of self-isolation, I’d like to speak about local adventures. I feel the need to do this because I see people posting about their trips to someone two to three hours from live and work during a pandemic and I strongly believe that getting into a car to have an adventure far from home at this time is short-sighted and selfish.
Between running, cycling and hiking I have got to know more and more of the local routes. I have found that there are a lot of nice places to walk off of agricultural roads where you can avoid everyone. Today I was walking in the woods by a motorway and I found what I call the “corkscrew tree”.
Today during my hike I ranged further than usual. I went beyond my usual deflection and return point and kept on going and the reward for this was to see scenes and landscapes that I associate with thru-hiking imagery. i’m not thru-hiking. I am going around in circles and exploring every last trail and path, whether in the forests, along agricultural roads or the walkable space between fields. In some cases this includes fallow fields.
We don’t need to drive for hours to see nice landscapes and to feel that we are visiting a new place. We just need to look around and see a path we haven’t been down, and proceed along it. The landscape above could easily be taken by a thru-hiker, but it’s in Switzerland, just minutes from villages and towns.
The pandemic is an opportunity to go back to the child-like habit of exploring every nook and cranny. By doing so we protect the environment by not using a car or public transport to get anywhere, and we get to find plenty of local gems.
While driving to and from Geneva I often pass by this field and see these cows. Today my walking route took me by the cows and they were close enough for me to take a picture or three. This is local, and yet it feels like I’m travelling to Scotland or the US.
One of my habits, when living in London or visiting big cities is to walk for hours, until I get exhausted, and to return by public transport. I’m applying the same habit to explore the local countryside. I had already explored plenty of the local roads before, but because of the pandemic, I am being encouraged to explore ever more meticulously. By the end of the pandemic, I could write a guidebook about hyperlocal walks.
Aside from coming across cows with very long horns being suckled by calves in a field bordering with France and a corkscrew tree on a trail in the woods I also saw what I think are baby or juvenile apples just starting to grow. As I walk some parts of the routes so many times in a row I see them sowing the seeds, fertilizing, spraying with insecticide and harvesting. I also see how the crops change over time. Today’s reward were juvenile apples.
My message is simple. During the pandemic, to avoid giving the virus an opportunity to leap between cantons, or from town to town, grab the opportunity to explore locally. You will be rewarded.
By May we may be able to go back to doing sports in groups as long as they are not “contact sports” in Switzerland. For me this means hiking, running cycling and other related sports. For me climbing is a contact sport because we touch the same hand holds as everyone else climbing the routes, we use the same ropes and we share quickdraws and belay devices.
This being said I also have no desire to do sports like climbing at the moment because they require us to stand around and socialise and I haven’t really socialised in at least 38 days. I need to ease back into the world of the extrovert. Hiking is a good way to do that.
Today I started watching a course on Linkedin learning about using Chrome for webmastering but got distracted with the idea of installing a server on my mac book pro. I then got even more distracted by Visual Studio Code.
I like this piece of software because it’s free, intuitive to use and quick. A few days ago I had spent hours playing with another html editing tool and the process was so laborious that i wasted a lot of time. With Visual Studio Code it’s fast and I’m getting through the task of making the old part of my website mobile friendly.
The process is interesting. The more pages I optimise the more experience I gain and the more efficient I become. I found that if I remove some bits of code the page is mobile compliant within two or three steps and I can move on to the next page, and the next one after that.
In theory these pages should always have been mobile friendly because they’re light. There is no CSS or other clunk. Images are also small as bandwidth was an issue in those days. It still is, but we have a firehose rather than a syringe today.
Webmastering is great because time really flies when you’re working on a website. You can easily spend ten or more hours a day working on something and still have a few more hours of work. That’s why some professions look so busy compared to others. Of course it’s time consuming because I am still perfecting the work flow. By the time I’ve optimised every page I’ll be proficient at an updated skill.
Last night I was unable to focus so I installed TikTok and looked at plenty of videos to clear my mind enough to be able to think about dinner. I must have been in the right frame of mind because I enjoyed quite a few of the videos and flooded my facebook timeline with examples. Don’t worry though, out of the flood I only got one like. It seems that no one saw the flood so it didn’t happen.
More in character with me is the One Second Everyday app. I created a compilation for every day of quarantine so far but I won’t share the video too frequently because it will be most effective when it has at least sixty more days.
That’s it for today. Time to think about dinner.
Today I went for a Hike from La Barillette to La Barillette. It’s a shame that the restaurant wasn’t open to the public. It is currently marked as private, and scheduled to open on the first of May. Today I didn’t expect to do a long and physical hike. I expected to complete my usual daily tasks and then to go for the usual walks around where I live. In the end I did do such a hike, but it involved a slightly different geographic location.
The road to the top is currently closed to cars but sneaky motorbikes and cyclists can still head up the mountain. Plenty of cars were parked along the road by the first barrier. Instinctively I expected that we would see plenty of people walking up and down the road to La Dole but that wasn’t the case. The road was busy with cyclists.
Groups of up to five cyclists at a time headed up to the mountain. Some looked comfortable heading up, others looked okay, and some looked to be making an effort. I was surprised to see one person riding up that hill on a tandem and to see someone else ride up the hill on an electric bike pulling a child’s trailer. I couldn’t see a child in either the child seat or the trailer but that’s still quite a bit of extra weight to get up a mountain. Although that’s a nice distraction it isn’t the reason for this blog post.
Self-isolation means that we have to keep distant from other people but walking along paths with high traffic makes that complicated. For those with a little more energy and a lot of time the solution is to walk from the base of the Jura to the top. Initially the plan was to go up via the road but my curiousity got the better of me so I checked on Komoot to see whether I could take a side road up to the top and when I saw that this was possible I took advantage.
You follow the yellow and the Red and blue markers. We took one wrong turn so we had to scramble through some underbrush and climb up an even steeper incline. At least two or three trees have fallen across the path but they can all be avoided by going either side of them.
The trail is not used as frequently as others so navigation can sometimes be more challenging. It’s good to have some previous experience of navigating in this type of landscape. There are no sign posts and the red and blue and yellow markings are irregular. Without Komoot I would have explored more. I know that the aim is to reach the top, so from that aspect the goal is simple, but you could spend time wandering around without getting where you want to be.
During the walk you go from paths that are wide enough for cars to drive along where orienteering is easy to narrower paths where navigation is hard.
In Summer, when the restaurant is open this would be a good variant. I would have enjoyed having a fondue or Entrecôte at the top. As it so happens that’s my dinner, but prepared by myself rather than someone else.
For people who love flowers now is the ideal time to go up. You see plenty of these flowers growing in patches all over the top of the mountain. You need to go just as the snow finishes melting to see them at their best.
By meeting up with someone to do an activity I went against my self-isolation rules. Two weeks ago when I was asked if I wanted to go for a bike ride I flatly said no. Now that the virus appears to be on the decline and that the number of cases is dropping I am being less aggressive about my self-isolation. I still give as much distance between myself and others. We also met using two scooters, rather than catching the same car. When I was asked if I wanted to stop for a coffee I had to say no.
People were having a big song and dance about how we shouldn’t call it social distancing because social distancing has negative connotations. Today I wanted to say yes, and I wanted to get back to normal but I couldn’t because the rules are still in place and we’re not in the clear yet. Let me point out that this is day 35 of not having a conversation within normal conversation distance, or of a handshake or a hug. It would be nice to be able to say yes to all of these things.
People, in big families, will never understand what living through a pandemic, is like for people living alone.When we get the green light to meet people again we should celebrate, not by going to a bar but by going on a hike.
That’s it for today.
You build up plenty of dust as you plow the fields at the moment. The drought continues, as does the desire for this pandemic to be over. For now, the downward trend continues so we could feel optimistic. I’m still optimistic than in two or three weeks recycling centres will go back to normal. At the moment recycling centres remind me of something else.
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Looking at this queue of cars reminds me of something. All the engines are off. All the cars are lined up. Plenty of people are in their cars waiting. If you saw this in Calais you’d expect them either to be waiting for the Eurotunnel train to get back to England or for the ferries to take them.
This is an image of Swiss people waiting to get into a recycling centre. Despite this being the 31st day of the pandemic Swiss peoples’ desire and compulsion remains strong. For many people this is the lazy person’s equivalent of “getting out of the house for a bit”. I go for a one and a half hour walk and they sit in their cars, enjoying the fresh air, the tweets of the birds, and best of all a great view on the Mont Blanc. For the last two days we’ve had a good view.
Today I have spent very little time on Twitter and Facebook because I still can’t stand either of them. I’m thinking of deleting both accounts when this pandemic is over. I spent time modernising my weebsite instead. Pages that haven’t been changed since the late 90s are finally being updated and included within this CMS. The inspiration came as a result of seeing that Google told me in an e-mail that 21 pages were not AMP compatible.
Last night I watched this during and after having dinner last night. I feel the need for watching people hike, and socialising. We’re now on day 31. We’re officially a month in. If we were in a different context then I would have almost completed one Via Alpina route by walking several hundred kilometres.
When I started reading about Thur-Hiking it was in blog form, with pictures, and then books, and occassionaly podcasts and then, during this pandemic, I started watching videos of people’s hiking adventures. It’s a way of seeing nice landscapes and imagining what would be possible in Europe. It’s good to plan for the future, and it’s good to have plans that do not require much or any contact with others. Via Ferrata, climbing and other sports may not start again for a while after the last new transmission of the virus. Hiking, however should be possible.
My project, for the next few days, is to continue shifting all my old website content to this blog. I should learn something new in the process.
I need to eat dinner now.
I have a strong desire to go hiking. I would like to go on a hiking excursion that lasts for a few days. In theory I could do the Via Alpina route one starting in Nyon and ending in Lichtenstein. It’s a 21 step hike going north.
I had lunch watching one and a half episodes of this video series. They’re short, lasting just ten minutes each so easy to fill spare time with. As I’m trapped walking around in various circles around where I live it’s nice to see people walking in a straight line from one side of a country to the other.
To do a long thru-hike would be social, at least in the US but also possibly in Europe. Hiking is usually a social activity. That is probably why I want to go hiking. In theory it has been thirty days since I last shook a hand or gave a hug. It may be even longer than that.
One of the things that isn’t discussed about self-isolation is that if you’re living alone when self-isolation hits you’ll be alone for the duration of the pandemic. It means that for however long the pandemic lasts you will have only yourself as company and conversations will, at best be from two meters away, but quite easily from one balcony to another, or from two sides of a road, taking wind into account.
I found that I really can’t stand Facebook and Twitter anymore because they’re used as RSS rather than a chat room and I’m looking to find conversations that I can join. My use of Flickr has gone up because at least that’s about sharing images. I also find that blogging helps.
“It’s incredibly useful both for us personally and on a historical level to keep a daily record of what goes on around us during difficult times,” said Ms. Franklin, author of “Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life,” which won the 2016 National Book Critics Circle Award for biography.
The New York times has an article speaking about why it’s important to keep a diary. The reason for which I’m blogging on a daily basis about life during the Coronavirus pandemic is that it’s a historical record of thoughts I’ve had, but also to some degree a reflection of how self-isolation is experienced. The three-year-old toddlers who are experiencing this today will skirt the topic if they study modern history. Modern history is up to fifteen years ago so in their final year of school they will explore this pandemic.
Clicking on the image above will take you to the photos I have taken and added to the “During the Pandemic” album on Flickr.
See you tomorrow,
We’re in day 29 of ORCA in Switzerland and I have an ever increasing desire to go for a hike. During today’s walk I listened to two podcasts about hiking and I walked yet another variant of my usual walk. Apple tree blooms are increasing in number and the Colza looks almost ready to harvest.
We’re also going into a dry summer. During this pandemic we have hardly had any rain for a month. The whole of Switzerland is either yellow, orange or red with the risk of fire. I’ve been walking outdoors with a t-shirt.
We could be under the illusion that Switzerland has beaten the virus but that’s an illusion, because the risk of a new center of contagion is possible. We have to continue self-isolating. Today two children cycled too close to me so I crossed to the opposite side of the road because they stopped and would pass me again.
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My shoes are wet and my socks are wet because today I tried river walking. If a child was to do the same it would be called immature and irrational but when an adult does it then it’s adventure, and trying something new.
My motivation to river walk came from the pandemic, or more precisely from how people behave during a pandemic. When I walked yesterday I had a runner pass right by me and then spit on the ground a few meters ahead of where I would have been going. When I walked through the woods yesterday I could hear groups of people so I avoided walking along the same routes.
That’s why I placed both feet, and the shoes they were in, into the river and walked. I didn’t get that far. In fact I was only able to walk a few dozen meters before finding that the river would have required wading. I wasn’t prepared to do that. We’re not in a heatwave yet.
Although you can’t really see it in the image above grooves have been worn into the rock strata. As a result you shouldn’t spend all of your time looking forward because you’ll be caught out. River walking requires you to look at where you’re placing your feet. In the image below you can see these erosion patterns more clearly.
I’ve walked along the routes so much that now I’m starting to get to know the details. Now I know that the river is beautiful and that if you’re willing to get wet you can see some nice features. There are a few places I need to return to, and document through photography.
This morning I was looking through to see if Thru-hiking had started and to see whether people would still try to thru hike any of the main trails in the US and from what I see most people have not started and those that did have postponed their hikes for now.
As a follow up to this I listened to this episode of the Hiking Thru podcast. It’s about Chris Smead going for a lesser known Thru hike with eleven lenses, seventy five batteries and a monopod to document a hike with a group of people. The hike sounds like an interesting experience. It also makes a nice change from listening to so many news and current affairs programs. A moment to dream.
I will keep exploring. To a large degree I treated today as if there was no pandemic and that was refreshing. I still washed my hands as soon as I got home. I just didn’t stay cooped up indoors without treating myself. Exploration is a treat.