Looking into ultralight hiking

Always good to have an obsession: mine, at the moment, is lightweight backpacking.

This sprung from my 900km walk of the Camino in the north of Spain earlier this year(2015). I found that, despite my careful limiting of weight in my pack, I finished with very painful legs...no blisters or contusions just the dull ache of pounding along hard roads and rocky tracks for a month.
And I know that I did better than most because I read, and took to heart a skimpy volume called, sssss, which preached

As a general guideline, aim for your backpack’s total weight to be 10 percent of your body weight. ---Ashmore, Jean-Christie (2011-09-16). Camino de Santiago: To Walk Far, Carry Less (p. 3). Walk Far Media. Kindle Edition.

Camino pilgrim with a moderately heavy pack...not as bad as some.

For me that meant a base load pack, excluding water and food, of no more than 8.6 kg(19.2lbs). Which I did and was grateful for the advice as I watched my less weight conscious fellow travellers wilt under their heavier kit.

But I still had pain.  How to stop this pain has become a little bit of an obsession because I love "through walking", the steady coverage of big distances over weeks rather than weekend walks.  The Camino Français from the French side of the Pyrenees to the Galician Costa del Morte on the Atlantic Coast is only one of the many trails that converge on the dream pilgrimage destination of Santiago de Compostela. And then there are all the other mega walks that I may have time to do.

Reading into it, I found that I had adopted the right philosophy; I just had to do it better. Relentlessly getting the weight down, going "ultralight" appears to be the trick. As the Wikipedia article puts  it:

By carrying lighter and more multi-purpose equipment, ultralight backpackers aim to cover longer distances per day with less wear and tear on the body.

 Not just 8.6kg but a ultralight base load of three kg(6lb), a target of less than half of what I carried in Spain and nearly what I carry on a daily walk around town. Wish me luck, I've a long way to go.

Terrific Terrigal

Terrigal Haven is an extraordinary place in this world: several seafood restaurants sprinkled along a quiet golden Beach, a suburban football ground with weight for age teams fighting out their rostered games. Scores of spectator vehicles competing not only with the beachgoers and restaurant customers but hundreds of tourists. The tourists are there to walk the Skillian a dramatic green ski slope of a headland poking into the blue-green Tasman Sea. 
Sheltered from the winds, it was warm in the early South Hemisphere Spring, exotic vehicles featured. Two stood out for me: a simple retro Vespa and a magnificent and immaculate green chopperised Harley. 

Another failure to capture the Effiel Tower

Accidental reporting

In the Luxumerg area for a movie. Came out to find a major drama on the street. One of the Japanese restaurants on rue Monsieur le Prince had burst into flames but had been doused. We watched as the Pompiers painstakingly checked each of the apartments above for people who may have been overcome by smoke.
Meanwhile as the second photo shows, Parisians continue with their Sunday dinners just beyond the Police cordon.

Tour de France flâneur

It was a wet Tour on the Champs this year. The tough women's race in the leadup to the arrival of men's epic endurance event was made bloody by alight rain. Just enough on the cobbles to cause major crashes that sent some to hospital and others to be so delayed that they were allowed to pace in the slipstream of support vehicles in order to make them competative

Being a spectator is a bit like being in a battle: moments of high tension surrounded by hours of boredom holding your precious rail vantage point.

Off the track the sponsors make the most of the crowds, organising stationary bikes for competition...if you have a shopping docket from their stores

Then there are the official souvenirs to buy. And the hucksters appointed to pedal them

Rain stops play.

English supporter of Mark Cavendish

Paris flâneur

A building that welcomes graffiti instead of erasing it.

The Point Éphémére performing art centre on the hip Canal Saint Martin.  For over a decade home to concerts, performances,  festivals, parties, meetings, unusual events ... And wall space for graffiti artists  Point Éphémère 

No, not the Riviera. A solid kilometre of yellow sand and tasteful white umbrellas along the Seine for the poor souls who have to keep sweltering Paris ticking over during the summer holiday. The city's more fortunate flee to the Med or the Atlantic coasts

Last of the Spanish Wine

Spanish figure in a cityscape

I have been trying to take a photo that expresses how I feel about contemporary Spain after travelling through it for the last two months. I think this is it: a not so healthy Spaniard ambling past a half demolished apartment block covered in graffiti. The façade faces a strikingly modern low-cost rental development in the shadow of Santiago De Compostela cathedral. The clash of symbols (pun intended) is deafening. Spain, like Portugal and Greece has run up some pretty substantial debt. The building has stopped but the energy for reform is still there. For the moment, people are just waiting hoping the system will right itself.

My Way: Muxia musings

Muxia is an alternative end to the Camino. The majority choose to finish up at the religious climax of Santiago Cathedral, a minority at the traditional and mystical 'end of the Medieval world', the glorious Finisterre headland. A few, a fortunate few, journey through the relatively untravelled Camino that runs two walking days through wooded coastal hills to the north and the fishing town of Muxia.
Muxia, when it doesn't rain or fog over, is extraordinarily photogenic in the hard Spanish light. Here is a selection from the hundreds of shots I took and the thousands I could have.

My Way: reality was waiting at Muxia

Know that Oz is having a cold winter.
On the other side of the world, Europe is suffering a heatwave. People are quietly dying, serious questions are being asked about preparedness...they have already recognised that the number of days over 40C is rising each year. In the short term they are asking weather predictions give better warnings, getting hospitals ready for a high influx of dehydrated and heat prostrated patients and building special air-conditioned public halls. For the longer term, radical planning stipulations include a choice of solar panels or earth roofing. Not everywhere but that gives a flavour.
The photo was taken yesterday  at the delightful fishing village cum resort of Muxia where the temperature is  only in the high twenties but considered hot by the locals use to a cool wet maritime climate which has more in common with Ireland than sunny Spain.
But this is an area that has seen two huge disasters in the last 20 years.
The on with the biggest world exposure was the mammoth oil spill from the breakup at sea of the tanker 'Prestige' in 1993. It coated the coasts of Spain Portugal and France with a sticky slick. The clean-up is said to have cost €3b and for many years destroyed the coastal fishing industry. Today, it has recovered... and the seafood  is great.

The Prestige broke up at sea. The law courts are still trying to resolve the blame but part of it was that the tanker was blatantly unseaworthy, and none of the effected nations allowed the ailing vessel to enter a port to allow the spill to be properly contained.

And so the clean-up of a thousand kilometres of Coast using hundreds of volunteers from all over Europe was massive and costly. This photo was taken around the same point at Muxia where I took the photo.

But this is not Galacia's only type of disaster. The other is bushfire. Much of the traditional sheep and dairy land has been given over to plantation of eucalyptus hardwood and pine softwood. I was horrified to see the lack of firebeaks and trails and evidence that the countryside was only just recovering from bad fires of ten years ago. The experts are warning but, like the Prestige, the authorities are not taking preventative care. It will only take one hot summer in Galacia before another crisis occurs.

Galacia fire in 2006

The Camino to Muxia and Finisterre winds through a lot of eucalyptus forests

Other provinces are realising that the commercial tree selection is part of the problem and are trying to change where they can to the less combustible and easily managed native trees. But not in Galicia.

My Way: biking the Fisterra Camino

Cycling the Camino is not the cushy ride most walking pilgrims assume. Wandering away from the walking track and it's wonderful system of posts and yellow spraypainted arrows can be difficult: even with the help of a GPS.
Well, why not just follow the Camino? Easy. Firstly because it is often tough off-road cycling demanding exemplary skill and a well set-up VTT bike. Don't even think about it in the Galician wet.
Secondly, a basic incompatibility between the cyclists and walkers. Cyclists forget the fundumental courtesy of ringing a bell(if they have one) while trying to prevent themselves from crashing. Thus walkers, generally lost in thought about the nature of God, think them rude as the leap sideways off the track.
And, while it is possible to follow the walkers way, over the years, more of it is being converted back to what it should be: a tree sheltered nature trail well away from the roar of the modern world.
The other extreme is to follow the main roads and do battle with the trucks and speeding cars. This makes navigation a cinche but also guarantees that you see nothing petrol stations and the rubbish that the Spanish think it is alright to chuck out of their car windows.
The third way is to take the mini-minor roads, almost always tarred and pothole-free that service the many farms and former villages turned residential commuter clusters. Wayfaring along them is nice in theory but difficult in fact because they seem to be made up of interections with other link roads and cul-de-sacs. Google Maps was completely confused giving bad advice with monotonous regularity. Worse the Spanish don't waste much money on signposting.

Screen shot of our wandering. We almost never make this kind of error.

Sights like this are difficult to find if you aren't on the walking trail

And above is the result: a five km figure of eight before we decided to join the parade of traffic on the mainland. And, out of time, coughed up the cash for a taxi to get us to our reservation for the night.
Someday someone will blaze the midrange route neither dirt or tour de whatever, bu for now, I have to stamp the Santiago-Finisterre Camino as unsuitable for real touring.

My Way: Pilgrims