How much you put in your bag makes a difference. If you're 12 stone, and you walk 9 hours a day at 3 miles an hour you consume 2993 extra calories a day. 9 hours is a lot of walking and three miles an hour is a sustained speed but this calculation assumes no climbing (using Naismith's rule you add half and hour for every 1,000 feet climbing). If you're 14 stone, you consume an extra 500 calories. Now I'm not sure if carrying a bag weighing 2 stone makes 12 stone person the equivalent of a 14 stone person (without the bag) but there must be a rough equivalence. An extra 500 calories a day is a lot, 90,000 calories over the length of the whole walk, or 30 days extra food consumption!
A helpful list for loading your bag is provided on the Confraternity of St James website (for walkers planning for the St James Way walk).
Not sure about the starting premise which says you need a 60 litre bag if your a man and a 35-45 litre bag if you're a woman. I guess it's assuming that you can carry more and that some of the items of clothing are bigger. Anyway 60 litres is a much bigger that any bag I've carried so I must be doing something wrong (or right).
I don't think you need much in the way of clothes. The key thing I guess is to be able to wash them and to make sure sure that everything is made of the latest quick/drip dry synthetic materials. Three tea shirts, shorts/trousers, fleece, waterproofs,hat, something to put on your feet in the evening and socks seems enough to me.
Wasn't much taken by the idea that you can buy specialist clothes with silver threads that can absorb oder for up to three weeks. Is that the same underwear for three weeks?
The suggestion that you rub your boots with wild fennel or mint whenever you get a chance seems like a good idea, particularly if you've been wearing your underwear for three weeks.
Anyway the top tens question I need to answer before packing my bag:
1. How long do socks last, how many miles?
2. How many pairs of socks should I take given that they take forever to dry?
3. How long do boots last?
4. Will I need to wear some boots in before I start or do your feet change shape after so many miles walking?
5. Will my clothes last 180 days of walking, or will I need to be sent supplies?
6. Given that I look like an idiot in a hat, what sort of hat should I get?
7. What is the very best stuff for keeping mosquitoes at bay? They will already know I'm coming.
8. Should I go modern and get one of those integrated watering systems (intravenous?)?
9. Will I need the same clothes in Austria as I need in Spain?
10.Should I take my ipod?
Eurorando 2011
Brilliant. Eurorando is the five yearly celebration of the E long distance walking network and the next one is in 2011 coinciding perfectly with the planned amithefirst "conquest" of the E4. If that bit of good fortune wasn't enough the association organising the event is Spanish (the FEDME) with the walking club in Andalusia taking the lead. Tarifa, the starting point for the E4 walk is in Andalusia. The only slight problem is that I'm proposing to walk from west to east so I should be in Budapest when everyone else is celebrating in Granada. Small detail to be ironed out at a later point.
Plans for the Eurorando 2011 are well advanced - its a significant event for tourism in Andulasia and if I understand all the documents correctly there is a budget of some 1.6 million euros. There is even a video which looks great (but of course is in Spanish).
Apart from creating a bigger interest in the concept of the long distance walks I'm not quite sure yet what this means for the amithefirst project. What I need is a really good Spanish speaker to help me engage with the project team in Andulasia to see if they are interested in promoting my attempt.
Which Charity?
After completing the walk the second objective for the amithefirst project is to raise money for charity. So which charity?
I get lots of different things from walking. One of the particular pleasures, especially on the big iconic walks like the Haute Route, or Everest Base Camp, is the sense of international solidarity you get from sharing something with people from different countries. So it was a special Christmas Eve spent drinking with a group of Mexicans, Spanish, Indians and Nepalese in a freezing tea house at Poon Hill on the Annapurna Circuit. The memory of the tiny Nepalese porters giggling uncontrollably as the much larger, in your face, female trekkers from Spain sang louder and louder as they drank more and more Indian whisky is both really nice and in a way inspirational.
The E network of trails is, in itself, a sort of international solidarity manifestation. The European Ramblers Association, which looks after the network, exists to promote trans border access for walkers and to support "activities which serve to strengthen greater understanding between the peoples and nations of Europe".
So a charity which promotes international solidarity seems to make sense.
It would also be nice to support something that was real and generated a tangible result.
In both Nepal and Ethiopia we were lucky to get invited into local schools. In Ethiopia we were invited into schools in Lalibela (famous for its churches carved out of rock) and later on the trail itself in the village of Chiro Leba (the day before climbing Ras Dashen). Both schools were joyous places with children seeing education as way to a future. In Lalibela we were struck by the organisation. A large school, children started at different ages and were taught by a combination of teachers and other children who had learnt more. To add to the organisational complexity the school ran a two shift system with a 1,000 or so children attending in the morning and another 1,000 going there in the afternoon (different children - same teachers). In Chiro Leba the school was much smaller, uneven earthern floors, with walls incapable of keeping livestock out when the children weren't not there (the evidence was on the floor). Throughout our time in Ethopia children came up to you not for money but for pens. The empty biro refills (the bit in the middle not the pen) on the floor of the school in Chiro Leba showed us why.
So a charity which supported international solidarity and which did something tangible, which made a difference to say a school in Ethopia, would be nice.
What I'm looking for now are some ideas.
I get lots of different things from walking. One of the particular pleasures, especially on the big iconic walks like the Haute Route, or Everest Base Camp, is the sense of international solidarity you get from sharing something with people from different countries. So it was a special Christmas Eve spent drinking with a group of Mexicans, Spanish, Indians and Nepalese in a freezing tea house at Poon Hill on the Annapurna Circuit. The memory of the tiny Nepalese porters giggling uncontrollably as the much larger, in your face, female trekkers from Spain sang louder and louder as they drank more and more Indian whisky is both really nice and in a way inspirational.
The E network of trails is, in itself, a sort of international solidarity manifestation. The European Ramblers Association, which looks after the network, exists to promote trans border access for walkers and to support "activities which serve to strengthen greater understanding between the peoples and nations of Europe".
So a charity which promotes international solidarity seems to make sense.
It would also be nice to support something that was real and generated a tangible result.
In both Nepal and Ethiopia we were lucky to get invited into local schools. In Ethiopia we were invited into schools in Lalibela (famous for its churches carved out of rock) and later on the trail itself in the village of Chiro Leba (the day before climbing Ras Dashen). Both schools were joyous places with children seeing education as way to a future. In Lalibela we were struck by the organisation. A large school, children started at different ages and were taught by a combination of teachers and other children who had learnt more. To add to the organisational complexity the school ran a two shift system with a 1,000 or so children attending in the morning and another 1,000 going there in the afternoon (different children - same teachers). In Chiro Leba the school was much smaller, uneven earthern floors, with walls incapable of keeping livestock out when the children weren't not there (the evidence was on the floor). Throughout our time in Ethopia children came up to you not for money but for pens. The empty biro refills (the bit in the middle not the pen) on the floor of the school in Chiro Leba showed us why.
So a charity which supported international solidarity and which did something tangible, which made a difference to say a school in Ethopia, would be nice.
What I'm looking for now are some ideas.
How many days will it take to walk the E4?
Probably turning into some sort of mapping/internet nerd but I have found researching the walk really interesting. The key thing is that there is no one source of information that takes you from one end of the walk to the other. At the European level the walk is described on the European Ramblers Association website, and even on Wikipedia, but not at the level of detail you need to determine the daily length of each walk. Wikipedia (when it does do detail)is sometimes wrong. Plotting the route, from end to end, has therefore involved piecing it together from a whole series of sources (translating the sites into English using the Google translate tool)and then estimating what the daily walks will involve.
I have plotted the route in Google Earth. Google Earth is incredibly powerful and I'm still learning how to use it. I now have a file, which plots my version of the walk, which I can "play" in Google Earth. This means I can fly virtually, place to place, from one end of the walk to the other. Nerd or what!
What I haven't worked out is how to publish my file, i.e. share it on the internet. I'm sure this is possible so hopefully I can do it soon.
Some of sources of information actually provide walking times and I have used these to plan the days. Where this is not available I've used Google Earth. Previous planning experience suggests that I can overstate my daily walking capacity (12 hour walking days in the Dolomites bear witness) so the current plan will definitely need some more work.
What the plan is telling me is that I need to walk for 172 days (I have walked 16 before!). If I walk six days, and have every 7th day of, this makes for a total elapsed time rounded up to 200 days.
If I have got this right it could work. What it means is that I could start at Tarifa at the beginning of March and spend the spring crossing the Sierra Nevadas and eastern Spain. By mid-May I will be in France and the Cevennes, going up the Rhone Valley to Grenoble in June/July. The Swiss part of the walk looks really nice and easy and I should be able to get to the tough Austrian part mid-way through August. The Der nordalpine Weitwanderweg 01 looks brilliant but is the highest and most exposed part of the walk, involves 40 days walking, so I need to start this as early in August as possible.
I have plotted the route in Google Earth. Google Earth is incredibly powerful and I'm still learning how to use it. I now have a file, which plots my version of the walk, which I can "play" in Google Earth. This means I can fly virtually, place to place, from one end of the walk to the other. Nerd or what!
What I haven't worked out is how to publish my file, i.e. share it on the internet. I'm sure this is possible so hopefully I can do it soon.
Some of sources of information actually provide walking times and I have used these to plan the days. Where this is not available I've used Google Earth. Previous planning experience suggests that I can overstate my daily walking capacity (12 hour walking days in the Dolomites bear witness) so the current plan will definitely need some more work.
What the plan is telling me is that I need to walk for 172 days (I have walked 16 before!). If I walk six days, and have every 7th day of, this makes for a total elapsed time rounded up to 200 days.
If I have got this right it could work. What it means is that I could start at Tarifa at the beginning of March and spend the spring crossing the Sierra Nevadas and eastern Spain. By mid-May I will be in France and the Cevennes, going up the Rhone Valley to Grenoble in June/July. The Swiss part of the walk looks really nice and easy and I should be able to get to the tough Austrian part mid-way through August. The Der nordalpine Weitwanderweg 01 looks brilliant but is the highest and most exposed part of the walk, involves 40 days walking, so I need to start this as early in August as possible.
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