Refugio de Bujaruelo - Torla

Oh my god. I felt like I’d been woken from the dead when the alarm rang. Pale light seeped through the curtains, I almost didn’t dare look outside in case the storm was still ravaging the valley. Every bone in my body ached as I slid down from the top bunk and eeled into my putrefied clothes. I’d had a shower the night before, but what I needed was a washing machine and rest. And presumably a real coffee made by a certified barista. I’d used the spotty signal to book an obscenely-priced hotel in Torla. Because you deserve it, gal. Now all I had to do was get there.

I dragged my pack and poles out into the seating area. A sunny morn, miraculously. The Czech girls were there, coffees and croissants in hand. The oldest of the three (what was her name? Veronica?) looked utterly defeated. “I want to go on, but how can I deal with these storms? It’s exhausting and I don’t know if I am able to do this…” She seemed so forlorn, an oddly young look on her tired face. I summoned my absolute best pep talk of “Most people can do most things! Just because it’s hard doesn’t mean you can’t do it! Etc etc!” She looked at me with a mixture of hope and wry scepticism. “You’re… a very positive person”. I snorted before I could stop myself. Oh, sis. If 3000 something km of thru-hiking had taught me anything, it was that you could only hope for the best and accept that disaster will happen. You can prepare as much as you can and make decisions with the information you have, but at the end of the day, thru-hiking is an exercise in letting go of rules. True freedom entails a level of renouncing control – a painful exercise for people like me, Type A’s who prefer nailing next year’s New Years Eve plans on the 2nd of January. I certainly wasn’t able to apply these lessons to my real life with any measurable success. But on the trail I was different. I was another level of resourceful out here, smelly but competent. I knew how this worked.

We ended up getting a minibus taxi into town. 40 euros seemed a decent price to pay for peace of mind. Torla was a tiny but packed hiker town full of gear stores, little tapas restaurants, two small supermarkets, and gift shops. The hotel, Villa Torla, was sublime. I spent a good 20 minutes washing out brown grime from all my clothes in the bidet, sacrificing all three bottles of hotel shampoo. My armpits itched with heat-induced eczema. I decided to employ the complimentary toothbrush as a hairbrush (the only care my 70+ cm lengths would receive for the entire trip), after which it looked utterly demolished. On every hike I seem to uncover another layer of feral hiker-trashiness. Not a month ago I’d given a guest lecture in a pencil skirt at University College London. Now I was burning up the track. The city layers had peeled away, leaving only rocket power. It dawned on me that as purebred thru-hikers were in short supply here among the day hikers and families, I was unlikely to find someone in the next stretch who could keep up with me. So much for my quarter life crisis.

I looked at my tan and already leaner body in the mirror. Being here all alone while at my physical peak seemed borderline wasteful. For the first time I empathised with Cheryl Strayed as she sat in her motel room prior to embarking on the PCT. The world was full of company, all you had to do was go out and find it. This year, once again single, I had fallen back into old ways of hunting for answers in someone else’s arms. But it was different than before. At 23 I had been completely free-range, knowing that a life in London lay ahead, too young to have even thought about my age. Now, at 27, dating was another ball game altogether. You needn’t tell an early 30s guy you were looking for commitment – they could smell it on you.

I’d spent the summer longing for a partner with an almost visceral craving only comparable to how I’d heard people describe the biological desire for children. Like women who struggle with fertility and become acutely aware of other pregnant women or parents, I too couldn’t see the streets of London for the happy couples walking hand in hand. I’d spent countless days reading alone under the trees of Green Park, trying to focus on the page and not the laughing women nearby, sitting with their boyfriends’ heads in their laps. Being single at 23 was completely unproblematic. Being single at 27 when you didn’t want to be was absolutely shit. The negative space beside me in my bed on Sunday mornings was physically painful. My London life was so rich in friends and experiences, but nothing could alleviate my desire to build a future with someone who would stay. At the end of the day, it was about more than age. I had been to all the corners of my mind, I’d done more soul-searching than most people would in a lifetime. I knew who I was and what I was about. And one thing was for sure: I sucked at not being loved.

I flopped down on the bed and sent off some texts to my most recent attempt. G was a somewhat dysfunctional life experimentalist living on a houseboat with his adorable cat. We found one another both physically and intellectually attractive, but we were both also actively nursing heartbreaks over other people. The main thing that drew me towards him was the fact that I didn’t go to sleep next to him crying silently into my hair and wishing he was someone else – which I’d done on multiple other occasions the past few months. Having said this, G was also hands down the shittiest texter I had ever met. No counting on that for emotional sustainment during a month in the wilderness.

My wonderful women friends I had made at Kings were as always my saving grace, and I was bubbling with excitement over the wonderous Pyrenees during our call. Not only were the mountains pretty, I also wasn’t dying from the hard walking! I spontaneously booked another night in the hotel after checking tomorrow’s grim forecast. True enough, day 12 was an indoor deal, watching the pool flood over and hail battering the window like shotgun fire. Go to Spain in summer they said. It would be fun, they said.