- Distance: 19.5km
- Ascent/Descent: 1390m up, 1305m down
- Time: 10 hr 13 min
We weren’t really prepared for this hot sunny shadeless day, scrambling along the crest.
It was already pushing 28C in Bidarray as we left our hotel next to the train station, climbed up the hill to the village, and stopped at the Vidal to get 6 liters of water and a Coke for me. The trail did say it went up, and it sure did, on an east facing windless slope, through waist high bracken ferns. It was almost a scramble—so many rocks—and it was very slow going, my brain turned off after awhile and just thought about “I’ll rest at the next shade”.
After a couple of hours of this very unpleasant slog, we rose above the fern zone, onto high grassy slopes, and soon we were on top of serrated sandstone peaks, all marching off into the distance, and it was a lot of up-and-down. Up to the peak, down a bit, up to the next peak, then really down. Oh, and back up again, this is the last one! No it wasn’t. One more. Spectacular scenery, but my mind really wasn't on the views.
We had been conserving water, but we were really really thirsty, even up high it was hot, and I was getting sunburned. I spotted a paved road on the topo and said “we’re taking this down”, and a few k from town as our water ran out we passed a watering hose in a garden next to a farmhouse. In an open-air shed next to the hose, a woman was soaking her feet—“so hot today”, and she said of course we could fill up our water bottles when we asked. Did we want cold water or something from the fridge? No thanks, no thanks! We both gulped a liter-plus each (I am wary of over-indulging after a bad experience a decade ago, made me dizzy and bloated), thanked her profusely again, and kept walking down and down.
We were pretty wiped out, but it was still 3km to town, grrr. Chris spotted a bench next to a vacation-condo complex, with one of those red umbrellas with the ice-cream logo on it, and the attendant happily sold us some Cokes and put up an umbrella on a table out back. We just relaxed for 20 minutes, then walked the remaining 25 minutes slowly to the hotel, arriving just before 7.
The hotel was very insistent on giving us dinner at 7:30, so we quickly showered and headed downstairs. The entree was melon and tomatoes and cheese balls—tasty—but our main of fries and chicken, though tasty, was just too much. We both ate about half our plate, then said “Ok, bedtime, I’m done for the day”. So we skipped dessert, and just collapsed into bed.