I was perusing mountaineering stories and gear reviews online when I found this blog post by a Deuter employee, giving an amusing secondhand account of my own expedition with NOLS in the Indian Himalaya. As a student, I think we were sheltered from the instructors' true alarm over our fuel shortage situation. We knew it was an issue, but reading Evan's quotes make me realize how serious of a situation it could have become! We all thought Evan was crazy for bringing just a 3-season golite quilt to sleep on a glacier for three weeks, but his bean-counting ways helped him keep his pack (full of extra protection and rescue regalia) smaller than most of our own.
I found that same photo from the Deuter blog on a NOLS flier on a bulletin board at REI two summers ago. Quite a trip seeing myself on the wall as I walked out of the bathroom! I'm second from the left, wearing an orange jacket. Eric, pictured in front wearing red, was carrying a 100lb+ pack by this point!
Another article I enjoyed reading is this from Adam Alter for The Atlantic:
How Nature Resets Our Minds and Bodies: The research behind an understanding that natural environments refocus our attention, lessening stress and hastening healing
Some good quotes:
Nature restores mental functioning in the same way that food and water restore bodies. The business of everyday life -- dodging traffic, making decisions and judgment calls, interacting with strangers -- is depleting, and what man-made environments take away from us, nature gives back. There's something mystical and, you might say, unscientific about this claim, but its heart actually rests in what psychologists call attention restoration theory, or ART. According to ART, urban environments are draining because they force us to direct our attention to specific tasks (e.g., avoiding the onslaught of traffic) and grab our attention dynamically, compelling us to "look here!" before telling us to instead "look over there!" These demands are draining -- and they're also absent in natural environments. Forests, streams, rivers, lakes, and oceans demand very little from us, though they're still engaging, ever changing, and attention-grabbing. The difference between natural and urban landscapes is how they command our attention. While man-made landscapes bombard us with stimulation, their natural counterparts give us the chance to think as much or as little as we'd like, and the opportunity to replenish exhausted mental resources.
. . .
Natural environments promote calmness and well-being in part because they expose people to low levels of stress. These stressful experiences are tame in comparison with the trials and tribulations that most of us associate with stress -- workplace drama, traffic jams, and wailing children on international plane trips. Humans thrive with some stimulation, but we're incapable of coping with extreme stressors, which push us from the comfortable realm of eustress (good stress) to the danger zone of distress (bad stress).
A few weeks ago my friend Brooke emailed me asking for some guidance for planning her trip to Europe this summer. I happily obliged, and ended up writing this rambling narrative of my time spent in Europe this past year with some important observations and advice. She'll be traveling with her son Lander, whom I met in third grade in Bozeman, MT. Lander and I were on the Bridger Ski Foundation's nordic team for a few years together until I decided that skiing uphill competitively wasn't very much fun! He went on to be a champion of the nordic team, while I opted for racking up powder-flu sick days and bluebird ridge hikes at Bridger Bowl.
Here's my letter to Brooke:
I’ll first tell you a little about what I did in Europe this
year, so if any of it sounds interesting you can ask me about it specifically.
I flew to Geneva in late June, and met my parents and my brother’s family
there. Our flights were all delayed/cancelled, so the first three days were
kind of a wash. Learn to expect these sorts of things! Honestly, the
transportation portions of your travels will be some of the biggest adventures
of your time spent abroad – and so researching exactly how you’ll get from
point A to point B (and then on to C and D etc) is pretty important. Having a
wifi-capable device (ipad, ipod touch, etc.) is a good tool, and we found it
indispensible. We found that wifi is available pretty much everywhere in the
world, and you can book everything you need online. We didn’t have a cell
phone, only an ipad, and it was all we needed.
We spent a couple days at an old family friend’s chalet upin the middle of the Swiss Alps (seriously as good as it sounds) that was just
one or two drainages west from the Matterhorn & Zermatt. We spent a day inZermatt – it’s a made-for-tourists cookie-cutter swiss village, but the
mountain scenery is amazing!! You could easily spend a few days here hiking
around.
There’s a world-famous trekking route called the Walker's Haute Route or “Mont
Blanc to the Matterhorn” that goes from Chamonix to Zermatt, walkable in about
10-14 days. The snow isn’t melted until late-June/early July, so unless you
want a ski tour instead of a trek, I’d wait until then. I used the photos and advice from this blog to help me plan my route. I recommend any of the guidebooks written by Kev Reynolds. After my family left to
go to England, I had 5 days to spend by myself in Switzerland before joining
them in London. I planned on hiking for 4 days on the Haute Route and walking
out to a bus & train back to the airport.
The amazing thing about trekking in Switzerland is the
abundance of government & alpine club-sponsored mountain huts. For a
moderately hefty sum ($40-80 per night, depending on time of year and location)
you can have a bunk to sleep in, dinner and breakfast, all in the relative
middle of nowhere!
These links have some good info & photos of these accommodations:
Swiss Alpine Club hut information
MySwitzerland.com hut information
There are hundreds of trekking routes around Switzerland
(circuits around Monte Rosa, Mont Blanc or the Matterhorn are a couple), and I
really do think the Alps are like the “Little Himalayas.” Since you’ll be there
in July, snow will be melted and it will be beautiful. You really don’t need to
hire a guide, because all the main trekking trails are well marked and there
will be other people hiking around you to answer questions. A guidebook, a map,
and a healthy dose of common sense should be sufficient for you and Lander.
The weather turned nasty during my short trek, so I only
hiked for 2 days and then spent a couple days hunkering down in Chamonix
waiting to fly out. If you have good weather, Chamonix is another amazing place
to visit. It’s very similar to Zermatt with the made-for-tourists vibe, but
again, the scenery is impeccable. There’s the world-famous Aiguille du Midi
telepherique (cable car) that goes up thousands of vertical feet to the top of
a rock spire near Mont Blanc. I just showed up in Chamonix on the train with
zero knowledge about anything, and found it very easy to get around & a
place to stay. I would say that’s very common all around Europe – having signs
and tourist info centers that probably all speak English. I know a little
French and my boyfriend knows a little German, and we never had much of a
language barrier for our entire trip around the world! Most everyone you’ll
interact with on a regular basis (the staff of hotels, restaurants, and
transportation providers) will speak enough English as to be understood.
Taking the trains is easy, if not expensive, around Europe.
Unless you want to take the train for the sake of the experience, I would
recommend flying between countries. Companies like RyanAir and EasyJet have
pretty cheap prices, and usually cheaper and much faster than the train. Trains
are good to get around a small area, but long-distance opt for the airplane.
You talked about wanting to visit eight different locations
(Rome, Florence, Tuscany, Portofino, Venice, Greece, Switzerland, France). If
you have a month to work with, and counting on at least one day of
transportation between each location, this doesn’t leave you with very much
time in any one place. Narrowing down your options is really the hardest thing
to do. If you can extend your time abroad, or leave your return ticket
open-ended (really a brave thing to do, we did that for four months, it’s an
exiting way to live!), you can leave a lot of the details up to the last
minute. But I’d advise you to pick maybe three or four locations at most- meaning
getting on a airplane or long train ride <4 times. Through a series of
unfortunate events, Mervin and I ended up with only about 48 hours in Rome
before flying to Nepal. We tried to do too much in Europe and Rome was really
just a waste of our limited time (and money! Rome is expensive! Italy is
expensive!). Instead of trying to do Greece and
Rome, we should’ve just stayed in Greece for the extra three days. I would love
to go back to Rome, but with at least four or five days.
(Backtracking here) After traveling through Switzerland and
London for 16 days, I returned to the US for about a month. Then I took off to
Paris with my mom around the middle of August. We rented an apartment in
downtown Paris for a week, and it was perfect. It was really the perfect amount
of time to find our “favorite” neighborhood pastry shop, and only need to visit
a couple cathedrals or museums every day without getting exhausted. I then flew
to Athens and met Mervin at the airport just a couple hours after I’d landed.
From the beginning of our trip, we started using the same booking/planning
system for our transit days, and I’d recommend you do the same.
Book a hotel that is either on public transit stops or
within easy walking distance from them. Every major town in Europe has
easily-navigable public transit, with bus/trains/airports having intersecting
lines. Find out where the airport shuttle or train will drop you off, and book
a hotel very near there, or have a couple in mind. Even if it isn’t the “best”
part of town, book one night there so you can stop worrying about traveling and
just plop into bed. Take a deep breath. That’s why you’re traveling, right?
It’s harder to have an enjoyable time when you’re worrying about the next train
to catch, where you’ll spend the next night, if there’s enough time to catch
that ferry, where you’ll get dinner between the bus and the hotel… so don’t try
to cram it all in. Choose places that are entertaining within a reasonable
distance (where you can spend multiple nights in one place and do short daytrips
from there), and just settle in to your life living abroad! You don’t need to
be busy every day – spending a day relaxing at a café people watching is just
as enjoyable as going to the mega historical attraction.
Make a top ten list of things you want to see. “Going to
Europe” usually evokes a few iconic images in the mind… what are yours? What
are your must-see cities, museums, or things you’d hate to miss while you’re
there? Now can you group them on a map and figure out how you’d best weave yourselves
into this map of to-do’s?
We found that hostels are cost effective for solo travelers,
but if you’re willing to pay $5-10 more per night, you can get a private room
and often with a bathroom. This always seemed more appealing to us than sharing
a room with others. We used HostelBookers,
Booking.com, and HostelWorld to find almost all of
our rooms while we were abroad. We usually went with the mid-level places on
the hostel sites (usually hotels, not hostels. “Hostel” typically means younger
adults sleeping in shared rooms, with common spaces often devoted to partying).
It’s usually worth it to check to see if the hotel has their own website, and
email them directly for the booking. We usually got a better price this way. You
can also just book one night and choose to stay longer or leave if you don’t
end up liking it (sometimes not possible during busy seasons).
Pay keen attention to the reviews for all the places you are
researching. The internet is truly invaluable in this way. Reviews from
travelers will tell you so much more than the company or booking website will.
I recommend using Trip Advisor
for looking up reviews for hotels, restaurants and attractions, and some
general travel advice too. For more in-depth reviews and specific questions, I
used Lonely Planet. If you
have a specific question about something try typing it into google, add “lonely
planet” to the end (ex. rome public transit lonely planet), and there will most
likely be a forum post about it! Lonely Planet has a huge resource of
hotel/restaurant/attraction reviews, and their hard-copy and ebooks are good
resources too.
That’s all I have for now – Let me know if you have any
questions, now or in the future! I’ll be happy to help you. Traveling seems
pretty daunting during the planning phase, and talking with other travelers and
hearing their stories was the best way for us to get good information. Also be
sure to check out my photo albums of facebook, the one from last summer’s trip
to the Alps should be enough to inspire you to go :)
Jelica
