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Keeping to the trail

12 Jan, 2025

Welcome news this week from New South Wales as 23 year old hiker Hadi Nazari was found having gone missing 13 days earlier having stepped off the trail to take some photographs. Perhaps even more extraordinary, is the news from November that 20 year old, Sam Benastick, a self-styled "avid-hiker" in British Columbia had been found after 5 weeks in a rugged mountainous region. Good news in a couple of corners of the planet, but other places are equally confusing once you stray from the trail, as we have now learnt that a search continues in the Italian Dolomites for Aziz Ziriat, a 36 year old British hiker, whose unlucky companion’s body has been recovered after a suspected fall. Keeping to the path in many remote areas of the world, is not only sensible but life-saving.  Hats off to all the volunteers and specialist mountain rescue teams, that selflessly step out in all weathers in search of wayward hikers.

I have to thank Molly Wagner, one of our staunch Australian supporters who joins our Salons and Cafés even though she has get to up before dawn to attend them.  She sent me a note after listening to our most recent Salon, in which Chantal Lyons chatted with fellow Wainwright Prize nominees, Polly Atkin and Sophie Yeo.  They were saying how wonderful it was to walk through the countryside in the various parts of Britain where they live - not so easy, or sensible Molly pointed out, sharing the news of the Australian hiker, who at that stage was still missing.  Our next Salon is very much to do with how the British countryside has been fashioned and access enforced or denied, in many areas owing to ownership, and how those that own became so wealthy.  Corinne Fowler is a colonial historian, and she will be in conversation with Richard White, sound walk composer and researcher in to slave ownership - definitely one to be up for.

I’m always fascinated by walking trails, how the route was chosen, and how they have been constructed. When I’ve walked them myself I frequently find that I’ve lost my way even if they’re well signposted!  Last year, I read Robert Moor’s book On Trails: an Exploration. Moor notes that a trail’s function determines how it gets to its destination. If it is striving to get from one place to the other as fast as possible, it follows the path of least resistance (the case for most non-human trails). If it is like the modern hiking trail, it often meanders. He writes "A hiking trail factors in the best views, good places to avoid erosion or endangered species, and how to get the hiker along the trail safely."  On Friday last week, I had the delight in talking to Shinlee Hung from the Taiwan Thousand Mile Trail, who spoke about traditional methods in trail building, she will be joining sculptor and land artist Julie Brook, at a café we are running early one morning in February (take note Molly & fellow Australians), in collaboration with walking Ali Pretty. We are excited in the UK when a new trail is dedicated, so it is welcoming to see the King Charles III English cost path being promoted, and I guess as long as I keep the sea on one side all the way, I shouldn’t get lost.  

Tohoku is the north eastern region of Japan, “the deep north” as philosopher poet Basho described it, that was battered by the earthquake and subsequent tsunami in 2011, now has a 1,000 km hiking trail as an emblem of regional solidarity and a memorial to its loss. Tour company Walk Japan are now offering self-guided holidays along its route, that includes rock-hewn tunnels through limestone cliffs, and some detours away from the coast where the land is still unstable.  Travel writer Henry Wismayer writes: “Travelling to a place where tragic events are yet to fade in the detachment of history comes with a side-order of disquiet, and anxiety that coming here betrays a certain ghoulishness.”  A recommendation from the tour company is that you make as much noise as possible on blind curves to frighten black bears.  It rings bells for me when I think of Lake Prespa and its surrounding area, of abandoned buildings, war-torn and fleeing communities, with equally unfriendly brown bears on the loose.   The good news, is that early next month, you can join a café with reassuring advice coming from locals of the Prespa lake region, still within a fortnight of the Encounters submission deadline - just to make sure that all the encounters are friendly encounters!

Later this month, brave Jenny Sturgeon joins us at a café to talk about her solo 860 km walk along Scotland’s unofficial national trail, and of the BBC-commissioned podcast, sound walk and album that came of it.  What ways might you choose to document a walk? Would you follow Jenny’s footsteps and record an album? Although that wasn’t her intention when she undertook the walk. Clara Gari, a woman not shy of long distance solo walks prompted the question on documenting walks, and she has invited Cuban / American walking artist, author and educator Ernesto Pujol to give a presentation at our next Walking Art & Local Communities Confluence event on Tuesday week.    

Some interesting listening is on BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs with guest Laurie Anderson, who our walking artist readers will know, made a work called Walking and Falling at the Same Time with Francis Alys - that's not mentioned in the programme, but there's a lot more to Laurie than walking art.

And finally, a great quote from Japanese fashion designer Yohji Yamamoto who writes: "I have travelled all around the world, mostly walking around, looking at landscapes, rocky sceneries, and plants and flowers. Nature is incredibly strong. I have said to myself that I will never be able to design such beauty. It is impossible, more than beautiful."

Keep safe wherever you are walking, and please join us online whenever you can.  

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flakkari

“Icelandic culture is infused with stories of travel. When names were needed for modern machines, the technology that enables our imaginations to travel, words were chosen that centred on the quality of roaming. Thus the neologism for laptop is fartölva, formed from the verb far, meaning to migrate, and tölva – migrating computer’; its companion, the external hard drive, is a flakkari. The latter word can also mean ‘wanderer’ or ‘vagrant’. In the end it’s the wanderers we rely on.” From Nancy Campbell’s “The Library of Ice”.

Added by Ruth Broadbent

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