I sometimes write about trips I do.
Read my essay on a long-distance walk to Lake Baikal with two (wonderful) friends in 2019 in Bouts du Monde (in French).
– EXCERPT –
Three thousand seven hundred kilometers, three pairs of feet, four months, from Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan, to Lake Baikal in Siberia. The itinerary: to be determined. At the outset, that was all we knew. There would be three of us. Two brothers, Tom and Jimmy, and me, their friend Hugo. We were 23 and 24, all on a "gap year," and we wanted to wrap it up with a shared project. What better than a little stroll? The idea was to walk, and only walk: no hitchhiking, no buses, no trains, no bikes. A pair of boots, a pair of mates. On our backs, a six-kilo bag — the bare essentials for bivouacking. With a few solid hikes under our belts — the GR20 in Corsica, the Haute Route des Pyrénées, a few summits in our native Alps — we were the picture-perfect hikers. We were ready to follow any path that would lead us to Baikal. We would leave Bishkek on April 11, 2019, heading into Central Asia, its people and its mountains. Kyrgyzstan is one of the most landlocked countries in the world. With an average altitude of 2,750 meters and peaks above 7,000 meters, we knew we wouldn't be bothered much.
Yet we were far from imagining the consequences of the only promise we had made to ourselves: we would only walk. That was the sole rule.
On previous trips, we had been content to follow long-distance hiking trails, moving from one white blaze to the next red one. At every fork, we simply followed the arrows placed by the French forestry service (ONF). You start from a pretty spot and arrive at another pretty spot, passing through places reputed to be equally pretty. The starting point is usually a parking lot where a barrier symbolizes the entrance to nature. But once past that barrier, the route is laid out by ONF rangers: ideally, it forms a loop to optimize access to points of interest. The path skirts the edges of woods for shade in summer, overlooks cliffs so the view opens up, then takes a trail along the heights to tower above a waterfall. Finally, you admire from a promontory that unbeatable view, perched high, overlooking the entire valley.
Hiking thus allows you to wander through a sanctuarized nature where everything you came looking for is laid out, with no risk of damaging it or missing its star attractions. But isn't it then a nature made easy, ready-made, that is offered to us? The expected places follow one another, predictable and anticipated. The landscapes strung along the path meet very precise aesthetic criteria. I have often heard fellow hikers say: "How beautiful nature is here, along the trail! In the distance, everything looks wilder, more hostile, darker." Isn't there a kind of staging of nature at play, so that the hiker can experience an easy, comfortable sense of bliss before the reassuring spectacle of a curated landscape? Perhaps… In any case, we found none of these comforts during our walk across Asia: from Bishkek to Lake Baikal, there is no marked trail.
That is why the beginning was hard, and dealt a blow to our carefree spirits. How do you know where to take your first steps? Leaving the Kyrgyz capital, we walked along an industrial zone, then a sprawling suburb, before finally reaching open nature two days later — a place we could have reached in an hour by car.