Tour du Mont Blanc, Day 0

The thing about these long walks is that I thought I understood why they mattered to me. I knew about the physical part: the way my body warms up and gets used to walking more distance and climbing up hills. I knew about the mental discipline required when I wake up at six in the morning for the fifth consecutive day and have to hype myself up as my mind goes spiraling, "why am I not lounging at the beach in Paros instead?". That's actually why I left for my first Camino three years ago: I wanted to know if I had it in me to keep walking when everything in me wanted to stop.

But there's another thing that I only managed to pinpoint out recently. I realized that the more I walk, the more the trail stops being a novelty, and so my brain zooms in and tries to seek more details beyond what the eyes can see. I start noticing how each part of my body feels and reacts to different things. I start to recognize how the air feels at different times of day. My brain begins thinking in a mixture of the languages I've been picking up along the way, even when they make no grammatical sense. I know the faces of the people I keep running into at the rifugio, and slowly, I know more about them. And from these repeated moments, stories start to emerge, and one day I will find that the stories connect to each other in ways I never saw coming.

I love stories. I love reading them, collecting them, writing them. Going on these trips every year means that I come back with a backpack full of stories to tell. Although unlike a meticulous writer with a carefully planned plot, whenever I set off on my journey, I never had any expectation about how the story is going to be like. I was, for the most part, merely hoping that I would make it home, safe and sound in one piece, brownie points if I came home with no blisters. What I usually ended up getting is exactly that, and so much more.

Our Tour du Mont Blanc hike pretty much would not have happened if I didn't go on my Alta Via 1 hike. Or maybe, maybe it would have still happened, but it would have had a completely different start.

Last year, Dylan and I were looking into doing a hike for 2025, and while the Tour du Mont Blanc had always been on my list, but so had plenty of others. We both love Scotland, so the West Highland Way is something we've been talking about doing for a while. It was a difficult decision to make: the world is full of beautiful, wonderful hikes, but there is only so much time that we have.

As we were slowly but surely planning, I got a text from Patricia, whom I first had met when I left Citta di Fiume on Alta Via 1 last year. She asked me: would I like to hike the Tour du Mont Blanc with her? She had booked a trip for 2025 through a third-party company, she texted, and I asked for her itinerary so I could see if I can book the exact same itinerary, and the three of us could hike together. Alas, it didn't happen. Booking rifugios in alpine trails, especially popular ones, is always a challenging test to your logistical skills, and apparently this time I was not early enough. Doing the same itinerary was impossible, I concluded, but we managed to work it out by arriving in Chamonix on the same day, and she would be leaving a day earlier. As soon as we figured this out, we went straight to planning mode, and before we knew it, we had our hike for 2025 figured out already.

A few months later, we are here in Chamonix, about to go on our hike, except not yet. We are staying here for two days, because one thing I learned in my past hikes is that it's important to be kind to yourself, such as by giving yourself one or two extra days at the trailhead before you start the hike.

Getting to Chamonix was relatively straightforward, except it was just a bit funny because we flew into Switzerland only to enter France half an hour later. We made our way with a van from the Geneva airport to Les Houches, a smaller town next to Chamonix, where our Airbnb was. Ideally, we would have stayed in Chamonix since it was a much bigger town (although big is an overstatement here). But later I found out that our arrival coincided with the biggest event of the year, which is Ultra Tour du Mont Blanc (UTMB), and all of the rooms in Chamonix are completely booked out.

UTMB is probably one of the, if not the most, elite competitions in trail running. Trail runners from all over the world gathered in Chamonix and would run the exact same trail that we would be doing, except that on average they would finish within 40 hours, instead of our 10 days. I was rather annoyed at first for not realizing this, because now that we are staying in Les Houches we have to take the bus to Chamonix every time we want to go there, but as soon as I got there my annoyance dissipated. We got to see Chamonix not as a tourist town, but as a town where everyone was comfortable wearing their athletic clothes and this is the first time in my life where I didn't feel weird walking around town in my hiking pants and down jacket with no make up.

We decided to stick around to see and cheer for the runners starting their race. But before then, we met up in Patricia in a pizza place in front of the bus stop. She still looks like just how I remembered her, while in the meantime the first thing she told me was that I look more mature. I laughed it off, and quickly in my mind made some justification: so much has happened since we last met, maybe it's not a bad thing to mature, I told her I hope that means I've got my shit together in the past year.

She caught me up with all of how she spent the winter after Alta Via 1 and her recent travels, most recently about how she somehow ended up in Albania without even planning to. We have been keeping in touch since we hiked Alta Via 1 so some stories were familiar but of course it's always good to be able to catch up in person. While she checked in to her hostel, we headed to the center of Chamonix to watch the start UTMB, and the three of us met up again for some drinks before Patricia starts her hike the next day. She would be one day ahead of us, which means we could be counting on her for live reports on the trail, that is if we all could find reliable phone signals along the way.

We actually spent two days in Chamonix so the next day was a full free day. This means we had a chance to sleep in - something we probably wouldn't be able to do in the next 10 days. We also got a chance to try getting to Chamonix by riding the train that runs every hour or so and departs from a very minimalistic train station, if you can call it that. On our second day in Chamonix, we made our way to Chamonix just in time to watch the first winners of the race finish, ride the alpine rollercoaster, sketch, and have some coffee. Our dinner in town was at an Indian restaurant that smelled really, really good when we walked past it by chance, we decided that it would be a really nice last dinner before the hike tomorrow.

Chamonix was still pretty much alive even when we left at around 11 because runners were still crossing the finish line. The winner of this year's UTMB ran the course in 19 hours but that is definitely an exception - 40 hours seems to be the average, so runners would still be making their way to the finish line until the next day or so. Everyone would cheer and clap every time they see a runner ran through town, regardless who the runner was or what place they finished. Running the UTMB is an achievement in itself, I don't think any ordinary person would voluntarily sign up to run the same trail that we would be doing in 10 days. I often say that I always meet some of the most interesting people on the trail and today I even "met" some of them even before I started my hike!