Tour du Mont Blanc, Day 2

I thought I had heard rumbling thunders when I was sleeping and when I stepped outside I realized I was not hallucinating it. The bathrooms at Auberge du Truc were located in a separate building, so the first thing I did in the morning was to walk outside, only to find that it was drizzling, and the sprawling views that we enjoyed for an entire afternoon yesterday were no more. Instead it was grey mist all over. Today was looking to be a drizzly, wet, cold day.

After breakfast we trotted out of the auberge in raincoats. I didn't think it would be this early for me to use my backpack rain cover. The first few kilometers were an easy walk down the mountain, where I ended up rather enjoying the mist because it gave the scenery a more dramatic backdrop. Our next stop was a small town called Les Contamines, where we found a Spar and we managed to get some lunch there. We also found a pizza vending machine which unfortunately didn't really work. Whenever I pass small towns like this where you can walk the entire length of the town in probably 2 hours or so, sometimes I wonder if it would be fun to stay here for one or two days, just to do nothing instead of having to rush to the next town.

We walked to one end of Les Contamines and started to climb again, but before that we walked past the Notre Dame de la Gorge and also a "path" called the Roman Path. If the name was accurate apparently this road had already existed since the romans, which was a long time ago and this place seemed to be quite a random place to have such a road.

During the first climb we still came across a lot of cows, farms, and also dogs. We took our lunch break and enjoyed our Spar lunch in front of Refuge La Balme and thought we were good for time.

But then as we continued further we got even more and more remote, and it was just mist surrounding us, along with the various rivers we had to cross. This is where the exhaustion started to set in - I had told Dylan that for me, I always feel such exhaustion on Day 3. Day 3 is the day where I would question everything and I would come close to giving up, perhaps because my legs had not gotten used to it yet, my brain is still trying to understand why I'm hiking again, and it still wasn't too late to turn around and say "I quit". Apparently, that day had arrived a day earlier for us.

It was indeed a long, long climb. We had a small debate about whether the next col would be the final col where our rifugio is, because the next col was called the Col du Bonhomme. I argued that well, this must be it, one final push and then we would make it to our rifugio and we could have some nice hopefully hot shower and rest our feet and legs. But then what we discovered was no, there was another col called Col de la Croix de la Bonhomme, and what was in Col du Bonhomme was a winter shelter where we decided to take our protein bar break because it was cold and windy, and the col was too exposed for us to stay outside. And so we stayed there, before finally mustering up the energy to do one last final push to Col de la Croix de la Bonhomme.

I guess today really was what I really felt was an adventure. Yes it was misty and cold, but it was the most remote we have got so far. There were many streams that we had to cross, and we had to do a combination of climbing and crossing and we had to manage these funky crossings while making sure we didn't slip, while also making sure that we would get to our rifugio before the stormy clouds rolled in. There were many rocks we had to climb too, and at some point it was like a tiny bouldering session and by the time we reached our refuge we were totally spent, and about to collapse 100 m before it. We high-fived, hugged, and as soon as we pulled back we noticed there was an ibex, looking over us from the ridge high above.

The ibex wasn't moving for a solid 5 minutes so I wasn't convinced it was an ibex. But later on during dinner, we were seated in a long table with a Dutch man who had been hiking for 50 consecutive days, and had spent a lot of time in the Alps himself. We showed him our pictures of the ibex and he confirmed to us that it was, indeed, an ibex that was staring down at us and we were very very lucky.

If Auberge du Truc was rustic and minimal and cozy, Refuge de la Croix du Bonhomme was rustic and minimal and at the same time it was huge and therefore, crazy busy. According to our guidebook, it houses 150 beds, and living there felt like I was living in a high school dorm in the mountains, complete with the shared showers and the bunk beds and the toilet wait times and the communal dinner in the large dining hall. Since there were so many people crammed into one hall, sitting in long tables that made it tricky for everyone to get in and out once seated, the rifugio has a certain system to deliver the food and cutlery that everyone needed: they operated a large cart and they would pass all of the cutleries to each long table, and instead of serving individual plates, they would make us divide the soup and pasta by ourselves.

The chaotic vibe was such a contrast to the calm in our previous rifugio but that's what I loved about these mountain huts: you really never know what you're going to get. In this hut we didn't really see anyone that were staying with us the night before, not even the large Luxembourgish group, which was a surprise because I wasn't aware of any other rifugio nearby, so where is everyone else. But there were also so many new faces to talk to and get to know. Besides the Dutch Alpine hiker, we also sat with his companion who joined him for a few days, and they were planning to camp outside before the hailstorm came and ruined everyone's tents. She was a lovely woman whose name I didn't catch, what I knew was she was going to travel to Berlin in the next month or so for a tango event. Don't people live such interesting lives! And while waiting for check in, we also came across two hikers from the States, Anish and Sloane, who were on a month long trip around Europe, and we all bonded over the fact that we were all so cold and tired and bordering miserable from all of the rain but just like us, they had also committed to completing the whole TMB trek. I didn't know if I was going to see them again tomorrow or the days after, but it made me feel better to know that they were on the same journey as ours. Despite the numerous flies bothering us throughout (which Google reviews confirmed seems to be a trademark of the rifugio, given its remoteness), I still have a lovely memory of how the day ended: me completing my sketch despite being extremely tired, Dylan playing the guitar, and hikers chattering in the background.