Getting Started

Studies of the brain have shown that keeping active helps fend off debilitating diseases, not to mention boredom and complacency.  That’s reason enough to lace up one’s hiking boots!  But there are so many others:

• The world is a fascinating place, but there are many parts of it that cannot be experienced from a cruise ship, tour bus or car.
  
  
• Walking is the most intimate form of travel, and it can expose you to people and cultures that you didn’t know existed.
  
  
• If you have worked at keeping in shape, it provides instant pay-off for all your efforts.
  
  
• If you haven’t worked at keeping in shape, it will quickly make you aware of your shortcomings and fill you with resolve to do better in the future.
  
  
• After a day of strenuous hiking you can eat and drink with abandon and never gain an ounce. 
  
  
• It is not essential to have a traveling companion.  Traveling as a single is common, and  over shared experiences a group will usually quickly coalesce.  (To be honest, there have been times when we wished we were traveling solo!) 
  
  
• Hiking enables you to actually know the difference between Tanzania and Tasmania, and locate both somewhat accurately on the map.
  
  
• For the most part you will be out of reach of CNN, and studies show that living in a news vacuum, even temporarily, can decrease depression and increase life expectancy. 
  
  
• Globe-trekking brings you into contact with some truly outstanding local beers.  (Wine drinkers need to choose their destinations with a bit more care.) 
  
  
• You will enjoy enviable bragging rights at cocktail parties.

Once you have determined to step out in a different direction, there are two things that need to be done immediately: You need to (a) decide where you want to go, and (b) book your flights to get there.  Doing first (a) and then (b) is the more conventional approach, but if getting confirmed upgrades is a high priority (and more on that subject later), by all means settle for the reverse. One more cautionary note, learned the hard way: make sure your passport's expiration date is acceptable to the country you hope to visit. Many want months of validity remaining before they will let you in. (One of us recently was denied boarding at Dulles for this very reason).

The decision of where to go will be highly individual.  The Internet has made it immeasurably easier to examine what’s available.   Simply type the words “hike” or “trek” into your search engine, along with the name of a country, and you will be bombarded with a staggering array of choices.  But a word of warning: It’s probably inadvisable to put all your faith in what you read online or in the printed catalogues.  Those companies want your business and don’t mind romanticizing where necessary.  For example, their photographic coverage of the weather you can expect to encounter is very heavily edited.  You will see only happy people walking in the sunshine under a cloudless sky, even in Norway, which boasts the highest annual rainfall in Europe.  And over the years we have obediently kept our eyes out for a great number of animal species that have failed to make an appearance, despite what was promised in the literature.  

Another important decision you will immediately face is whether you want an escorted or an unescorted trip.  There are several advantages of the latter.  You won’t have to make small talk with a bunch of strangers.  The trip will cost substantially less.  And, most importantly, your image as an intrepid adventurer  will be secure.  We, however, would not dream of taking an unescorted trip because we are trepid and can’t read maps.  They seem to be making them so small these days.

As noted earlier, one walk around Mont Blanc was all it took to get us hooked, and for the following reasons that trip has to be included in any list of recommended first time hikes.  It is quite simply spectacular, every step of the way.   It’s relatively easy to get from the United States to the starting point; Chamonix (France) is a mere 60 miles from Geneva International Airport.  The food (French, Italian and Swiss in succession) is good everywhere, and exceptionally good in places.  The walk takes effort (and on some days quite a lot of effort) but no expertise, and there is usually van support for those whose feet for one reason or another want a day off.  And its typical ten-day duration is, in our opinion, about the right amount of time to spend.

Here, however, are a few other criteria to take into consideration when deciding where to go.  All travel companies will rate the degree of difficulty of their itineraries with descriptions like “Easy,” “Moderate,” or “Challenging.”   (There’s even “Extremely Challenging,” but if you’re up to that, you obviously don’t need to be reading this.)  Descriptions will also give some sense of the hours spent walking and the distance to be covered each day.  Read these with a degree of skepticism;  individual times may vary!  Pay attention to what meals are included, as eating out can add substantially to the cost of a trip.  Another caveat is to figure out from the trip description how much time will be spent in vehicles getting from one place to another.  Some shuttling may be unavoidable, but if you’re prone to motion sickness and you’re in hilly or mountainous terrain, you might want to take this into consideration when choosing a destination.

Deciding when to go, for those who are not held hostage by their determination to get upgrades, or the inconvenience of a job, is relatively easy.  Since you will be off the beaten track, it’s not so important to try to avoid the school vacation months of July and August, although there will inevitably be the occasional sortie into tourist territory, and there the throngs will assuredly be.  This was particularly true on the Amalfi Peninsula.  We would drop down each evening to spend the night in one of the coastal towns, and attractive though they themselves are, it was a huge relief to know that the next morning we would be marching uphill and inland, away from the madding crowds.  And remember that our bleak winter months are someone else’s warm sunny months; there are many wonderful hikes to be found in the Southern Hemisphere.  

Language won’t be a problem if you book with an American or British company, or head for an English-speaking country.  On the other hand, even a rudimentary knowledge of the language spoken where you are going will allow some interaction with farmers, cowherds, shopowners, or any of the other local people you might encounter as you walk.  It pays to at least learn how to say “Hello” in whatever language you need, because you can then indulge in broad cultural stereotyping when the greeted person does or does not respond.  This gives you something to mull over as you walk.  

Almost as important as deciding where you might like to go is to focus on what you know you don’t want to do, as this will narrow your choices considerably.  After almost twenty years we’ve been able to compile a pretty comprehensive list of things we don’t like.  After all, beyond a certain age we are no longer carefree kids stumbling into one youth hostel after another.  In the final analysis the fund of knowledge that you will build up with each successive trip will be your best guide in deciding where to go next. A careful reading of Tips and Warnings on this website should give you a good idea of the things we now avoid at all costs.

Whether you first decide where you are going and then book your flights, or vice versa, there are some important points to keep in mind.  We have learned the hard way that it is vital to keep time zones and date changes in mind when making flight reservations.  Many companies, in an effort to make you think you are getting more for your money, will annoyingly refer to the day you set out from the United States as “Day One” of the trip, even though you may be getting yourself to the assembly point city on your own nickel, and the company’s part of the deal doesn’t kick in until what you consider to be “Day Two.”  This can get particularly confusing if you misplace some important days when crossing the International Date Line. A good remedy is to always plan to spend a day or two on location before the hike begins.  This has the several advantages of letting you correct any miscalculation you may have made as to dates, recover from jetlag, and do whatever sightseeing you may wish.  It is always better to do this before, rather than after, you hike; at the end your clothes will be rank and dirty, and the injuries you might have sustained while hiking will prevent you from enjoying hours walking around museums and art galleries.    

Another advantage of going early is that it gives your luggage a chance to catch up with you before you head off into the wilds.  There are few worse endings to a flight than standing at a carousel that has been slowly emptied of all luggage.  By the time the belt shudders to its final sickening standstill there will be an enormous line at the Lost Luggage window of people who didn’t harbor the same kind of irrational hope that you did, but faced the inevitable and got into the queue at the first hint of trouble.  It’s a bad situation from any angle, but if your guide is meeting you and the rest of the group at the airport, intent on setting right out for someplace else, it can be a catastrophic one. Arriving a day or two ahead greatly reduces that risk.   

Here are some of our personal preferences regarding flights, reflective of our age and experience.

• One of us insists on trying to upgrade any flight lasting longer than six hours.  The other is of hardier stock and would be willing to put up with a little discomfort for a flight of that length, but being good-natured and obliging, she always endures the enforced luxury graciously.

• If you have upgraded, be sure to get to the airport at least four hours ahead of your departure time in order to take advantage of the free food and drink in the Business Lounge.

• If traveling to any part of Europe from any part of the United States, try to be routed through Tokyo because the Business Lounge there has the best draft beer.

• When flying Business Class be sure your flight leaves relatively early in the evening or you will have to stay up half the night waiting for your meal.  As a matter of principle you won’t want to miss that.  Also, drinking far into the night is not good for the head, but the flight attendants will use every trick in the book to force you to do this.  Starting with an innocuous announcement of what’s on offer, they will then shamelessly try to impress you with their good memory by remembering correctly - over and over again - whether you were drinking the red or the white.  

Finally, our current guiding principle is to always lock in our upgrades 364 days before the trip - even before there is a trip.  We’ve reached a point where our trips are contingent upon available upgrades.  When we get older still we plan to spend a happy week or two in various Business Class Lounges - preferably Tokyo or Sydney - and then lie about where we went and what we did when we got there.  Once we learn how to use PhotoShop we should be all set.