Caroline’s report

We all move through this world in different landscapes – our mental landscapes,
our socio-economic landscapes, our relationship dynamics, and all the different
physiological systems happening in your body. There are too many threads to
count. Each person is created by all these threads weaving together, and each
of our experiences is wholly unique but still shared with every other being on
the planet because we each form one thread that is being constantly woven
into the larger braid of existence. Usually, these different threads are so tightly
woven that we can’t distinguish their separate contributions to our overall
movement through the world – and there really is no distinguishing them; all
feed into each other and all are formed by the others.
Everything I do is an exploration of this in some way. It drives my art practice,
was the reason I took a degree in Psychology and specialised in Neuroscience,
and is the reason I seek being out in the mountains. Science is interesting
because it maps out the different landscapes and gives words to these
intangible parts of reality. It allows you to step deep into the mechanisms and
patterns that form the structures we move within. Art, however, is that
instantaneous moment, the never-ending process – the language that you
speak when inside a phenomenon. Contemplative practices are the same, and I
view it interchangeably with my art practice.
Endurance running and hiking allows me to get into a space where these
threads start to untangle. The more your body fatigues, the more you require of
your mental faculties to keep putting one foot in front of another, the more
time you spend out in wild spaces with nothing but space for thoughts and
emotions to bubble up and disappear as you watch them, the easier life feels.
Eventually something shifts and the moving feels easier, your energy levels
increase, and you enter a different state of consciousness altogether. It’s like
your body is no longer a body, it’s a numb vibration of mass, and you
understand that you are not your body. Endurance sports require you to actively
shape the narrative you tell yourself, because in the end if your head isn’t there,
you physically can’t go the distance. So, when you get to that point where you’ve
passed all points of previous reference, you also see clearly that you are not
your thoughts, either. The physical movement ties together all levels of enquiry
– it is the art form, and the meditation, and it is the process of collecting
experiential data.
So what has this got to do with the expedition?
The intention for this project was to use an expedition across the Pyrenean
Mountain range to collect experiential data for a series of written, and visual art
outcomes. The expedition was also a journey in its own right, I love these
mountains, and I’d never done such a large undertaking before.
This project started out as a curiosity as to how Beni and my experiences differ
in the mountains. I’ve experienced so much self-inhibiting fear and doubt
compared to Beni in some ways, but in other ways I’m much more experienced
in long-distance running and multi-day backpacking. Part of the conversation
was also how different groups of people experience the journey differently –
such as the physical reality of your body, or the reason you are taking a journey.
We’d called it a ‘Braided Traverse’ because the idea was for our physical
movement to be tracing a woven pattern across the surface of the earth as we
journeyed separately, meeting at points where our routes crossed.
In the end, the route this project took turned less into a braid, and more into a
spiral or labyrinth, but I’ll expand more on that later. The base line lessons I got
from this experience was 1) How to Problem Solve, 2) The Earth is Alive, and 3)
How to Problem Solve.
The journey
The expedition itself was a fully self-supported ‘fastpack’ – a mixture between
backpacking and trail running. The idea is not to literally run up the mountains,
but to pack light and move fast, getting a great mix of pushing yourself on the
uphill hikes, and cruisy running downhills (as cruisy as they can be with all your
gear on your back), getting weeks upon weeks of undisrupted camping, living
out of your backpack exposed to the elements. We were going to take different
routes, meeting at points along the way, and the initial end ‘goal’ was to get
from A to B, from the Atlantic Ocean, to the Mediterranean.
We didn’t want to fly, so we took a land route down to Hendaye from Glasgow
down to my parents house in England, then a train from London to Paris and a
long bus ride to Hendaye, at the Spanish border. The entire journey from
London to Hendaye only cost us £50 each in the end thanks to nifty sales and
cheeky bus hitching. We set out in Hendaye, already exhausted from life
circumstances before the trip. In retrospect we should have taken a day or two
to rest and sleep before beginning the journey, but instead we pushed on
immediately. After one night camping together we went our separate ways,
entering the gorgeous green mountains of the Basque country. I don’t want to
dwell too long on these earlier days of the journey, but there were some key
things that happened that shaped the very powerful outcome.
Basically every variable that goes into how you experience the world is
amplified when on a journey like this. In the Basque I started much too hard
and fast (rookie error). I had a few days of feeling super fit and great, but my
stomach was a third of the size it should have been – probably due to the heat. I
spent the first days moving very well, loving the wet forests of the Basque,
finding myself much more comfortable in sketchy down-scrambles and washed-
out trails in heavy rain than I would have expected. In one spot, there were
chains bolted into the wall where the trail was just some rock steps that fell
away to a 300meter drop to the right. In the dry, this would have been easy
enough, but in the torrential rain, the rock steps were slick with wet moss, and
parts of the down scramble had crumbled away meaning I had to slide down
the chute created, but if I fell out of control I would have gone falling down into
the gorge to my right. I was very happy that I just took it one step at a time, one
breath at a time and got myself through this long descent in a few hours. I think
if I was with someone, I would have actually had a much harder time and
maybe ground to a halt. On my own though, I just had to grit my teeth and
move through it. Later on I cried with relief at how well I handled myself and
also felt a frustration that a part of me wished that Beni could have seen how
sketchy the trail was. Why couldn’t I just be so calm when we go climbing
together? I think part of it was that being alone for days (although I would chat
with people I met along the way) meant that I was in that beautiful semi-
meditative state from running and hiking, breathing is up but not crazy,
thoughts are calmed down, and I was loving the process. Just after this section,
with the trail still incredibly thin and with the same huge drop to the right, I
turned a sharp corner around a finger feature of the mountain and bumped
into a small group of horses and cows. There was about 3 horses and 2 cows.
My heart sank because there was literally no way around them, we couldn’t
both fit on the trail and the side of the bank was so steep. I am SO scared of
cows also, sounds stupid but they send me will-nilly. But the animal closest to
me was a horse, and I spoke gently, asking if they could turn around and let me
follow them. I also clicked my tongue a little bit. The horse looked straight at
me, and scrambled up onto the incredibly steep bank up above the trail, and
giving me a big nod. The other horses and the cows all did the same. Amazed, I
walked as quickly as I could past them, mumbling thank you.
After this section of descent, I started running again, and had the best time on
the easy trails that got me back onto a road to go into a village where I could
restock for food. I realised that I only had an hour before the shops closed so I
started pelting it back along the road in the rain, having the best time of my life.
In retrospect, I really should have gone slower, I’d had a huge few days before
and had told myself that this day was going to be a non-running day. But I felt
so amazing, so pushed myself into the red-zone, where my legs start to go
numb and I go into this trance where I just plod on. This came back to bite me
in the ass later on!
Sleep was another factor in this section of the journey, starting exhausted was
not a good idea, and some big storms mixed in with the usual fear of camping
alone meant I became extremely sleep deprived very fast. After St Jean Pied de
Port, whilst climbing a small hill and having a great time with just the hills and
my map, my vision suddenly went completely black and the world started
spinning. I fell over, and, with my vision all blurry and spotty, was sitting down
in the middle of the head-high bracken. So I nibbled on some sweets for about
20 minutes in a daze. I then got up, walked about 30 more meters, had a HUGE
diarrhoea in the ferns, and saw a man sitting about 100 meters away from me,
eating his lunch. I went to go ask for help, and told him I’d half-fainted and was
worried I’d pass out. He kindly sat with me while I ate bread and chewed on
maltodextrin tablets and sipped on water. This episode was probably caused by
the calorie-deficit I’d put myself in, too many long days, and the humid heat, or
so I thought. He warned me that there was no shops for the next 3 days, with
very few inhabited areas, and went through the contents of my bag to make
sure I had enough food. We both decided it was better for me to go back to the
town I’d just left, which was about 2 hours down hills, and stay in a hostel for a
night or two. I agreed and when he left, I called Beni, bawling my eyes out. At
this point I was still seeing black spots and I’d started shaking, maybe more out
of the shock and fear of letting myself get to such a stupidly run-down point.
Luckily Beni was not far away from a village that had a bus service to that town,
so he came to meet me at St Jean the next day. I felt angry at myself for giving
in to calling him immediately, but in the moment all I wanted was to not be
alone.
Back in the town I forced myself to eat and drink. The hostel room was a
windowless box that must have been about 30 degrees C, and everyone was
sweating in their underwear. One woman, however, insisted she was freezing so
wouldn’t let us put the AC on or turn off the light, and I swear I’ve never felt
rage like that before. I had yet another sleepless night that consisted of getting
up to soak myself in water, and soak clothing in cold water to lay over my head.
I’ve had small bouts of insomnia in recent years, which left me a mess, but
nothing was like the fatigue I was experiencing here. It was quite interesting
actually. I met Beni the next day and we camped right next to where I’d had that
episode. I couldn’t express my gratitude to him enough for dropping his part of
the journey to come help me. He has a calm solution-focused energy that came
out exactly when I needed it.
The farmers out there put bells around the necks of the wild horses, and there
was one huge horse with a bell around his neck a few hundred meters away
from where we set up camp. In the middle of the night, we awoke to the
deafening sound of the bell, and the shaking of the earth as this huge beast
came to sniff out our tent. The fear that seeped through my body was insane,
although obviously horses aren’t aggressive, 2 people being enclosed in a tiny
one-man tent at ground level with such a heavy creature standing over you is a
weird way to wake up. In the tent I had these tiny fairy lights up that I use to
make it feel less creepy when alone at night. We both scrambled out of the tent,
and were presented with one of the most beautiful views of my life. We were
standing right in the middle of the milky way, with the silhouette of the
mountains all around us forming a black line against the bright dense clusters
of stars that reached all the way to the horizon line. The tent was a neon-green
glowing pyramid that illuminated the horse who was busy investigating the
inside of our tent with his face. The horse was standing behind the tent,
wrapping its long neck around and into the open door. I was very happy to not
be inside the tent at that point, and we gave him space to mooch around,
remembering it was a wild animal. He kept walking circles around the tent, and
eventually walked down the hill, so we got back in and went back to sleep. 2
hours later we awoke to the exact same situation, with the deep clanging bell
and ground-shaking Jurassic Park-esque footsteps driving me out of the tent
again. This time I tried to get Beni to shoo the horse away, but it was totally un-
bothered by us, and basically laughed in our faces. This time, the horse decided
to eat a pack of biscuits from Beni’s bag, and threw rubbish around as it
whipped it’s head up. This entire palava happened a total of 3 times, with an
additional visit from a herd of sheep who were easier to shoo away than the
horse. In the moment, I was really anxious in my body, and the sheer
exhaustion was getting worse every day. But in retrospect, it was incredible and
I have the image of the illuminated horse on the hilltop burned into my
memory.
Another funny moment happened later down this part of the journey when we
tried to find somewhere peaceful to sleep to recover from yet another sleepless
night. We entered a ghost village, and saw a tall old building with Auberge
written in peeling paint on the top. In my terrible French, I asked a woman who
was hurrying from the building if this was a hostel. I didn’t think much of her
weird energy, the look she gave me, and her toothless frown. She said yes,
come back at 4pm. There were plenty of backpackers passing through this
village, all saying they were going up the hill to stay at another guesthouse. We
couldn’t muster the energy to go 5km uphill in the suffocating heat, so we
napped by a river all afternoon in the shade until 4. Not another soul was seen
in the village, and it seemed no one lived there. Eventually we knocked back on
the door of the old building and a strange old man opened up. I said the
woman told me to come at 4 and he said yes yes come in. The man locked the
door behind us as we went in, and drew the curtains shut. Inside was a fully set
up restaurant that clearly hadn’t been used in years, but all the tables were laid,
with a layer of dust covering everything. The building smelt of burning plastic
and that depressive smell that hangs over care-homes. I turned to Beni and we
both looked at each other with confusion. If I was going to be murdered
anywhere, it would be in this building. I mumbled something to the man in
broken French about needing to decide more, and that we wanted to go
outside. Beni turned around and quickly walked to the door, pulling on the
handle which was locked. The old man came and stepped between Beni and the
door, and my heart stopped for a second, but all he did was unlock it and open
it for us. We walked faster than ever, up that hill, for 5 km.
A few days later, once I was feeling better and we were able to move faster and
run again, Beni went over his ankle on a cruisy descent. The mountains felt like
the Highlands at this point, vast and rolling, but in the distance we could see the
craggy limestone peaks in the high country. His ankle swelled up and we were
again reduced down to a walk. It was really swollen, and he couldn’t walk
without a heavy limp. At the bottom of the mountain, we found a strange road-
side Bothy structure, next to an ice-cold river which Beni was able to ice his foot
in. We met a man there who had been ground to a halt because of terrible
blisters. We were far from a food shop there, so the man had been eating all his
food at a tiny remote road-side restaurant just down the way. The man had
been there for an entire week, but was still in good spirits and I was jealous of
his ability to stay positive and alone when struggling.
One thing I’m very scared of is lightening storms. Specifically, being in a
lightening storm whilst on a mountain. This fear is part useful fear, and part
inhibiting fear. My mind creates every terrible situation, from landslides to
ground currents. One day, with Beni’s ankle still bad, we passed through a
mountain resort at Iraty, now in the high country! We were supposed to go over
an exposed ridge line and descend into a forest. I was terrified of the storm that
the weather app said was approaching and insisted that we couldn’t make the
20km ridge line in time for the storm, because we would have to walk due to
Beni’s foot. So, I made us join a road with the hopes of hitch-hiking, and we
descended into a valley into a devilish heat – nearing 40C. The heat emanates
off the tarmac and traps you in a suffocating box of thick air. In retrospect,
taking the ridge was probably less dangerous weather-wise. After five cars
drove past containing folk who looked very angry at our hitch-hiking, a lovely
Basque man named Michelle picked us up whilst he was on the way to pick up
his cyclist friends. Pretty soon we were sitting in a garden of Eden sipping on
orange soda in the shade with 6 wiry Basque men all over the age of 70. We
both were exhausted and covered in dirt head to toe, and stank. Funnily
enough, that lightening storm I was so scared of was a few hours late, but we
could feel the humidity and electricity in the air. The heat was unbearable. I was
getting quite anxious to find a place to camp before the storm started, and
luckily these 6 men all animatedly argued about where would be safest for us to
camp. They were born and raised in these surrounding villages and knew the
mountains well. There were three Michelles, and the second one (who was the
only one to speak English), showed us on the map an old Shepards hut that is
hidden in the forest, that is used as a bothy. Great news!
So they dropped us off at a trail head, and we started the long climb again, this
point at 3pm in the scorching heat with the sun still beating down on us. We
passed over a beautiful suspension bridge across a gorge, but Beni was really
struggling in the heat, much more so than usual, and I was worried he might
pass out. Once we got to the hidden shepherd’s hut, we sat in the electric air,
watching the clouds form and roll down the mountain peak above us. We had a
lovely moment playing the harmonica and whistle, being in a trance getting lost
in the textures of the music and the sensations of my body that were calming
down now we had some shelter from the storm. At this point, however, we
realised how badly we were doing at getting enough calories in. Neither of us
had realised how low in energy instant noodles were – I thought it was like
pasta but it turns out theres only 80kcal per packet! These had been a staple for
us so far, and we were both becoming weird shaky leaves. As soon as the storm
started, Beni suddenly got incredibly sick and was diarrheoring every 20
minutes. What I thought was sun-stroke was actually a week long stomach flu
that meant we had to bail off trail for a few days and stay in a guest house while
he slept and sipped on soup. I’ve never seen him so sick, or lose so much weight
so quickly.
There were some big emotions during this down time, and events from before
we left the UK were eating into my psyche. After Beni recovered from the flu, we
finally parted ways again. We’d spent a lot more time together than expected
and lost a lot of time between me having to slow down and get Beni to meet
me, Beni’s ankle, and then his sickness that ground us to a halt for a week.
The lowest point
It didn’t occur to me that only a few days later I’d be ground to a halt yet again. I
spent my first night away from Beni camping with a lovely couple that we’d met
a few days before who were going the same way. That night I was an anxious
wreck, every movement from outside the tent woke me up and I was over
thinking the sections I had to do on my own, scared about being on the high
exposed areas in heat. I thought that by this point I would have become much
less fearful, but I was still like a little chihuahua.
I spent a few days flip flopping between having the time of my life, and slipping
into a strange alternative universe. It started with a deep nausea that I ascribed
to being at altitude. But then I started to lose the ability to make sound
decisions, and was starting to experience visual hallucinations. I spent 2 days
going up and then down, up and then down, back to the town called Gourette,
back up one mountain, back down to the forest – flipping between fear and fun,
fear and fun. Multiple times, cows appeared in the trail that turned out to be
rocks on the edge. People setting up their tent in the trail also confused me
until I realised, they weren’t real either. It sounds kind of funny but I was stuck
in loops. I couldn’t make decisions and stick with them, and the nausea was
getting worse. Earlier in the journey, I’d had an encounter with a man that really
freaked me out, he wanted to know where I was camping and was very overly
keen to camp together. On the occasion that I managed to get myself UP the
mountain, trying to force myself to camp, I came across a man who wanted to
camp in the same spot as me. I just turned around and ran back down the trail
again.
Getting over this mountain seemed like a literally insurmountable task. There
was a huge block in front of me, a forcefield that I could not pass through. Why
couldn’t I just plod on? Why was I starting to shake again? Instead of seeing all
the threads of existence unravelling, I saw them merge into one spiral. This
wasn’t a case of girl meets task, and pulls herself up to the occasion. Something
very deep in my body and in my psyche was starting to come out. This fractured
space deep in my foundations was becoming clearer the more that this journey
stripped back. I didn’t have all the busyness of life, the distractions, the labels
and accomplishments, I had nothing. I was in the process of becoming laid
open on the mountainside, for what was to become an awakening of sorts. But
little did I know that this was only the first part. So in the moment it felt like a
whole lot of confusion, a sickness, that same dizziness, a lot of crying.
I called Beni again, sobbing, of course. I was stuck and couldn’t look after
myself. I felt so unwell, my head spinning and throbbing, seeing black spots, on
the edge of passing out. I got public transport and he took a detour to meet me
in Spain. I can’t remember the exact place we met, but it looked like the moon
and Coca Cola branding was everywhere. It was scorching hot, no trees, nothing
like the lush forests of the French side of the mountains. He had actually sun
burnt his shins so bad we had to wrap them in bandages. While he was coming
to meet me, he got startled by a rotting horse corpse on the trail and rolled the
same ankle again, badly. So here we were sipping coca-cola, Beni in a lot of pain
unsure if he could even walk, and me sitting there as a mess, sobbing and
confused. He suggested we go camp where he had been but something in me
knew that I had to get over that mountain that was the huge block. I could
return and do it with Beni. Sometimes we don’t have to do everything on our
own.
So we hitched BACK to where I had just come from, and found a crazy valley
with beautiful boulders and hidden clearings of grass to camp in and shared a
beautiful rest day the next day by the river.
All of this was leading up to the rest of the journey being Beni and I staying
together. It’s funny just how easy that section over the Horquette d’Alans was, I
could have had the best day on my own when I initial went there. But all of this
was gearing up to something bigger. The following days were inconsequential
event wise, but we were getting on amazingly, having fun with the navigation
and teaching each other songs as we walked. Slowing down was a blessing. We
also shared lots of laughs, skinny dips in alpine lakes, and entered the more
extreme and craggy sections of the high Pyrenees together. We were able to
pick up the pace to running some of the downhills too. I then rolled my ankle
one early morning whilst we did a very technical descent down a small boulder
field. This was extremely painful.
My favourite night of the entire trip was bivvying under the stars underneath
the peak of Vignemale and Petit Vignemale mountains. I was so excited to be
alive that I couldn’t sleep. The next days were spent exploring that mountain,
and making it over to Gavarnie – a valley that ends at a behemoth Cirque, a
huge natural semi-circular Amphitheatre of stone that is hugged from behind
by the Odessa Canyon, and peaks such as Monte Perdido and the Pic de
Sarradet surrounding it. The little village at the base of the cirque is a tourist
honey trap, crawling with lobster-sunburnt families from the UK, screaming
kids, and unfriendly campground owners. The tourist town feels like a thin veil
trying to hide the magic that is just beyond the edge of the cirque.
Something thatwas heartbreaking was seeing how small all the glaciers are. In
some of the mountain refuge huts there were photographs of the changes in
the glaciers in the last 20, 30, 50 years. One glacier had just completely dried up
last year. We camped on one that was really just a big ice puddle with rocks
sticking out of it.
In a place like Gavarnie, there’s a real gravity. Maybe it’s better understood as
an inhale. When you arrive, the lay of this great body of mountain pulls you
deep into its lungs. There you see its inner workings – the waterfalls that drive
their way through summits and fall down twisting and twirling into clouds as
they crash against the floor of the basin. Here you see how water shapes
everything and watch as the arteries of the mountain flow away to feed the
thirsty towns along the valley. Once our souls had been reoxygenated (and then
a little beaten in the exposed sun of a day-time tourist trap) in the lungs of the
mountain we were exhaled and flew all around the further reaches of its great
body, returning consistently as you say to Espuguetts – where we found the the
best place to catch our own breath.
Up until this point, I’ve described events that happened, because I felt I was the
center of the experience. The mountains felt like a backdrop, a setting. For a
myriad of reasons, we stayed in this area. All the meanwhile I was having these
strange episodes, where I would become dizzy, confused, upset, exhausted and
panicked. My body would break down, but it was always fed by my psyche. In
the moment I thought maybe I had Lyme’s disease or a deficiency, but upon
return I’ve spent months at the doctors doing all sorts of tests. The episodes
have only come on again when I’ve become extremely stressed and negative. I
found I can stop these from happening if I control the narrative and story line I
tell myself. There were moments where I was so broken down emotionally that
all I could do was go sit in a little cave on the side of the mountain and cry. In
the moment I was so frustrated with myself – my body, mind and spirit would
all shut down simultaneously, and then the next day I’d be fine, fitter than ever,
bouncing up scrambles, steep scree gullies, across glaciers, climbing up
chimney steps, and then a day later, back to a quivering mess who didn’t think I
could do anything. I was in so much discomfort, but all of the suffering I
experienced was a direct product of the way I directed my mental narrative.
We joked about the faeries of Gavarnie that kept us trapped there, kept us
returning to the same basin, circling round this center of mass for weeks. I feel
that even in this short time, it was the returning to the hillside of refuge des
espeguettes again and again, that gave me this small insight into the living
mountain we were on. Exploring all the nooks and crannies of the valley and the
cirque – over to the dragon diving into the ground that is the Pic des Sarradet,
trying to dip into the canyon over the back of the cirque but getting pulled back
up to the Breche (a huge break in a cliff formed by the rock falling through)
when we realised we couldn’t descend that route. A few times it took me a few
days before we could start our little excursions, and this anchored us in this
space – returning again and again to this area of the mountain. All of that
allowed us to get a better familiarity of that concentrated land mass – a tiny
fraction of the insight into a place I wish to have, but an insight nonetheless.
It’s difficult to write with words the impact that this experience had on me. It
took weeks upon weeks of discomfort, feeling every thread of my being unravel
whilst simultaneously mushing all together, the ‘plan’ going completely out of
the window, for me to realise that the point of all of this was for us to just see. To
spend enough time with one body of land to see that the land really is a body. A
breathing, pulsating, living mountain. Sitting on the mountainside, in the same
campspot we’d returned to many many times, seeing all the places we’d moved
by foot over the last weeks, watching the light fade. I was able to see how the
shape of the land forms the weather systems- we watched the air getting
pushed down the valley, against the cirque, being pushed up and back, forming
clouds that then breathed and pulsated. The clouds would settle, forming an
inversion that cloaked the tourist town in a thick fog, with us watching the
crystal clear sky above.
The mountain has moods too; when she’s angry the sky darkens, hail rips your
tent, water floods in, rivers rise in a flash, blocking exit routes, rocks come
tumbling down and the wind turns you into a shadow of a human in seconds.
But just as within myself, the moods pass. Suddenly the sun comes out and
everything dries out in a minute.
One of the days I sat watching the mountain, I felt a deep interconnectedness
between myself and my mother. She experienced the worst conditions a baby,
child, teenager, adult could imagine. From the youngest age, her body and soul
were violated and torn apart, she spends her days now in a sea of
distractedness, pain and self-hatred. I feel her deep fracturedness inside of my
own body. I refuse to admit people can be broken, but it feels like we are. I have
done a lot of research, and the neurological effects of early sexual abuse are
directly passed down to offspring. The understanding has grown with time.
Our route these last weeks of the was like a labyrinth – winding inwards,
towards the center, and winding back outwards. We slowed down, enough to
see the different threads in existence, and enough to see just how embedded in
our environment we are. There is no us and nature, it is all matter, it is all one
larger system.
This expedition opened many many doors. But many of them are
uncomfortable and I found myself in a really dark space – It took me a few
months to recover when I returned back. I was unable to reintegrate into city
living at first, but after leaving it for a while, I feel I can integrate the lessons
from the trek more deeply than ever. I’m so sick of the traditional macho story
arcs of discovering oneself, conquering the mountain, getting to the end point,
blah blah blah. Everything seemed to go wrong, but it’s taken months to really
see how right it all went. It took so long because I had to move beyond the
actual state of being I was in on that trip, out of all the ghosts from my past, all
the cans of worms that were thrown around in my psyche, out of the narrative
I’d written before even starting. In retrospect, it is all about being able to access
a different language – of moving through a landscape actually as part of that
landscape myself. I got a tiny look beyond my perceptual framing, and it took
weeks to see that, and months afterwards to even start to articulate it.
To the team at Neil Mackenzie Trust – Thank you! It has taken much longer than expected to integrate the experience I had on this expedition. Everything has been messier and on a different timeline than I expected. The money provided by your generous grant meant that we were able to book a place to stay when both of us fell sick at different points, and allowed us much needed respite.

Caroline