When it comes to enjoying a walk, Tim Macartney-Snape reckons longer is better.
In our time-poor life, you might be surprised to find out that it always takes at least seven to 10 days to settle into a decent walk. “Seven to 10 days!” I hear you exclaim. “But that’s longer than most walks I’ve ever done!” Perhaps, but after long experience I can tell you it’s true.
Therefore any truly GREAT walk should last at least two weeks, but I would say that optimally it should be about a month. Any longer, for most of us, would require a much more radical and inconvenient rearranging of our lives. Walks shorter than a week may well be more practical in terms of time off work and are still worth doing, but they are not in the class of the longer trek.
Because I’ve been there a lot and still guide the occasional trek to keep my high-altitude mountaineering habit at bay, people often ask my advice about going walking in the Himalaya. Without hesitation, I reply that it will always be more rewarding to go for as long as possible, for a minimum of three weeks and to make the extra effort of going off the beaten track.
Not only will this allow you to spend more time truly immersed in where you are, which is only possible after the mandatory breaking-in period, but it will enable you to reach more out of the way places which generally takes time – even if you’re doing a ‘regular’ walk it will allow time for side trips to less visited places.
For most of us, the whole reason for going walking is to access more remote parts that by virtue of their isolation have resisted the modern pace of change and haven’t, as is all too common today, been spoiled by being over-loved, crowded and commercialised. After all, walking anywhere overnight requires a good deal more effort and planning than most common forms of travel and therefore there is an expectation that the destination will be sufficiently different and interesting to make it worthwhile. The best way to ensure that is to do two things: go for longer and go to places that don’t feature in guide books.
Counter-intuitively, providing you pace yourself sensibly, the longer your walk, the easier it becomes. Once that settling-in period is complete, your body works better, the daily routine becomes normal and best of all your mind has been de-pressurised from the pace of your everyday working life.
Without doubt the hardest part of doing a long walk is making the decision to do so. Breaking with the familiar (unless you’re a serial offender like myself) and committing the time is hard but you only have to exercise your imagination a little by thinking about all the experiences awaiting and compare them to a similar period in the immediate past and it’s a no-brainer.
Exactly a year ago I was a third of the way through a long trip in the far east of Nepal. We spent 10 days walking up a beautiful valley from the road-head to a place seldom visited by outsiders. At the valley’s head lay a rim of beautiful ice fluted peaks, none of them climbed, and beyond them lay the Tibetan plateau. Our goal was to climb one of those peaks.
Now I look back on those 10 days walking to our base camp and compare them to the 10 days before today – they’ve been normal and productive but compared to the same time in Nepal, each day packed with vivid and varied memories, the last 10 days is just a blur of virtual sameness. In a year’s time it will be difficult to remember them at all. Like any long trip, last year’s trip was difficult to commit to being away for five or six weeks then but it was well, well worth it and I’ll have the memories for the rest of my life.