I’ve never really had a long-distance, many-days-long hiking adventure. The closest I came were my two months living in the mountains of Michoacan, traveling by horseback (1987). When I traveled in Patagonia, too, although I traveled by bus (or boat, sometimes), I had a custom of walking for 5 or 6 hours each day that I could, exploring whatever town or lack-of-town I had arrived at, that day. I particularly remember walking from Rawson to Gaiman (Chubut Province, Argentina), about 35 km. It sticks with me as a vivid day-long hike, for some reason, in Argentina’s Welsh colony, stopping at Welsh tea houses and strange roadside attractions intended to be visited by car.
Well, anyway, I’m mentioning this because of this video I ran across.
Condor’s PCT Adventure in 3 Minutes from Kolby Kirk on Vimeo.
I very, very often think of just throwing aside everything and walking some really long journey, like this man above has done. Also, there’s Simon Winchester’s walk across South Korea, from his book A Walk Through the Land of Miracles. It’s one of my favorite books “by foreigners about Korea.” I think of doing something like that. Or walking to visit my uncle’s house in Alaska, from somewhere like Minnesota.
I like urban hiking more than rural hiking, too. Over several days, I once walked the length of Mexico City’s Avenida Insurgentes, one of the longest boulevards in the city (maybe 30 km? taking the subway or bus to a spot along the avenue one day, then going home and picking up at the spot farther along the next day), and I once had this strange fantasy of walking the entire Mexico City subway system – essentially, walking from station to station until I’d visited them all, collecting small bits of the system on weekends or when I was off from work. I more recently have thought I could do the same thing with Seoul’s subway system, too. I’ve done some major portions of the Orange Line (Line 3), along which I live, that way, including the long stretch from Yaksu to Gangnam.
It’s mostly fantasy. But fun to think about. And maybe someday I will do one of these things.
