Twelve kilometres, and what the map left out
Twelve kilometres is a number that sounds like an afternoon. We left at ten with sandwiches and one bottle of water between the four of us, on the theory that there would be a village at the halfway point. There was a village. It had been closed since roughly 2013.
The route was drawn as a thin dashed line running roughly east along a river, and dashed lines on that map turn out to mean something between "path" and "the idea of a path". For the first hour it was a path. Then it became a suggestion, and then it became a field, and then we spent forty minutes discovering that a river bend which looks like a gentle curve at 1:50,000 is, at walking scale, a swamp.
Contour lines are not decoration
Here is the thing we knew and had not internalised: on that map, the contour interval was ten metres. Four lines close together means forty metres of climb in about a hundred of walking, and forty metres is a building. We counted three such clusters on the eastern half and had cheerfully described the route as "flat" the night before, because the lines were thin and brown and did not look like effort.
Distance tells you how long a walk is. Contours tell you what kind of walk it is. We had been reading one and ignoring the other for about four years.
We got to the far end at half past four, which is six and a half hours for twelve kilometres, a pace that would embarrass a determined tortoise. Nobody was hurt and nobody was especially unhappy, but the water situation had become a running joke of the grim variety by kilometre nine.
What we do differently now
- Add the total climb to the distance in your head before deciding it is an afternoon. A hundred metres of ascent costs about a kilometre of flat, roughly, in feel if not in physics.
- Water per person, not water per group. The group bottle is a fiction that only survives until someone is actually thirsty.
- Assume any building marked on a map older than you might not be there. Villages close.
- Note the contour interval before reading the contours. It changes between maps and it changes everything.
We went back in September and did the same route in four hours, with four bottles and no sandwiches, because by then we knew there was a decent place to stop three kilometres from the end. It was a completely different walk. Same line on the same map.
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