We slept extremely well and all plans to get up and leave early went out the window when we saw it was cold and foggy outside. We took our time getting ready, planned more logistics for after the hike, and eventually checked out. I loved that hotel, and our town stop was perfect. I didn’t want it to end. I didn’t want to go back to hiking. I wanted to stay in town and eat and be comfortable. But I knew the only way out of the town blues was to get back on trail for a day.
We took a bus from Vielha back to Salardu, where we resumed our hike. For some reason the “standard” route out of town had you go up and around some other village before continuing west. There was an alternative that just went west so we decided to take that. I think that was a wise choice. Who needs to see another cluster of buildings?
Our option didn’t save us any climbing, just distance. We had a lot of climbing to do and I was reminded what I hated about going into towns: you always have to climb back out. Also, the climb out is with the most food you’re going to have, so it’s also the heaviest your pack is going to be. So the 3,000ft climb out of town wasn’t easy, but the trail was good. It was also still cloudy and quite cool. If we stopped, we’d need to put on a jacket, because our sweat was cooling us off too much. We didn’t stop for a couple hours, where we decided to have lunch in a parking lot.
After lunch, I felt heavy and my pack felt no lighter. Somehow I had managed to make leaving town even less enjoyable. We joined back up with the official route and were welcomed back with the defining feature of the HRP: garbage trail. We had another choice to make after lunch, a higher route that would take 3.5 hours and involve “rough terrain…and a large section of boulders.” The other option was more direct and only estimated to take 2 hours. Not really ready to jump back into rough terrain, I voted for us to take the shorter of the two options.
It ended up being quite fun. There was no one else on our route, for once, and there was no trail for most of it. We got to choose our own adventure, with plenty of time to spare and no one around to influence our decisions. We made it to the end of our day, next to an unstaffed hut that we opted to camp next to. There were plastic mattresses provided in the hut but it seemed stuffy and smelly to me. Not long after we arrived, two others arrived. This part of the trail is HRP people only and these two were from France and started 4 and 5 days after we did, respectively. We chatted with them while we ate dinner and another woman arrived, who was from France, but she is hiking the other direction. We recognized a lot of her gear. She even had the exact same shoes Zoë had. It turns out she had hiked a lot in the U.S. (PCT, CDT, AZT), so it was very easy to connect with her. It got cold soon after and we bid everyone else goodnight. Our quiet section of trail ended at a not-so-quiet campsite.