Since hearing some aspirationally pro-campers swear by camping in Temagami, it has become a bucket-list camping destination for us. From naïvely attempting Crown land camping in 2021 (failing miserably and swearing never to go to Crown land again), to portaging through Algonquin’s Tim River in 2022, to backpacking through Killarney’s La Cloche Silhouette trail 2023, we finally felt prepared to tackle Temagami… we would be coming full circle from our newbie Crown land days!
“Something needs to be said about Rosa Parks other than her feet were tired… Lots of people on that bus and many before and since had tired feet… lots of people still do… they just don’t know where to plant them”
— Nikki Giovanni’s “Harvest” (quoted from Rosa Parks with Princess Weekes on You’re Wrong About)
And so we arrive at the our final hurrah before we go back to Canada and real life (aka unemployment) begins.
In late June, my trip began with a 1 day layover in Iceland. Back then, the sun did not set.
Early September, our trip ended with a 3 day layover in Iceland. At that point, the nights were just long enough for potential aurora sightings. This leg of my trip is the focus of this post.
Iceland–a significant place in its own right–will also forever be personally significant to me for bookending this season of my life. I would like to think my second time here was different from the first, that I left that side of the Atlantic a changed person… I mean, that’s the kind of outcome and introspection that makes good blog material. But in reality, I think this layover was different from the first not because I’ve changed/grown/crossed-thresholds/seen things, but moreso because I am coming under different circumstances; I envy people who can be so sure otherwise.
A little photo diary of what some WWOOFers did on their days off.
If you thought being in Norway would give me the space to have deep thoughts etc., you would have overestimated me. If you caught me zoning out, 9 times out of 10, I would be thinking about berries. The 10th time, I’d be thinking about ice cream.
So I’m not sure why the bears in Canada didn’t get the memo, but there are tons of wild berries in Scandinavia. Basically, free food everywhere. Yet foraging is a special kind of free food. For one, its free food without mark-ups for being package-free, local, AND fair-trade. It’s free food without anyone trying to sell my anything (ie. samples at Costco). It’s free food without someone trying to bribe me to do something (ie. to be social at a lunch hosted by church). And, not to mention, it would actually go to waste if it weren’t in my belly. This is free food I don’t have to feel guilty about. In fact, I can make a moral case for eating berries.
I haven’t gotten around to finishing even half of my Europe 2017 retroactive posts, and here I am with another trip in my past to mull over. Yet gratitude is a common theme in my life, and I never want to squander this blessing by failing to recognizing it.
So, I understand that Time is writing history faster than we can record it, but why my life is happening faster than my mind can reflect on it is surely not Time’s fault. My life can hardly be considered fast-paced– and trust me I have an inkling of what fast-paced really is after visiting Hong Kong.
…And with that wonderful segue, I’ll elaborate on my Hong Kong and China trip for a bit before resuming with Europe/Scandinavia posts. (How do people deal with reflection backlog anyway??)
Gelato is cheaper than a bus ticket here; so naturally, I had gelato everyday and walked everywhere.
After the past couple days of terrifying experiences, I had already decided on the train on my way to Innsbruck that my two days in Innsbruck will be chill. I will tone down the walking, not try any mountains, and just enjoy the city. I mostly followed through with that, so that translates to a pretty boring blog post. (Poor you.)
The process of mountain hiking is conducive to becoming a metaphor of journey, spirituality, and life. I mean, it literally has a rising action, a climax, and falling action. For the duration of the hike, I can self-indulge and romanticize myself (or my party) as a main character(s) in some heroic journey. Hiking is a celebration of life as a process rather than a destination; and that’s a much needed for a soul that’s trapped in a “destination”-oriented mind like mine.
While hiking, I need to be hyper-aware of time and space for mundane things like daylight, my own safety, and such. Yet for the same reason, the fact that a hike occurs within the time span of a really long conversation, puts the mind in a space where internal dialogues can fester and run (read:walk) their course. Given that long internal dialogues monologues are prone to recursive thinking (…at least mine are?), it follows that the activity of hiking is conducive to forming nested micro-metaphors within the broader “hiking metaphor” as a whole.
But–and forgive me for being trite–isn’t the phenomenon that hiking is fertile with nested metaphors, itself a metaphor for life? After all, any metaphor about life is just a subset of life that is modular enough for the human mind to appreciate the parallel. Every metaphor about life is nested in life. So it really shouldn’t be a surprise that a powerful metaphor of life, like hiking, is a Russian doll of nested-metaphors.
I’m convinced that the hike on this day is somehow a metaphor for all my other days. This is my absolute favourite “story” to tell about my trip because the things that happen in a certain sequence within a certain time. On a deeper note, I love telling it because I feel like the story hasn’t ended yet. I feel like this day had more subtle metaphors I haven’t fully teased out, and perhaps symbolism that I don’t yet know the meaning of.
It’s a new day…… and you know what that means! Another chance to tackle Garmisch-Partenkirchen to Mittenwald!
There’s really no reason why I should be so determined to do this. It’s not supposed to be a hard hike or anything. Somehow having it denied from me yesterday, made me want it more today. Also, having it denied from me yesterday made me want to make it longer today. I’m convinced that irrationality like this is what makes me human. I’ve learned to live and breathe it.
Between the conference and WWOOFing in Norway, I had a little less than a week of alone travel time. The morning after the conference, I took the first train I could out of Munich (marked 1 on map below) to the Alps on the German-Austrian border (3 on map). For (my own) reference, I labelled Starnberg (2), because that’s where my professor took us that day we skipped part of the conference together. A couple days later, I would take the train to the end of the line at Innsbruck, Austria (4).
Specifically, the town I visited is Garmisch-Partenkirchen, which, according to my research is a great skiing place in the winter and a great hiking place in the summer. I had already picked out several hiking routes to take. I had two goals for the 3 days I will be here:
But, aware that I am completely at the mercy of the universe and such (in terms of the weather, health etc.)…
I’ve learned that anytime I refer to a desire as “my goal”, it’s really just an arrogant way of saying “my request to the universe”.
We will revisit these goals later.