DAY 3 (final day of the walk)
At breakfast the morning of Day 3 I chat with a pleasant
Austrian solo-hiker. She now lives in south London and is heading towards
Bellagio, too. She’s the only trekker I meet over the three days who’s heading
along La Dorsale in the same direction. I say bye-bye to the Ostello, pay up
(65 euros including all drinks), thank the friendly and helpful If-You're-Called-Danny and set off towards Wolf’s Farm.
They’ve been pruning the trees to the left of the track, so
there are a lot of sturdy lopped-off branches lying around. I weaponise. That
damn wolf comes anywhere near me again, I’m going to beat his brains out. I
whistle and sing loudly as I approach the farm ... OK, let’s give Wolfy the slight benefit of
the doubt: I have in the past been attacked by dogs which were asleep when I
got too near them. They hear DANGER!!! in their sleep, jump awake in panic and
instinctively attack. So I’ll at least let him know I’m coming … then we’ll see
what we see.
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| Warning! Large Aggressive Primate! Avoid! |
I ascend the slope up to the wolf’s lair. The son-of-a-bitch
is comatose under the same hopper. He doesn’t blink an eyelid as I stroll past
him. I go through the farmyard gate, shut it behind me, throw away my beefy
staff, walk a hundred yards along the track, then bear left up the trackless
meadow towards the Alpe Spessola where I’d been the day before.
It’s just a 650ft plod – a pleasant plod, though - on a mostly
cobble-stoned track from Alpe Spessola (at 1273m) up Monte Ponciv (at 1453m).
Mr Deutschland says ‘go up the track to the Alpe di Terra Biotta, then, if you
want, you can take an interesting diversion up to the peak of Monte San Primo
(at 1685m), over that, and down a very steep trail to Rifugio Martina.’ I can’t
find any ‘Monte San Primo’ on the map ... hang on, hang on, yes, there it is,
quite a few km to the west. I’ll give that one a pass, dankeschoen…
The track winds round a sub-peak with a radio-mast on top –
surely that’ll be on the map? Nope. OS maps in England would definitely mark a
radio-mast, wouldn’t they? Never mind … and tops out on a high saddle. A
choice. Neither the map nor the guide seem to correspond to what’s on the
ground. One track goes off to the left, the other takes a sharp right round the
back of the radio-mast, then down. Now if I was a proper Buddhist I’d take ‘the
Middle Way’, wouldn’t I, that is to say, take neither the left nor the right
track but go straight on. How ridiculous! ‘Taking the Middle Way’ does not mean
taking the mean of two alternatives – it means taking the way of the Middle. My
middle.
I take the way of my Middle. I follow the right hand
sharp-angled track. Soon I’ve left the heights of La Dorsale behind. From now
on, it’s all ‘head north – except for a slight twist east around Monte Forcella
- and go down, down, down’.
An hour or so later the track disgorges onto the bottom of the
draglifts taking skiers in the winter up Monte Ponciv. Wife-of-Danny told me
there used to be a meter of more of snow in the valleys and more on the
mountains in the winter, but nowadays there’s barely any, and that much later,
so no wonder the ski-lifts look antiquated, rusty, unused. I park myself on a
convenient bench outside a holiday chalet in the warm sun and have lunch: a
piece of the cutlet from last night’s dinner wrapped in two pieces of bread
liberated from breakfast and the rest of a packet of wafer biscuit things
filled with a hazelnut spread. My Lancashire-born mother would be proud. She
was always shaming my father by snitching food off the breakfast buffet in any
hotel they were staying in, wrapping it in a napkin and furtively stuffing it
into her handbag ‘for later’. She didn’t need to, my father was a doctor, they
could certainly afford lunch. She was a Lancashire lass of the wartime
generation. That doesn’t ever leave you. You don’t ignore free food. You don’t
waste it. She used to go out gleaning in the potato fields - they lived in the countryside outside
Nottingham - after the farmer had lifted the potato crop, picking up left over
potatoes. The local doctor’s wife.
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The Reality And The Dream |
There’s a constant stream of family groups with small children
now coming up the track, out for their weekend fun-in-the-sun walk. Signs to
various ‘Rifugios’. They’ll have parked the grey Citroën DS Family with Sunroof
just down the track in a carpark; they’ll have a nice walk to the Rifugio, have
a nice lunch, a few drinks, a nice snooze in the sun while the kids Get Close
To Nature, graze their little knees on some rocks, get stung by a bee, fall
over, cry, get soothed; then they’ll pack up, walk back to the car, home. Not
knocking it! Used to do the same all the time when the kids were little. That’s
what you do when the kids are little! Don’t mean to sound superior after having
slogged away on the trail for 2 days! Nice thing to do on the weekend!
That ‘clonk’ of Alpine-meadow cowbells. I bypass the carpark, jammed full of Identikit grey Citroën DS Families with Sunroofs. Back in civilization. But that’s what’s so interesting about La Dorsale – it continually wanders between high mountains, Alpine meadows, shaded beech woods, old mule ways, the backs of quite ordinary scattered houses, crumbling and abandoned farms, metalled roads, the odd carpark, poseur-locations for gear-freaks … then the vista opens out again and you’re transported into a vivid, translucent realm of light and air extending into infinity in every direction.
I stop off to take lots of pictures of a failed Ristorante, roof-beams collapsed into melancholy weeds and piles of rubble, then, just down the road, an abandoned hotel ‘in the grand Alpine style’. It’s now in the ‘grand Romantic Gothic Alpine falling-down style’.
Whatever happened to them certainly happened: loss of trade? Too large? Failure of the Italian financial system? Bank forced foreclosure? Euro-crisis? Voted for the wrong politician? You - well, I – get the feeling that in Italy, ‘government’ is something that has a separate existence of its own, apart from the life that the people (have to) live. It runs on an illogic of its own in another sphere, a parallel universe. The Italians have no expectations of ‘government’ being able to deliver what it, in theory, is supposed to. They just get on with their everyday lives in whatever way they can, doing whatever it takes for them and their family to survive, in general just ignoring ‘the system’ as far as they can, hoping that ‘the system’ ignores them as much as possible.
La Dorsale jinks left off the road and wanders through
beechwoods again, eventually spitting me out behind a small, well-kept
white-washed shrine to the Virgin Mary in a small meadow surrounded by trees.
Someone has given her flowers. I have some nasty thoughts about her and
‘religion’, so she sends me the wrong way, off down a broad track behind the
shrine heading right for 10 or 15 minutes.
‘Feels … wrong,’ I think. ‘One, there suddenly aren’t any
official Dorsale signings – a red and white ‘1’ blaze - on the rocks or
convenient trees; and, two, I can see the massif of the Grigna Meridionale on
the east of the Lecco arm of Lake Como towering over the trees ahead, so I must
be heading due east. But I’m supposed to be going north…’
She smiles. ‘You were having nasty thoughts about me,’ she says. ‘So I decided to teach you a lesson.’
'Well, you should just chill, go get yourself a boyfriend – or girlfriend – I don’t mind,’ I say, ‘I mean, what’s with this biologically impossible ‘virgin’ stuff, anyway? Like, you had a child, yeh? Well, children – ALL children - have a father, somewhere, somehow. OK, ‘parthenogenesis’ - an egg developing into an embryo without being fertilized by a sperm – exists, yes, but the only living creatures which can have children without some form of sex are, I think, aphids, bees ... ants, for example. But you, you’re not an aphid, a bee or an ant, so you can’t have a child – or Child with a capital ‘C’, that Child you’re holding – without sex, can you? So why do you have to be a virgin? Something supposed to be wrong with sex, then?’
‘Hmm,’ she says, cupping her Mona Lisa face in her palm, ‘you’ve got a point there... '
Ok,’ she says, 'here, take this.’ Before I have a chance to remonstrate she’s handed me The Child. ‘Take Him with you to Bellagio,’ she says. ‘Seems I’ve got some catching up to do.’ She winks at me and vanishes, leaving me holding The Child with a capital ‘C’.
Whatever. I look at the Christ child who’s been dumped on me. He looks up at me and chuckles. Oh well.
I hoist Him up on one hip in the
time-honoured manner and stumble off down the trail. The correct trail, this
time. To the left. It’s emblazoned with the usual markers I’d missed on the
wrong track. Wretched child seems to quite like me. Maybe he was getting a bit
fed up of being stuck in a shrine with his mum all the time, being worshipped and
responsible for all the misery of the world and stuff. He coos at me.
Down, down, down. I dump BJ on one mossy-covered rock and sit on another to have a drink. Two young women jog up the cobbled mule-path, panting and dripping
sweat. ‘Hi!’ I say, ‘where’re you going?’ ‘To the Mirador,’ they say, pausing
for a minute. Turns out they’re English, staying down below. They’re out on a
fitness run. I wish them luck and watch them sweat off up the track. ‘It’s a
long way up,’ I think, ‘happy running, girls.’
Just before this side-road hits the main road there is an old
stone basin part-set into the wall of a house into which water trickles in a
steady stream. ‘Milagre de Sto Antonio’, it says on the blue, yellow and
white-tiling of the fountain, depicting the saint either blessing, or
enrapturing fish out of the sea. Three 18th century gentlemen of some
description observe the miracle from the other side of (the lake)(the sea)?
‘Milagre’ seems to mean ‘miracle’ – in Portuguese. ‘Miracolo’ would be the
Italian. So why in Portuguese? Was St Antonio Portuguese? I look it up: “Saint
Anthony of Padua, born Fernando Martins de Bulhões, also known as Anthony of
Lisbon, was a Portuguese Catholic priest and friar of the Franciscan Order”
(thanks, Wikipedia). That might explain the Portuguese azulejos, as well.
The perhaps-no-longer-a-virgin Mary pops up out of nowhere and reclaims Her Child. She ascends heavenwards sitting in zazen on a fluffy white cloud, clad in Madonna blue. ‘Thank you for looking after Him for me,’ she waves. ‘It was sooo good to have a break! So long! Have a good trip back to England!’ The Child waggles two fingers at me in a blessing. It wavers in the hot air for ever, then vanishes with a ‘pop’, like a Cheshire cat’s grin.
25 minutes – not 0.25km! – later I roll into Bellagio.
The seafront at Bellagio is absolutely prime poseur-territory: replete with top-of-the-range Jaguar sports cars (British licenced) and Japanese and Chinese tourists doing The Grand Selfie Tour; all shore-side restaurants crammed, long queues for the Gellaterias. The Thing To Do here is to See And Be Seen. I make a beeline for the booking office for the boat. Another very long queue. When I get to the window I buy a ticket for the fast service to Como. The time I’m given bears no relationship to the times advertised in the timetable I’ve bought with me. Oh well, c'est la vie – in Italy, anyway. I join another queue for a gelato with all the Beautiful People, then the gleaming hydrofoil sweeps into Pier No. 1. I board, go downstairs into the air-conditioned lounge and fall asleep.
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