DAY 138 - KLENOVICA TO RIJEKA: 34 MILES (68,000 STEPS)

7 September, 2011

34 miles (Total: 1404.14 miles) 68,000 steps (Total: 2,760, 481 steps)

It was another sleepless night due to leg cramps and so another early start at 4am. It was going to be a very big ‘ask’ to try and make it as far as Rijeka, but I knew from previous experience that when you can actually see your destination and you imagine it within your grasp, it begins to draw you in. Rijeka represented effectively the end of my journey through the Balkans, which had begun three months and 900 miles earlier. It was a goal worth stretching for.

I passed through the very picturesque Novi Vinadoiski, which had been in my mind as a likely stopping place on this stretch for several weeks, which a may sound a bit odd, but maps have become my books. Because books are so heavy to carry—I don’t carry them, so in the evening when I am sitting in a restaurant or during the day when I am sitting in a petrol station, it is always the maps that come out and I study routes and locations for potential stops. I don’t know where exactly I will stop, that largely depends on how I feel which is a factor of the terrain and the weather, but studying maps, whatever the quality, has become my relaxation and my inspiration.

There is a wonderful story about maps that I read once. It is a story about a group of soldiers lost in the mountains and is told by the Nobel Laureate Albert Szent-Gyorgi:

“A small Hungarian detachment was on military manoeuvres in the Alps. Their young lieutenant sent a reconnaissance unit out into the icy wilderness just as it began to snow. It snowed for two days and the unit did not return. The lieutenant feared he had dispatched his men to their death, but on the third day the unit returned. Where had they been? How had they found their way? “Yes” they said, “we considered ourselves lost and waited for the end, but then one of us found a map in his pocket. That calmed us down. We pitched camp, lasted out the snow storm, and then with the map we found our bearings. And here we are.” The lieutenant took a good look at the map and discovered, to his astonishment, that this was a map of the Pyrenees.”

The moral was: “If you are lost any old map is better than nothing”. The map enabled the soldiers to get into action. They had been disabled; but now the map, believed to represent the surroundings, gave them a reason to act. Accuracy did not come into it. By taking some action, the soldiers started to obtain new feedback about their environment, and they entered a learning loop, which gradually built up their own understanding and a mental map. The map got them out of the paralysed state they were in.

One of the aspects of the journey, which the final section of the road to Rijeka brought into sharp focus, was the precarious nature of walking headlong into traffic on busy narrow roads, especially on the sides of cliffs. Many is the time on the journey that I would see a large truck not moving out to give me space or a distracted driver who probably hasn’t seen me and I would leap onto the verge, but when the verge is simply a crash barrier and a sheer drop on a cliff, then the options are limited.

This was certainly the case with the last 30km of road between Crikvenica and Rijeka and there were times when I was holding my breath as an articulated truck sped past me with only a few inches to spare and only the crash barrier between me and a drop of a few hundred feet onto rocks below.  In sympathy with the drivers they are unused to seeing people walk along the road, as I have mentioned before, I haven’t passed a single other traveller on foot on any of the roads so far. There are cyclists and the closer we get to Italy then the greater that number increases, but it’s not that they are intentionally trying to scare you witless, it’s just they don’t expect you to be there.

For this reason and many others, I was so relieved to make to Rijeka in one piece and complete this section that I had been dreading for many weeks. It was also great to see the 1400 mile barrier being passed, that was an unexpected boost—I had expected to be in the 1380s’ or 1390s’. An unexpected benefit of the leg cramps and mosquito’s was that I had actually arrived in Rijeka a day early and a day before I needed to travel up to Zagreb. Rob and Di played an absolute blinder in finding a fabulous hamlet on the hills above Rijeka called Kastav and a fabulous family run hotel called Kukuriku therein.

It was a wonderful way to end a very tough week, perhaps the toughest week of walking yet, as we were able to enjoy a meal, a nice hotel, broadband internet, a glorious buffet breakfast and a whole day off in the company of wonderful friends.