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Category: Italy

Published on Leave a comment on Alpine Crossing 2013 – Day 14: Valsavarenche – Rifugio Vitt. Emanuele II

Our destination for today is Rifugio Vitt. Emanuele II on about 2700m. From here we want to climb the Gran Paradiso tomorrow. From Valsavarenche we start a two hours walk to Pont along a quite boring road. On our way we have been taken over by one of the two only busses today. The weather is good, it is still early in the morning, we feel good :) …so the two hours pass quickly. At Pont we find a very small supermarket and buy a new bread :-D We leave some things like stove, helmet, cooking material and some clothes at a hut below. All those things we do not need the next day. This reduces the weight by about 4-5kg! We are very fast upwards overtaking everyone on the way to the hut :) – actually feels like flying :) At the hut we meet Gianni – our guide – again. It is quite full today – probably because of Sunday…but maybe also because tomorrow is the last day with good weather for a while. Lets see if the weather forecast is correct…. We have a very small but nice chamber tonight :) Tomorrow we will get up at 4 am, have breakfast and then start to walk to the top of Gran Paradiso.

Published on Leave a comment on Alpine Crossing 2013 – Day 13: Courmayeur – Valsavarenche

Those two days we walked a very long and boring road from Courmayeur to another valley. The regions we passed seemed to be far away from any hiking tourism. There were almost no signs and many paths on the map were no longer there. So we tried very hard to find a way by foot to our destination. The first day it worked :) I would not have believed that but on the second day we finally had to give up. When we stood in front of a long tunnel and the cars passed us with 120km/h we decided to take the bus for a few kilometres. I think it would have been quite dangerous entering such a tunnel by foot. There was nothing for pedestrians at all. It took the bus only about 10 minutes to get to our destination. From there we walked again. One night we slept at a very nice guesthouse. A big kitchen, the living room and the garden was free to use for everyone :) Luciana, the owner also lived in the same house with her three kids. This created a nice atmosphere – like in this american television show – I can’t remember the name….

Published on Leave a comment on Alpine Crossing 2013 – Day 11: Refuge de Requin – Courmayeur

What a great day! We got up at 6. After a quick breakfast, packing and putting on all the equipment we left the hut at 7:15. The first thing was to pass the ice fall which was to the right approx. 200m above our heads. We asked the guide if we should wear the helmet. He just smiled and said: If you feel better…. :-) But if this comes down you don’t need a helmet ;-) And so we quickly crossed the ice fall and luckily no ice and no stones came down at this time – probably also because it was still quite early. The next thing to pass were some big crevasses which were partly still covered with snow. Parts we had to go in parallel to the crevasses what actually created a strange feeling because you never know what is under your feet. After 2 hours the critical parts were done. Then we could fully enjoy walking on the glacier. There were still some crevasses but they were not so big. After 4:30 hours we finally arrived at Rif. Turino which is already in Italy. There were quite some people around which all came up with the cable car. From this hut (~3300m) we planned to climb down to Courmayeur. Unfortunately the path down to the middle station of the cable car was too dangerous since it is very steep and there is still lots of snow. Our guide recommended us to take the cable car at least to the middle station. From the middle station it was approx. 90 minutes by foot to Courmayeur. Here we found a quite nice and cheap one star hotel :-) For dinner we had a huge pizza :-)

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We spent the evening in Catania. After checking in at the hotel we went to the "party street" to get some food and cocktails. We decided to have some ice cream and went into a nice looking gelateria at a nice piazza close to the theatre. I thought about ordering a crepes instead of ice cream - but due to many misunderstandings we left the shop with one crepes for each person filled with three huge ice scoops and chocolate sauce! Wow.. that was enough food for the evening. After that we went to a cocktail bar - nobody was talking English again.. - and ordered two cocktails. Maybe cocktail is the wrong word - actually it was pure alcohol with a bit of flavour 😮 One was enough.. and luckily the hotel was not too far away...

Nevertheless after a good night of sleep and a more or less strange breakfast we were ready to do some sightseeing the next morning. But before that we wanted to buy the tickets for the bus to Palermo which should (according to the schedule on the Internet) leave at 1pm. But.. what a surprise.. there was no bus at 1pm - instead the bus was leaving at 11:30am. We bought some tickets and we happy that we found a bus at all. So we had to reduce the time for sightseeing a bit..

After that we went to the centro storico and saw the landmark of Catania which is the elephant fountain. We spent some time at the piazza and watched the Italians talking to each other and meeting up there... Then we walked around a bit through the historic city center.. Before we got to the bus we found a really nice bakery, bought a wonderful bread for the long bus ride and arrived just in time at the bus station. Now our next stop would be Palermo.