Maiella National Park

Rules and regulations. Do we agree with them because we have to or do we only keep the ones that fit us. Some rules come naturally to most of us while others seem to especially restrict. In a city, or anywhere people live close, rules are a must. But when city people would feel restricted, how will they free themselves from it? Or will restricted feelings turn into a new normal?

Could it be that when used to much freedom it makes you either a loner or an inconvenient person. Do all the persons that can not handle restrictions live off grid, become environmentalist or are forest rangers? (Obviously not).

I honestly think most people would be living very differently if their conscious would be enabled. If their living would not be made so difficult. If life wasn’t so restricted and unnatural. I think that life is restricted and regulated no matter where we live, what we do and how we are. Rules is what we go by on, as the human race.

We just need to see fit that we can adjust, stretch to our maximum and still be able to the voice within us. To feel the natural roar deep down and to act out these earthly feelings. Some run ultra marathons, others climb mountains without a rope. Some discover trail running with a loaded backpack. Others get a dog and find walking through the city the best thing to do in life.

And I? I desperately have to walk and sleep in my new tent. Of course, walking out of the door from your home and be back by sunset isn’t very much of a true outdoor experience for me. From discovering a city where one has to cross over designated area’s, called zebra crossings, is rather annoying. But being finally out in open nature and hitting signboards that come with all possible restrictions, is truly irritating.

So, I am in Abruzzo, a state in Italy where I know nothing about. As soon as Geo and I arrived and I saw a high mountain, I wanted to go there.

See the mountain in the right corner? Looks promising! When Geo and I camped here with the van, I knew I had to go to this mountain.

Arriving by train and walking straight into a National Park, this is where my week of walking will take place. Not knowing how Italy deals with wild camping I soon find out when I stumble on ‘The Bear Trail’.

A new ultra light tent and it’s funny how happy it makes me to sleep in it.

Bear trail, called because they’re bears. Marsican bears. I heard of this phenomenon but thought it more of a spun to attract tourists. The least I want to be in is an area amongst bears where, among 20 other restrictions, I may not camp, may not make fires and may not stray of the designated path. It gives me hope when I see lumberjacks breaking all the rules. I even discover some large patches of died out camp fires (undoubtedly not from camping though).

No, a double wall titanium cup is not fit for boiling tea in. Neither is using a stove in the outer tent walls.

Once a means of livelihood and pure survival, has nature now become a shop to stroll trough? I am on a bear trail and will have to deal with it. I am not going to go anywhere else as where I am now. Smashing all the rules: I will find spots where no one sees me, I will make fires without setting the moist national park in a blaze and therefore I must stray of the paths.

Is it because of all these rules that I see no one on the trails for a week? Besides a lot of healthy looking fox droppings, I see plenty of disgusting patches of human poop. Accompanied by toilet paper and soft cotton-alike tissues that are hard to decompose. Yet, that is okay because there’s no restriction symbol for wild pooping. Luckily, these are mostly only laying at the signboards. While I dig a hole to burry these matters and carry a pee rag, I see at once that nature in this part of the world has outgrown it’s original purpose. Now the environment it lays in is of a fancy one. Well, off I am: with a pee rag and tiny shovel to not adhere to the signboards.

I am positively surprised with Italy. Remembering it from childhood camping holidays long ago, I now see friendly people with an immaculate taste. People are dressed to impress, where style and detail are made into a daily routine. In contrast to Hungary, Italians are confident and slim. Again, I am the one that doesn’t really fit. In my unchanged smokey outdoor outfit and unkempt hair, I feel stand out. But that’s mostly okay since I try to stay on the tiniest of paths. While for most Italians, luxury is eating small portions of food for too high a price, served in restored villages perched upon hills, where they arrive in big shiny cars, neatly dressed with shoes not fit for the nearby environment they’re not venturing out to.

When I was a child my dad let me carry my own backback with a banana in it. Now I do the same and the happiness is as good as it was back then!

My body isn’t made for inactivity. It wants to live and feel and as soon as I am on the trail, I do. Having shed the trailer with lots of food, I have to make do with what I have, and that is precious little. Each morning I wake up, I look forward to walk and when the evening announces itself, I am looking forward to set up my new tent. This proves technically more difficult than ever before, sometimes taking me as long as half an hour.

Finding food is a difficulty, as is finding a spot to sleep, it turns out. Sometimes villages are ski resorts, sometimes more of an open air museum. The existence of siesta makes for odd opening hours and so when asking for a convenience store I come to speak with a lady. She reminds me there are plenty of deer, wild boars and bears here. She has seen the bear herself, rummaging through town. ‘Well, deer and boars are not an issue. I just hope I won’t see a bear,’ I reply.

Not just some dreadful large boars, it is a herd of 9 including piglets going wildly about.

In trying to find a spot to sleep I wander with a keen eye through the surroundings of Rivisondoli. I come across a dense forest, where I see a deer running, though it occurs a very stocky and cumbersome one. Once I realize it is a boar, I see a whole family prodding in the mud. Their bodies as big as deer, without the long legs, there is no second thought I could possibly sleep at ease. I turn around at once and opt for the safety of a farm. Arriving at the farm, it are only cats, cows and a shy sheepdog that are present. I leave for another farmer’s shed. Arriving there, the owner denies me a spot to sleep, advising me to use the ground at a public park. ‘How kind of him’, I think ironically. Perplexed about his weak excuse (of danger for boars barging through his fence) I settle for an abandoned factory cum housing quarters. Not at ease with a spot in full view, at least it has a little fence around it, though the gate is ajar. ‘Should I close it against bears and boars?’ I think weakly before I fall asleep (after a 4 kilometer search to get here).

After 305 stair-steps back into Rivisondoli, two coffees and a cornetto make up for the unpleasant camp experience. With new plans, given to me by the lady whose husband owns the cafe, I set out happily into a loop. Always wanting to go further and higher, I have reached an age, or menopause, where I realise that my limits have decreased. But a lot less than the 39 year young lady of the cafe: ‘I was an Alpinist but I stopped when I got married’, she explains. The sole reason being avoiding casualties for her work. I feel blessed.

To look at the new surroundings, the never ending rutting sounds of deer echoing against the mountain walls, feels like going from our usual Hungarian 1 dimension to a spectacular 3 dimensional space. I feel I am part of space above and below and of all sides of me. My mind need it. I feel I can go anywhere I want with my new set up. The narrowest paths are now mine and the tarmac with it’s noisy cars are a thing of the past (except when I enter towns: I am instantly startled by the harsh sounds of all mechanical things coming together).

My only problem is food. I eat a lot of bread and sometimes skip eating all together. After I meet a shepherd, having followed a trail of cigarette buds that were his, I go to sleep at ease. ‘Here are no bears and no boars. It is not dangerous. You can surely sleep here. But, oh no! You are a woman alone. You better go down to town and sleep there,’ he tells me. I leave the path when he’s out of sight. I hardly eat a thing when next day is only downhill.

These old Italian hill villages, a borgo, remind me of towns in Yemen, and Tibetan and Indian Himalayan villages. Borgi are generally fortified and dating back to medieval times. They are often surrounded by walls and built around a castle or palace belonging to the noble family that held power at that time.

There’s an atmosphere higher up, on that stops at 1000 meter. Upon entering Pettorano sul Gizio I am fed up with the whole bear stuff. I feel it is a tourist magnet. For tourists in clothes that would fall apart as soon as the fabric get caught on a twig, somewhere on an unpaved trail. I see bear statues at the tourist office. Signboards for pruning fruit trees to encourage bears to forage, in contrast to posters where bears are fed melons and peaches. Signboards with restrictions to caress a bear. Signboards for reducing your speed: the national park is okay with cars driving through, once having killed a bear. Two cubs drowned in a container and one once rummaged through town to immerse himself in cakes. The authorities want a closer relationship between bears and humans, a coexistence. But without humans straying from paths and overnight stays.

Cold water feels as ice on my skull. Soon my head starts throbbing but keeping clean is one of my own important rules (here in Italian towns, I start picking up feelings of being seen as a homeless or drifter or ‘hippie’ or at least I receive looks that I can not fully place yet, but aren’t of kindness or acceptance.)

I would not encourage anyone to set out in nature when not leaving a place as it was. Soil back in place after made a patch to use my new Vargo hexagon wood-stove. I bury poop and use no paper waste after peeing. Nature is the only medicine to a mind at ease. Walking without camping isn’t being fully out. To extract the honey from the comb, one needs to emerge fully. Even with 20 plus restrictions, nature still belongs to the earth. Or, who does nature belong to?

We all have a collective responsibility and nature doesn’t belong to anyone more than anyone else. (But how will I convincingly tell this the dear sir who checks the forest?)

I thought of collecting this unusual material to use in embroidery but the ends are so sharp that I didn’t want to take any risk in puncturing my new Therm-A-Rest Neo air mattress. It dawned on me, as soon as I couldn’t avoid the road, that hikers that transgress the rules are less prone to bring damage to nature than cars can do.