GR-G1 - Day 1 - Beginning the Trace du Alicés

Today we left the boat of Sara after having spent over a week with her and the others on the small island of Marie Galante. It was a bitter sweet moment to say goodbye like this, but in the end it was the right moment to leave. Paddling away with the dinghy filled to the brim with our stuff, still felt sad, like the end of an era, like saying goodbye to good friends that helped us so so much. Good people, and I'm filled with nice memories of all the parties, conversations and beautiful moments we had with this group.

The plan that Rebecca and I had was to hike the GR-G1 also known as Trace de Alicés, a route that goes from the North to the South of the part of the main island of Guadeloupe known as Basse Terre. But we had learned that parts of the hike were inaccessible and also weren't sure if we could deal with 6 days of being outside of civilization with our equipment and appetites. Food would be a problem and so we decided to split up the track into two pieces, first the Northern and then the Southern parts. The beautiful thing is that from the information that we found online, that there should be sheltered huts available to sleep at the end of every day and both of us were excited for this sort of adventure.

We left the beach with our giant backpacks while it was raining, to hitchhike up the road towards the North, thinking about where we could leave some of our stuff before attempting the hike, so as to have much less things to carry. Before long, a woman in a big BMW stopped, two young people in the rain have good chances of hitching rides. To our surprise she even spoke German, with a slight French accent. Her name is Nathalie and she is a dive instructor in Guadeloupe and just came back from a dive with some of her friends. When we told her about our problems with the stuff she was just like: "Ah no problem, you can leave your stuff at my house". And so we went with her.

Nathalie owns a 2000 m² piece of land together with her husband. Situated above a small town called Bouillante her house overlooks palm trees and green gardens and the sea with the ships and a small island below. The view is more than epic especially because the sunset is directly in front of her door every day.

They live together with six cats and a giant dog and I think their house is the most beautiful and cozy I've ever seen. It's like somebody envisioned a piece of paradise and then went out and built it. A giant "terrace" which at the same time is the living room makes up the bulk of it, with a big open wall to enjoy the view.

Plants hanging at the entrance and the overwhelming sensation of being out in nature while having the comfort and coziness of home was what struck me the most. I think, some time in my life I want to live in a place like this. It reminded me a lot of FKJ's home in the Philippines. Cuddling with the cats, we talked for a while more with Nathalie, planning the rest of the day and decided to "go for it" and just start the hike that very day because the first shelter was the easiest one to reach from the road. Just 30 minutes away into the jungle and so we thought: "we can hitchhike until there and then just walk, easy". And so we thanked and left Nathalie's beautiful home.

On our way to the supermarket to stock up on food we encountered a small place that was selling fruit and vegetables. More pricey than in the supermarket but everything was so fresh it was worth it. We bought some bananas and some pineapple, that the shop owner with whom we "spoke" in a mix of broken French, English and Spanish, and it's amazing how much information you can exchange even with the limited overlap of languages that we had. Communication works somehow sometimes.

The shop owner cut the pineapple for us right there, fresh and perfect and we started munching right away. I think I never tasted pineapple like this. Delicious, golden, sour sweetness.

Then we went to the supermarket and I think that we both were still a bit hungry because our shopping cart filled with more and more and more and more stuff. But somehow at the end, we fitted everything into our small bags just fine. Perfectly balancing amount to carry with good food for the road that keeps us happy and strong for the long hikes we had planned.

When we left the supermarket we ate a piece of Brie and a baguette at the side of the road waiting for a lift to a place called "Les Marmelles", in English "the tits". It's to mountains that you guessed it, look a bit like breasts. Before long we found somebody who stopped and today seemed to be our lucky day because he went into exactly the direction we needed to go, stopping at the exact point we needed to get out. Again we had a beautiful conversation with him, in a mix of all languages we know, and somehow understood a lot about what he does on the Island. Robert is a masonry refurbisher, he rebuilds old homes and sanitizes them to make them nice and beautiful again. He was such a nice person and we took a selfie and then went off his car and into the jungle.

The sun already started to become slightly golden but there was a small peak, 30ish minutes in the other direction of where we wanted to go, so we decided to quickly leave our bags at the wayside, a little hidden behind a corner, and go for the hike up to the mountain top.

The walk was through mud and up a big slope, the shoes quickly getting slightly brown and disgusting as we went. But the surrounding green of the jungle and the noise of the birds and the animals of the forest was worth the slightly muddy feet. After exactly thirty minutes the tree canopy opened up and we were at the top, there was a small shelter up there, with a view over the island and it was the first nice moment of our hike. But the sun started setting and so we needed to go down as quickly as we came too not have to walk in the jungle at nightfall in the dark.

On our way back down we had to stop every once in a while to take pictures though. The green of the leaves intensified with the golden sunlight streaming in through the trees. There was a slight haze in the atmosphere too, enhancing the colors and adding more depth and volume to the scene. It was just mesmerizing and every once in a while the trees opened up and gave way to view the mountains in the distance.

We continued our walk through the mud, admiring the green of the jungle and eventually stopped caring about whether or not our feet are covered in mud. There was simply no way around it and mud was to be a constant companion for the whole hike. The trees in the slowly fading light looked beautiful. Haunted, lonely, but also alive and old, ancient, like they will be here long after us and have been here long before. There is a sense to the German world "Urwald" which means the forest that has been always there, the ancestral jungle. Because that's where we have come from, long before, in days forgotten.

The green has something hypnotic, something alien, alive, wanting to eat and consume you, your primal brain thinking about the danger while admiring the beauty. Everywhere looks almost the same, a wall of green, yet there is variety and beauty and form to the madness. So many plants, to us, all of them unknown, but you can imagine the people who used to live in places like this, to whom this plant is medicine, that one food, where this place is not a hostile obstacle to be overcome but a rich source of everything, of life, of abundance.

What Organic Maps determined to be a twelve minute walk turned into more of a thirty minute little Odyssey. But in the end we made it, feet full of mud, but with a happy grin because we saw the shelter. A sturdy wooden construction, the only safe place in the jungle at night. We were happy.

We ate our food in candle light, a small gas stove providing the heat to cook a little bit of instant noodles. Small things like this can be bliss. I love how the pudding we had with us said Dolce Vita. Dolce Vita indeed. Let's see what the rest of this hike brings.