Italian Alps – day 5
Aleccio – Crodo — Susa – Meana di Susa
11.7.2024 Thursday
→ 9,9 km ↑ 357 m – total 92,9 km
We get up at 6:30am to even more beautiful views. I used earplugs for the first time last night, a genuine game changer, I finally got a proper sleep. We pack up the tent fast and move over to the table. We pack our things, have instant noodles for breakfast, and pull ourselves together. A car passes down toward Crodo, and Jozef shoots me an annoyed look, since I’m not packed yet. If I had been, we’d definitely be hitchhiking. We’ve got 5.5 km left to Crodo, and 1000 meters down. So we go on foot.
The trail’s in fairly good shape, so we move quickly. We’re in Crodo before 9am. We go straight to hitchhike, since we don’t know how long it’ll take. Within 5 minutes a woman in her thirties stops for us, cats on her t-shirt and good taste in music, which we appreciate. She drives us to the station in Domodossola. That was fast.
We get coffee and plan the next few days. We take a train through Turin to Bussoleno and from there head on foot north, toward Gran Paradiso National Park. Then we go buy pastries, a blackberry cake for me and something like pizza for Jozef. We sit down in the square and figure out more details. We go straight to buy groceries for the next 3 days too. Jozef thinks we’ve got way too much, but what if we actually eat that much. Then we’ve only got half an hour left before the train. I’d wanted to do laundry too, but we need to go. The train to Novara takes almost two hours and it’s really hot. I charge all our devices on it. I write the blog and look up more route info. By chance I come across a snow map.
All our plans are in ruins again. I won’t even bother telling you what they are anymore. Almost all of Gran Paradiso is under snow, and even the GR 54, which we walked last year around this same time, isn’t passable. In Novara we have coffee and change to the train to Turin. Jozef double-checks whether some of our planned routes might still be doable. Maybe two days would work out. I don’t want to keep zigzagging around, so I convince him to head south instead. In Turin we buy some food for the road and beer. Even I have some of it. Instead of Bussoleno we ride one stop further, to Susa. In Susa it’s a “pleasant” 30°C and properly muggy. It’s 6pm and we’d still like to cover a vertical kilometer, so we don’t linger. The moment we step into the forest it’s a bit nicer, but there are more mosquitoes too. We pass through the village of Meana di Susa. It’s known for Giro d’Italia.
Beautiful switchbacks lead up to the pass, we’ll reach it tomorrow. It’s getting dark and we hear thunder. We look around for possible shelter. There’s a rest area in the forest just ahead of us, so we hurry there and pitch the tent. That’s it for today. There are also three Swiss guys there with off-road vehicles. The storm arrives, we sit in the tent, which is terribly stuffy and full of mosquitoes. Jozef can’t take it for longer, so he goes to shower in the rain instead. He’d already soaped up when the rain stopped, luckily there’s water here too. We make dinner and the Swiss guys come call us over, asking if we want beer or wine, so we go. I get boxed red wine in a glass cup, and Jozef gets a chilled beer. They drive around these hills in their cars, and they’d also had trouble with snow and had to turn back. Really only one of them talks to us, and he translates for the others. I finish my wine and don’t want more, they take that as some kind of precedent and stop offering Jozef beer either, even though he’d have taken another. We go wash our toxic-smelling clothes and I also take a shower. Down in town there’s some kind of festival going on, so music’s blaring. Good thing I’ve got those earplugs. We swat mosquitoes and go to sleep.
