Taz thinks nature is over-rated.

Tuesday June 22nd - Karlstad

Feeling lucky to be alive!!!!! On Sunday we couldn't find a free spot so went to what sounded like a lovely campsite in a national park between two lakes. It was a real back to nature place with a vengeance. Took us 3 attempts to find a place to park where we weren't under siege from midges and mossies (glad I had brought my mosquito head net) then we shut the door and whilst all the other proper campers boiled their billycans and recycled their contents in the earth closets before crawling under their 1 sq metre of canvas, we cooked up some lamb (yes baby sheep), turned up the telly and downed our gin and tonics (for the quinine of course)

But boy did we pay for it the next day. We checked out and decided just to do the 5k nature walk before we drove off. Left Taz in the van (thank God) and tottered off with the little leaflet we were given. Same old same old, we were lost after 5 mins but there was an orange line on the map which met up with the nature walk so we just followed the orange markers. Four hours later we gave up and called the campsite for help. Help was effectively turn around and walk back. The orange lines never did meet up!

Just a nice days walk you're thinking. Think again - it was 7 hours in total, no food, no drink, didnt see another soul just lots of forest, swamps and mosquitoes. Absolute hell. We couldnt stop for more than 15 secs because after 5 the mossies homed in. In fact it was a full body work out as we were waving our arms around fighting them off all the time except when we needed to use our hands to haul ourselves across swamps or clamber up or down rock faces. The leaflet was stuck together with blood in 30 mins from swatting the blood suckers. Forgot to say - the centre had signs up warning that bears, cougars and wolves had been spotted recently.

I'm taking 90% of the blame as I didn't think it was a problem that the orange lines dropped off the little leaflet map and I just assumed they joined up at some point in a neat loop - wrong. but it didn't help that when I was crawling along a log over a swamp heaving with mossies David told me that we were now following the black markers and when I looked up I realised he meant the black lines round the trees where the orange had been burnt off. In other words the rangers had diverted the walk because it was impassable in their opinion.

But we survived and we've spent most of today sitting around our new campsite doing nothing much more than tending our bites and looking for dressings big enough to cover the ginormous blister on my heel.

Phew, too much movement must stop now.