The first proper day of our hike went well, though it was flipping hot. There are places to get water as you hike but often they’re few and far between. We found one after about 45 minutes but the trickle from the tap was so slow that a snail coughing in the next village would divert it’s flow.

Being a gentleman I let Delphine set the pace and go first. Also I could point and giggle each time she lost her footing. Which was usually about three seconds before I did the same thing.

We passed one refuge / shack near where we’d planned to stop for the night and were rapidly told that the area was “full” but one busybody man attempting to be polite. The fact that we were in the countryside on public land didn’t seem to be a fact he’d grasped but we decided we didn’t want to be near anyone like that anyway and that we’d just sneak down at 4am and steal their orange juice (we didn’t – we slept in).

Nearby we found a nice area with some steady rocks for us to light up the gas burner and cook dinner – ravioli. Yum! This was when we found that Delphine had picked up the wrong matchbox at home and we had only two matches on us. Uh-oh. Thankfully the first worked and we still had a spare. We cooked, washed, packed and headed uphill to the next flat area we could find… which was inundated with flies and mosquitoes making it nigh on impossible to concentrate on my Harry Potter novel as I spent longer squashing the damn things than reading.

We slept from darkness till slightly after dawn, woken only by the sound of wild pigs snuffling near the tent. At which point we waited for them to try and steal our luggage, but fortunately they must have had better quality stuff as they left it alone.