lukebuehler.com About the life of a pilgrim

Moving South in the Dolomites

After being for almost 2 weeks without Internet it feels good to be live again.

I've made it to Treviso one of the main cities besides Milan and Venice in the upper part of Italy. Much has happened, yeah, the greatest adventure wait to be told now. But for this time it will be hard to tell everything at once. But I'm taking a longer break in Venice and I'll have the opportunity there, to finish writing everything down.

Anyhow let's start where we left off.

Having realized that the upper parts of the Vinschgau are much more interesting, I was motivated to do those 1000 meters to get away from the boring valley. In Meran the lady of the camping site told me, that there is a high track from Meran to Bozen. After some minor getting losts, I found the way. It was so steep, I've never seen a way like this before. Mostly around 45 degrees. Later I found out that a guy broke the world record in making height in 24 hours on this very way. In 24 hours he walked the way around 14 times, which came to be, something around 16'000 meters in height! From there I moved on a little higher and found this amazing high plateau. It is called Langfenn and is once of the most beautiful places I've ever seen. After seeing only apples for days I came up there and saw a breath taking panorama of the Dolomites in all their glory of the setting sun. Imagine this place: Strong green grass with some awesome trees standing quite far apart from each other. From time to time you see horses and the only people you meet are some lonely riders. Trough the trees you see the mighty Dolomites in the evening sun because the way is always on the top of the hill. I couln't take it it was such a special sight. Later I found out that this high plateau is a secret tip of the Suedtirol.

The next day I went down to the city Bozen, which is not as cool as Meran in my opinion, but I met a really nice lady who owned a Pizza fast food place there. She offered me to stay at her house, but it wasn't on my way so I declined. She gave me her number and said whenever I have a problem in Italy I should call her and she would try to help. It's interesting to see how some people just feel that I'm doing something not normal and are somehow attracted to that. They want to know, help and be a part of it. Because I decided that I wanted to go into the Dolomites instead of around them, I walked towards the "Rosengarten". A famous group of peaks in the Dolomites. The next day I was already enjoying and hating them. From up close they are very beautiful but damn hard to climb. Always steep passings and crazy weather conditions. I would get to taste much more of that later. As I arrived in the Vajolet hut (Rifugio how they call it in Italy). I met a super nice guy called Henry. We had to use the emergency beds because the Rifugio was so full (over 80 people).We imediately got along well, he's the main DB architect of U2, a german telecom provider, and so we could do some serious geek talk for 2 hours plus. The next day I spontaneously decided to stay at this rifugio one day longer and join Henry on his planed adventure in the "Rosengarten". First we climed up on onto 2900 meters, from there we had to climb for quite a while. Most people used full safety gear but we had nothing. I didn't even have gloves as we had to climb some steep rocks by only 3 degrees. So after we survived this and enjoyed all the awesome sights (Pics still to come). We had a nice hike for another 5 hours. It was fun to hear about the former DDR where he grew up in and how similar things where but still different. It was interesting when the talk came to religion where he made a firm stand for atheism and me for theism.

That evening I heard it was going to snow down to 1000 meters, my plan was to go to the next rifugio on 2500 meters, which I did indeed. But more about that later...