Richard fell over twice. The first time was a root on an uphill section — entirely understandable, nobody's fault. The second time he was looking at the flowers. He tells me this without any particular embarrassment. Before they left, he had been worried about falling. He is six foot three, was carrying close to fifteen stone, and had convinced himself that the broken limestone terrain of the Serra de Tramuntana would expose him. He had never walked with poles before and packed much more than he needed.
This included a Frederick Forsyth hardback. Hardcover. He carried it every step of the 56 kilometres. He’s not entirely sure what he was thinking.
He and Al have been married for thirty-seven years, but this was their first trail together.
Al's main anxiety going into the trip was not the terrain, or the heat, or the navigation. It was whether four days of walking with her husband would damage what had been, up to that point, a completely functional marriage. She can laugh about it now, because it turned out fine.
More than fine. The kilometres went quickly when they were talking. When they weren't talking, there was what she calls a companionable silence — both of them looking at the mountains, or the sea, or the particular quality of morning light on the escarpment above Deià. Her face ached from smiling, she told her family at the halfway point. This is the detail she reaches for when people ask her what it was like.
They did a 56-kilometre section of the GR221 in early October, walking from Esporles to Sóller in five days. Their shortest day was just under ten kilometres; their longest was seventeen. They were finished by two or three in the afternoon most days, with enough time left to explore wherever they were staying. This was the whole point, really. They had come for a holiday that happened to involve walking, not a walking trip that happened to include evenings.
What Mallorca Actually Is
Richard had been to the island as a child and retained the usual associations — resorts, beaches, package holidays. He had then driven through the island a couple of years earlier and registered, dimly, that the mountains were more serious than he'd expected. The idea that trails ran through them struck him as interesting. Still, he didn’t quite know what he was agreeing to.
The Serra de Tramuntana is limestone — fractured, angular, sun-bleached, old. Richard knows limestone from a holiday home in Cyprus and had some sense of what the ground would feel like underfoot. What he hadn't reckoned with was the style it demanded. The locals move across broken rock with a lightness that is difficult to describe without sounding jealous of it. A young Spanish woman came down a steep section of shale above Deià in trainers, no poles, bouncing off rocks that were still moving beneath her feet. By the time each rock shifted, she had already left it.
Richard, in his walking boots, with his poles, took a different approach. Slower and more deliberate. It was right for him.
"Don't go at it like a bull at a gate," he says, "because you'll fall over and seriously hurt yourself."
This wisdom comes from experience: he fell over twice.
The section between Esporles and Valldemossa is where it stopped feeling like a walk and started feeling like something else. No marked path in places — just painted red arrows on rocks, some of them sun-bleached to near-invisibility. Scrambling between boulders large enough to require throwing the poles ahead and hauling yourself through the gap with your hands. Richard remembers reaching the top of one escarpment and telling Al he was glad they weren't descending that way.
"Moderate to challenging" is how the guidebooks grade the GR221. He thinks this is broadly accurate, with the caveat that the challenging bits require a specific kind of fitness — not endurance, but the ability to climb over rocks, trust your footing and keep your eyes on the path rather than the view. This last part is harder than it sounds. Richard kept getting distracted by the charcoal ovens and the ice houses built high on the mountain ridges. He wanted to understand what each ruined structure was for.
The Archduke's Way
There is a section called the Archduke's Way — a long traverse of the Serra at altitude — and this is the one they both reach for when asked what the GR221 is. You climb through dense oak forest on a gentle gradient, and then the shoulder of the hill gives way on both sides: to the south, all of Mallorca spread below like a rainforest canopy, the sea glinting at the edges; to the north, the horizon opening out, the light changing as the morning moved into it, cloud building on the mountains but never, on the days they were there, descending far enough to close the view.
They were, Al says, miles from anywhere. They felt entirely at one with it.
The weather for the whole section was between twenty and twenty-three degrees, clear sky, a small breeze. They had timed it for early October partly on instinct and partly on research, and it had been exactly right. Richard suspects that in higher temperatures the trail would be a different experience, and not in a good direction. The water they carried — a couple of litres each in bladder packs, topped up once midway — was sufficient. In summer, he thinks, it would not be.
They met two young German women on one of the scrambling sections — coming up as Al and Richard were coming down, trainers and shorts and phones, no map, no poles, heading towards Esporles in the general spirit of seeing how far they got. They bumped into the same two women later in the market at Valldemossa. Al asked where they'd ended up. Esporles, they said, before turning around. They were nineteen, possibly. Richard is sixty-one. He considered this for a moment and moved on.
There was a comradeship, he says, in the market towns — recognising people from the trail, nodding at them, seeing in their faces whether they were elated or wrecked or both. The ones who'd got lost, or fallen, or found a view that undid them. Al and Richard arrived at Sóller at the end feeling the strangeness of coming back into a tourist town after days in the mountains — busy roads, pavements, people who hadn't just walked across a limestone ridge. The reintegration, both of them say, is slightly jarring.
"You are detached from your everyday lives," Al says, "and there is something really special about that."
Richard thinks about the escarpment on the Archduke's Way, looking south across the whole island, knowing that somewhere below the canopy was the sea, and that when they got down they were going to swim in it.
That's what he comes back to.
The novel, incidentally, survived the trip intact. He didn’t reveal whether he actually read any of it.
