“When you start the day with your forks dropped and your seatpost raised, you know it’s going to be a long one,” says Holger Meyer, about the thousand-meter climb ahead. We’re smiling, but inside we’re all anxious. What is scaring us most isn’t this climb, nor the two-hour hike-a-bike across a sketchy cliff face to come, or the horseflies waiting in the forest. It’s us not knowing what lies ahead, our ignorance of what we’ve let ourselves in for, and it caught us out on day one, leading us on an eight-hour jeeptrack safari from hell.
We’re not to blame. The 400-Km long Alta Via dei Monti Liguri hiking trail we’re dipping into might be waymarked but it’s unknown among mountain bikers, despite it passing within a tyre’s knob of Finale Ligura’s Enduro World Series race. A basic website is all I have to plan our three-day hut trip … Pictures and more