Ari, Anaïs, Mei, her friend Laura and I drove to Andorra on Friday afternoon for a couple of days of walking in the hills. On Saturday we left Ordino where we’d stayed the night and drove up one of the valleys to Soldeu, where we parked. It was a hot sunny blue sky type of day. The plan was to walk for a couple of hours to a mountain hut beside a lake and stay there for the night.
We started by walking along a sealed road that was closed to vehicles before taking a left and heading steeply up into the hills. We reached the edge of a pine forest and then began to ascend more gently through the forest. I walked ahead with Mei and then looped back to get Ari’s pack a few times. I went ahead again and emerged from the pine forest and crossed a flat grassy section to a small stream which seemed like it was probably good enough for a lunch break.
The stream was fed from a lake higher up and it dropped over a cliff band creating a waterfall further up in the distance. We ate and threw small pine cones into the water racing each others cones down the small stream.
We continued up in the heat and it wasn’t much longer before we arrived at the hut. We dropped our gear and went to the lake for cups of tea and for some of us, a swim. The green water was deliciously cold. I dried off in the sun and then we returned to the hut.
For dinner, we cooked pasta using my aliexpress jetboil knock off and a small pot. Laura’s gluten free pasta turned into a horrible non-glutenous sludge but luckily we also had some of the good old gluten filled variety that even Laura had a bit of due to the superior texture.
Wild horses came up from the valley in the evening and we went down a little way from the hut and sat and watched them. They later came right up to the hut and one of them was intent on getting food and came to interrogate us. A labrador that was also staying the night was of particular interest, as was Mei. The dog ignored the horse as best it could but at some point it became too much and it shuffled off to sit somewhere else.
The hut was more or less full in the evening. The bunks were horrendously uncomfortable and I slept with a bit of metal poking into my back.
After a bad night’s sleep we ate breakfast outside in the sunshine and before heading down we went up to the lake to see the horses that were now drinking water there and milling about.
We headed back down to the car and drove back to Ordino arriving much later than planned due to a UCI world tour race that closed the roads. We ate something at the local restaurant Topic and then began driving back to Barcelona. This also took longer than expected due to a huge forest fire that had broken out on route. We arrived late in the evening ready for bed.
