{"id":11050,"date":"2025-08-17T21:15:03","date_gmt":"2025-08-17T21:15:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/damesnet.com\/?p=11050"},"modified":"2025-08-18T07:17:23","modified_gmt":"2025-08-18T07:17:23","slug":"a-walk-in-the-woods","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/damesnet.com\/?p=11050","title":{"rendered":"A Walk in the Woods"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Marie Albert\/Ouest-France<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n

\u2018I\u2019m not in danger alone in the forest, but I am when I\u2019m in the presence of men.\u2019 This is the simple premise behind the campaign of Marie Albert to open up solo walking for women.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It wasn\u2019t always like that: during her first night camping in the forest on her own, she didn\u2019t sleep a wink. But after five years of solo travel, including a cycling tour on the trail of Occupied France and a journey round the world on a cargo ship, she can face anything. Settling down for a night under the trees, she now feels as comfortable as she would in her own bedroom.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She took up walking in desperation after a period of unemployment, kicking her heels back at her parents\u2019 home in Paris, following her science degree and a master\u2019s in journalism at university in Lille. Filled with the beginner\u2019s misplaced zeal, she launched herself into the pilgrim walk to Santiago de Compostela, resolved to do 30km a day.  It didn\u2019t take her long to realise that there was more to long-distance walking than putting one foot in front of the other: \u2018I had a 10kg rucksack and no walking poles.\u2019 In the circumstances, the 30 km a day turned out to be more like 15 km a day, and she admits to cheating \u2013 with the odd bus ride here and there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But \u00a0her confidence and her stamina grew as the way stretched out ahead of her. Not surprisingly there was harassment, which she dealt with by tweeting about it, and doing a self-defence course. Her lament has echoes of Susannah Walker, whose book on women walking, The Hard Way<\/a><\/em>, we reviewed last year: ‘The public space is occupied by men. As women our role is to stay at home, or just to go from point A to point B.\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As Albert approached the last stages of her walk to Santiago de Compostela, the purpose of her journey became clear to her: she dedicated each of the remaining days to a woman who had been a victim of femicide.  Her tweets on these women gained traction and she began to think how she would do a solo walking tour round the perimeter of France, to be known as the Survivor Tour.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Her solitude in one of the early legs of this tour was briefly interrupted by an encounter with Veronique, thirty years her senior and a veteran of climbing in the Pyrenees. But after some idyllic riverside camping and a madcap nude swimming session, it was farewell to sisterhood and solidarity and they pursued their separate ways.\u00a0 In September Albert embarks on the penultimate stage of her tour: a month\u2019s solo walking along the coast round Marseille,<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Looking back, Albert realised she could have avoided a lot of grief if she\u2019d been better prepared and she has now distilled the lessons from her hard-won experience in a book: Rando Solo: le guide f<\/em>\u00e9ministe<\/em>, published this year. She stresses that the book would be useful for anyone taking up walking as a pastime, with useful advice on basic equipment, keeping your pack light, and overcoming any fear of wild camping.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

May the road rise to meet you, Albert!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The 30km a day turned out to be 15km a day…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[309,182,307,66,59],"tags":[606,605,607],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/damesnet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11050"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/damesnet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/damesnet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/damesnet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/damesnet.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11050"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/damesnet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11050\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11067,"href":"https:\/\/damesnet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11050\/revisions\/11067"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/damesnet.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11050"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/damesnet.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11050"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/damesnet.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11050"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}