Hike, stamp, repeat

January 27, 2022 2:41 AM

"The thousands of hikers who brave Hungary’s Blue Trail each year must face down unexpected obstacles, a bureaucratic, socialist-era stamp system, and a litany of rules. Which begs the obvious question: why bother at all?"

"It sounds like fun. In reality, however, aspirants need to be prepared for all eventualities: unannounced hunting parties and road closures on the trail, missing stamps, or new ones added to the route, but not to the booklet. There are colourful stories about railway clerks who refuse to hand over the stamps kept inside their stations unless a hiker agrees to buy a train ticket home. One Romani chief keeps a stamp in his family home, fed up with its repeated theft. Some stamps lie forgotten in pubs, seemingly closed forever. Which begs the obvious question: Why do people take such hardships on themselves to obtain a badge at the end if it all?"

posted by kmt (10 comments total)

Oh I thoroughly enjoyed reading this!

(One of my hobbies used to be day-dreaming about walking the AT- this scratched the same itch.)
posted by freethefeet at 3:12 AM on January 27, 2022 [1 favorite]

Sounds like fun! Last summer I met the sweetest Hungarian guy who was hiking the Pacific Crest Trail. He was a bigger guy, maybe 60 years old, not a fast hiker in the pass-you-on-the-trail sense, but he hiked long hours and avoided towns. He'd come up in conversations with other, younger, ostensibly faster hikers and they'd get this impressed look on thier faces, "that guy? He's always in front of us!"

He told me he had hiked the Camino eight times, from various starting points, and now I'm wishing I'd asked him about hiking in Hungary, and wondering if he ever hiked the Blue Trail. He probably has hiked it.


Thanks for the post!
posted by surlyben at 6:41 AM on January 27, 2022 [4 favorites]

Same, freethefeet. Even though it seems like a peculiarly bureaucratic way of doing a long hike, it's engaging in this bureaucracy on your own terms--you don't need to do the booklet and stamps, and lots of people are doing it as it pleases them, when it pleases them. And AFAIK the AT doesn't have cool old ruined castles on it.
posted by Halloween Jack at 6:47 AM on January 27, 2022 [2 favorites]

Poland has a similar system run by PTTK, except instead of one trail nearly all marked tourist trails are eligible for points to get a badge. It started with the Mountain Tourist Badge in 1935 and now you can get them for hiking outside mountains, hiking in mountains in the winter (please don't be idiots who go out in avalanche weather), kayaking, horseback riding, biking, sailing, car camping... The classic mountain badges, with over a dozen grades, are documented by stamps collected in mountain tourist refuges. There's even a Disney badge for kids (or 9 other kids' badges if you're boycotting the Mouse). We take our hiking seriously.

And then there are of course Japanese shrine trails. The first time I visited a shrine and got an ornate stamp on my visitors' booklet, I wondered if this was where the Carpathian lot got the idea.
posted by I claim sanctuary at 7:34 AM on January 27, 2022 [7 favorites]

"I saw the country with new eyes, found places I would have never thought existed so near."

Exactly. I need to get back to hiking. Around home first, maybe someday in Hungary.

The article answers the question of "why bother" with the stamp book quite nicely.
posted by evilmomlady at 7:35 AM on January 27, 2022

I love that they're using the dates on the stamps to verify how plausible it is that a given route was completed properly. As an occasional (mostly day-) hiker it stresses me out that some of the stamps are reportedly unobtainable and it's incumbent on individual hikers to figure out how to get those stamps or their replacements. I assume that there's a whole community around it the same way there is for the Appalachian Trail and thus it's not completely prohibitive, but that still means you need internet access on or near enough the trail for those times when circumstances on the ground have only recently changed.

My wife and I have been to maybe a quarter of the units of the U.S. National Park Service, but it took us a few trips before we figured out how we'd "collect" passport stamps. Instead of carrying the passport book we buy a postcard at the visitor center and stamp that, although we've had to improvise with trail maps and park newspapers in a couple instances. We've got dozens of postcards and we try to keep them with us so we can get the stamps we can as we go. Sometimes large parks have multiple stamp locations (like at each visitor center or ranger station) and we don't go out of our way just for stamps, but there are lots of people who do.
posted by fedward at 7:48 AM on January 27, 2022 [1 favorite]

Many years ago I was into a form of long-distance self supported cycling called randonneuring . You take on rides of generally increasing length - 200km, 300km, 400km, 600km and there's a set route with checkpoints that have time limits, and you get a little card that has to be signed at each checkpoint to show that you made it in the limit. You have to ride unsupported, and fix your own flats or deal with mechanicals on your own,but you can bring or buy food from shops along the way. The time limits aren't very aggressive, but they're tight enough to require some fitness and thought, and to discourage you from interrupting your ride with a leisurely boozy lunch and an overlong siesta.

If you finish in the time limit, your card goes off to a central authority in France to record your achievement, then you get a little medal in return. Everyone who finishes gets the same medal. It's less about being first and more about completing the challenge. If you finish the series up to a 600k then you qualify for the grand randonees, like Paris Brest Paris or London Edinburgh London. Those also have their own medals, plus a medal for completing the set.

Then there are different medals every four years so if you want a new set, you can ride a new series. It is a little silly to just ride for the medals but now I have a small shadowbox on the wall opposite my work desk with my 600k and Super Randonneur and PBP artifacts, and sometimes when work feels like a grind, I can stop and look at those silly totems and remind myself that I have done more exhausting things and had fun doing so.
posted by bl1nk at 7:53 AM on January 27, 2022 [12 favorites]

"Why bother at all?"
Because it is there.
There is a stamp system along the several Caminos de Santiago. If you have walked at least 100km and present your credencial = stamp-log at the office in Santiago you get your Compostella, a Latin document, with your Latinified name calligraphed into the relevant space. Your credencial also gives you access to the cheapo refugios along the way. I witnessed a couple being turned away from one refugio because they couldn't have _walked_ from the place stamped for the previous day and arrive by 1300hrs. My experience walking from Portugal to France via Santiago was transformative without being religious, partly because I was going against the flow from Santiago to France and got to say hello to hundreds of people each day some of whom would stop to Talk.
posted by BobTheScientist at 10:07 AM on January 27, 2022 [1 favorite]

My bucket list includes the Tro Breizh, the Breton pilgrimage route. As I understand it there is no stamp system, however.
posted by ocschwar at 10:26 AM on January 27, 2022 [2 favorites]

These stamps are pretty popular in Japan and you'll find them at train stations or tourist areas. The train companies will often have "stamp rallies" where you try to collect all the stamps in a certain area or route and then maybe get some kind of reward. I enjoy collecting the stamps but I'm not enough of a completionist that I ever expect I'll get them all so I never looked into what would happen if you actually completed it.

The island of Shikoku (in Japan) has a pilgrimage trail where you stop at 88 temples along the way. My first winter in Japan I got it in my head that I wanted to visit Shikoku and check it out. I had no plans of completing the whole thing but did buy the booklet at the first temple and walked to the first couple of temples (they weren't too far away). At each temple you can pay a couple of hundred yen to get a page stamped and then a monk will write some calligraphy on it. I stopped off at a couple of other temples during the trip as well. I'd love to do the entire trail properly but that won't happen any time soon. The next time I go back to Japan I've already told my brother-in-law that he's coming with me for a week to hike on the Kumano Kodo.

Here in Canada there's been a bit of promotion for the Trans Canada Trail. They should get a stamp system. You wouldn't be able to collect them all in one go but it would be fun to fill up a stamp book over a lifetime.
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 7:30 PM on January 27, 2022 [1 favorite]