Ode to a long distance hiker

As you tread along an ancient path, you may often wonder why you do it?

Looking at the scenery, you realise you’ve stepped in some dung,

Horse, cow, bear, dog or worse still a fox,

All leave a present for you on the path, thanks guys,

Life has turned into an eternal game of avoid the dung,

With your home on your back you often feel like a tramp or bum,

Lets face it, you look and smell like one too, you smell bad!

Your hands are dirty, and your feet pong too,

And you ran out of loo roll 2 days ago.

Here you are in the great outdoors, thinking about toilets,

‘How lucky I am’ you say to yourself watching a storm build ahead,

Weather is quickly followed by, funnily enough, more weather,

When it’s wet, you slip and slide in the mud or snow,

When it’s dry, you kick up a cloud of dust and horse dung, moving fast to avoid breathing it in,

Ah, the fresh air of the forest,

You’ve been drinking from mountain streams and springs for days now,

Let me tell you my friends, you have been drinking animal wee all this time,

As you cook food with a cloud of mosquitoes buzzing around your head,

You doubt if you will ever eat ramen noodles back home again,

Then you crawl into a damp piece of nylon feeling a lump under your bum,

Now the fun begins – in the dark the animals play games with you,

They play ‘rustling leaves’ before getting bored and change to ‘twig snapping’,

All this plays on your imagination and you wonder if there is anything out there slavering hungrily near to the tent.

When you finally drift off, at 2am a deer decides to run into a guy rope,

Twanging it like a bow, nearly giving you a heart attack,

But in the morning you look across the mountains,

Watching a sky transform into a mass of light and colour,

Now you understand what you are doing, and why you came to this place,

To connect and have an experience with nature,

In a way that many people may never know.