Today we would have a rather short tour because we splitted the regular stage from Valbruna to Tarvisio since I wanted to stay on the Monte Lussari for the night.
The night at the Valbruna Inn was very calm, we could even sleep with our balcony door open because there were no blood-sucking monsters aka mosquitos outside. But it took me a while before I finally slept – two espressi were probably too much. 😂
At night the rain woke us and I checked whether our clothes outside on the balcony got wet. But no problem there. Btw, since our Bivacco at the Inn was so funny I had to make pictures of it (the bathroom was as big as the whole room 😂):
The breakfast at the Valbruna Inn was the best so far and I daresay it might be the best on the whole trail. The choice was great, with a good assortiment of jams, fantastic honey, nice wholegrain croissants, wonderful coffee etc. We definitely ate longer than ever before. 😉
Finally, at around 9 a.m. we started with today’s stage. At first we followed the pedestrian lane to the Southern end of Valbruna before the path led us on some 4×4 road which was quite nice to hike. 20 minutes or so out of town there were some scouts having their camp with quite some tents.
Then we crossed a bridge over the Saisera (not carrying much water) and followed the track up in long winding roads but mostly through the forest so we had not too much hot sun.
Every once in a while on hiking higher up we had some nice views on the Val Saisera.
At around 1600m we saw the Monte Lussari with its buildings for the first time:
A little before noon we reached our destination. There were so many tourists and you could easily tell that only a handful were hikers (if ever!). Most came up here wearing sandals (there’s a cable car from Tarvisio up to the Monte Lussari – I think that explains a lot). 😉 We quickly headed to our accomodation, the Rifugio al Convento, to get rid of our backpacks because we wanted to meet Martin who also was somewhere around. He wanted to continue down to Valbruna so we decided to meet up here. I like that it feels somehow so very normal to meet someone on short notice on the top of a mountain heading there from two different towns. 😉 That’s long distance hikers’ style of getting together. 😂
We met on the peak up there (funny side note: there are two different peaks with crosses and of course we went to the wrong first 😁). Then we decided to have a drink at our accomodation which is also an inn and was well crowded. We exchanged our experiences and tried to find out where and when we might meet again on the way. And luckily Martin thought of having a picture together – we three being the only thru-hikers currently on the AAT we know of:
Then Martin set off to Valbruna and we went to our room to have a shower. Afterwards we took some food stuff from our provisions with us and had late lunch with a perfect view:
From there we also saw when a lot of scouts at the age between 10-15 arrived up here carrying backpacks nearly as tall as they were. I felt a little sorry for them. 😉
Then we explored the area on the Monte and took many, many pictures. The view up here from all sides is really awesome and I understand why so many people get up here by cable car!
At 6 p.m. we returned to our accomodation for dinner. It was already very quiet up here because the cable car stops its service at 5.15 p.m. and we enjoyed having the mountain nearly to ourselves. Ordering dinner was complicated. Jure, the inn owner, had already left and the rest of his staff knew neither English nor German. 😒 In the end we got mostly what we wanted. But it was long, hard way to get there. 😂
Meanwhile the scouts came along and went to the peak with the cross next to the cable car and began to sing many Italian song. Man, I didn’t even know that there exist so many scout songs! I didn’t even know scouts do sing together like some folklore troupe.
After dinner we packed our stuff and headed back to the peak because I wanted to make some nice sunset pictures. Only there were too many clouds in the west which kind of destroyed my fantasy of gorgeous red glowing mountain tops. 😢 (Meanwhile the scouts kept singing. 😂) All I got was this:
So we went to find the only geocache on the Monte and at 9 p.m. we returned to our room. It was getting even quieter (yes, the scouts stopped finally singing) and right now at 10 p.m. there’s no single sound to hear outside. It was a great decision to stay on the Monte Lussari for the night!!!
Some figures for today:
- 12km
- 1164m up
- 300m down
- Hiking time: 2h 15m