Six months, four countries and The Guy Flow
It’s fun to check in on curlers, and retired curlers, in their off-ice pursuits.
It struck me, a while ago, that former competitor Guy Hemmings—who recently turned 60—had to be on a very lengthy vacation of sorts.
I’d been seeing photos of him in various wild places for months at a time; one moment he seemed to be in a desert, and in the next he appeared to be climbing a glacier. The photos started cycling through social media last summer, and finished only recently.
Then I recalled the inaugural PointsBet Invitational championship held back in September. That was televised on Quebec’s RDS network, and Hemmings is their chief colour analyst … was he on duty for that event, or was he in a jungle somewhere?
As it turns out, Hemmings interrupted a mammoth six-month hike of South America to return to Canada for the PointsBet … and promptly went back to hiking.
“While we were in Bolivia, I had to do the trip back and forth to Canada for six days to do the coverage of curling on RDS,” Hemmings acknowledged.
His wife, Josée Plamondon, waited for him in Bolivia.
“The trip started in mid-June and went to mid-December,” said the two-time Brier finalist. “There wasn’t a lot of trip preparation, by that I mean we didn’t book anything in advance. We wanted to go with the flow, stay longer in places that we enjoy or get out faster if we didn’t enjoy it as much.”
The Guy Flow™ took the couple to Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia and Argentina, with Peru providing a two-month stay.
“Peru had spectacular hikes in the Andes, climbing as high as 6,000 metres. We had donkeys carrying most of the stuff.
“We camped at 4,000 metres, which meant adapting to thin air.”
By this point, as you can clearly see, Hemmings was firing me photos via email. Lots and lots of photos.
He and Josée checked out Machu Picchu, the capital, Lima, Cusco, Arequipa, Paracas and Puno before crossing the border into Bolivia.
“The weirdest thing we did there was stay a few weeks on the Altiplano and visit the Uyuni desert, where your senses are completely fooled by what you see and feel.”
The Uyuni is the world’s largest salt flat, or playa, at over 10,000 square kilometres. That’s where Hemmings tested his flexibility in a curling slide photo.
Not bad.
Argentina proved to be a feast for his senses. “That’s one of the greatest places to live on earth,” said Hemmings. “We crossed it, from the north border to the furthest part in the south, reaching Tierra del Fuego in Patagonia.
“I don’t have the words to describe how beautiful that part of Argentina is. So many great hikes available, glacier mountains, lakes, animals … your eyes get sore after a few weeks because they’re too busy, admiring the landscape.”
The pair finished their trip in the Argentine capital of Buenos Aries, “just in time to enjoy the wildness of the World Cup!”
Now Hemmings was sending higher resolution images of some pics. That’ll teach me to whine about image quality. He even sent some PDF versions.
This Guy, who also hiked the French Pyrenees four years ago, is obviously still pumped about this trip of a lifetime.
“We walked more than 1,000 kilometres and hiked over 1,100,” said Hemmings. “We didn’t have a car. We flew a couple of times but only when we had no other options. We travelled by bus—some rides were 26 hours long—and by bicycle, in the backs of pickup trucks, by collectivo—that’s shared minivans locals use to commute—but mostly by foot.
“I’ll never forget how big and how high the Andes are, we basically lived six months in the Andes except for the last two weeks in Buenos Aires and Montevideo. The beauty that it has to offer is beyond words. It is just so cold at more than 4,000 metres; when the sun sets at four o’clock, the temperature drops so drastically it’s impossible to get used to it.”
Hemmings ended up going through two pairs of hiking boots. The first pair were almost ruined after 45 days, so Hemmings gave them to a hiker from Seattle whose boots had been stolen. That’s just the kind of Guy he is.
“The last pair I put outside a container in Buenos Aries, on the street, and someone picked them up in a minute,” laughed Hemmings. “So those continue to walk around somewhere in Argentina.”