Via Alpina 15.5. 4. Stage

I'm now well ahead in the stages.
And after a wonderful night on a small hill in the forest, where I slept peacefully for 10 hours and only woke up once (like every morning at around 3/4am when it gets really cold, to pull the sleeping bag on) from a beautiful dream, I was able to run 20km today and climbed my first 1200m mountain. Up there are beautiful and magical beech forests with lots of wild garlic. I first smelled the wild garlic and then saw it. It is the broad-leaved kind, which we hardly find anymore... it was so beautiful there and above all quiet.
After today's route meandered along the motorway for over 5 km, which could be heard right up to the top of the mountain, along with the noise from the mine that I passed, I really enjoyed the silence up there!
I am glad that civilization is now becoming less and less and the mountains are becoming more and more.
Today I met another hiker. A young man with a backpack. We passed each other and said hello, then after 15 meters we turned around and went back to each other to talk. I asked him where he had spent the night because he was also traveling with a tent. However, he was walking the Way of St. James from Ljubljana to Trieste and had already walked 30km... so we couldn't give each other much advice. I was really elated after that and just kept walking. When I got to the next village, there were two cyclists with their fully loaded touring bikes. One was called Pink Pamela and the guy had used every free centimeter on his bike as storage space. That was really impressive! The two Englishmen had met by chance at the place and discovered that they both had the same destination: India.
But they take different routes. They spent the rest of the day there, chatting and eating together, and were just about to leave when I arrived. We then chatted for another half hour before I prepared my dinner under the church roof (like the two before me, because it was raining).
I gave them some tips for wild camping in Croatia. After all, I was just there and I gave them a portion of rice and dried (pre-cooked) lentils to lose some weight. I packed way too much food! And now I'm lugging it up and down the mountains.
This is partly due to the short preparation time. I usually spread all the food on the floor and then go through it day by day. This time I just roughly packed up what I had. Also because I packed from the bus...
And I didn't have time to take a look at where I could get something and whether one or the other hut was open... Unfortunately, the most important hut for me is closed, which is in the middle of the ridge at 1800 meters. But I hope that I can put up my tent there. There is a bivouac hut near another one, which I will use, and the huts at 1500 meters are open...
So I won't starve! And I'll definitely get my food. It's just absurd to carry food for 10 days! I could have learned that from the PCT, I had too much food with me and that slowed me down because I had so much luggage. But especially when I have to carry 4 liters of water, because there aren't that many water sources here, so I have to carry 4 liters, except today, when I carried less because there were actually 4 water sources today! And once I had to buy 3 liters in a supermarket to refill. Luckily it was open at 7.30 a.m. Otherwise I would have carried on without it...but I already told you about that and then forgot again ;)