Writing

Corfu Walks With Hilary
By Theresa Nicholas

According to some sources, and now a ‘truth’ rampant in the world of tittle-tattle and hearsay, Hilary Whitton Paipeti neither created nor founded the Corfu Trail. Apparently, she might have been one of a group of Corfu Residents who ‘devised it’ in 2001. That would have been quick work, since the first walkers hiked the route that year, in the company of Hilary herself (the hike is described in the article ‘Out of the Blue’ elsewhere on this page). This series of diary entries, made by Hilary’s walking companion Theresa Nicholas during the second half of the 1990s when she was helping Hilary develop the Trail route, demonstrate that its alleged non-creator really was the one who put the work in.
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On the Corfu Trail
by Hilary Paipeti - first published in The Corfiot Magazine, June 2001

'Everywhere I look there's blue,' exclaimed Dudley in awe. It was May 2001 and we were sitting at the harbour at Benitses enjoying a cold beer after a day of walking on the Corfu Trail, the island's long-distance waymarked route. Close by, brightly painted fishing boats bobbed by the jetty. Beyond stretched the blue, with only the bare mainland mountains sundering the sea from the sky. After the grey of England during the wettest twelve months since records began, coupled with the Foot and Mouth crisis which barred hikers from the countryside, Corfu that Spring was a joy, and the Trail a journey back to normality.  
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The Other Side of the Mountain
by Hilary Paipeti - first published in The Corfiot Magazine, August 2010

It was a morning in May, sometime in the early 1980s, and I'd set out from Nissaki to walk to Old Sinies and - I hoped - beyond. This was my first excursion on Mount Pantokrator, except by car on the then-gravel road as far as Strinilas. Further, the road, now asphalt all the way to the top, deteriorated into an obstacle course of boulders and bumps. On the other side of the massif, Old Perithia was just about accessible by car, as long as you were prepared to risk shredded tyres and damaged undercarriage. A few settlements in the foothills were reachable by road, but otherwise, the Pantokrator range was only foot-friendly.   
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