Type II Fun: My First Multi-Day Hike

Growing up, travel was always a relaxed affair with my family. The focus was to visit a new (or familiar) place, enjoy some good food and drinks, and see some iconic touristic landmarks. I’m privileged enough to have visited some lovely places around Europe following this format: from seeing the Basilica in Florence and Coliseum in Rome, to roaming London and Paris. I’ve gotten to experience many of the highlights that Europe has to offer as a conventional tourist, but something has always left me wanting. Hidden among the many joys of travel are some serious annoyances that have always dampened my experiences. I don’t care for large crowds of people and scripted touristic experiences. I started looking for something more than what was essentially the same holiday but re-skinned to a slightly different culture and scenery.

In the summer of 2024, we celebrated my mother’s birthday by going on a summer cruise around the Fjords of Norway, and hidden in another touristic holiday was a taste of the type of travel I want to prioritise in the next few years of my life. First, we booked an excursion to see the Briksdal Glacier, which involved a short hike to its base. The scenery was gorgeous, and besides inducing some climate change anxiety over how fast it’s apparently melting, was an incredible experience. I followed that up with a solo hike a couple of days later to Pulpit Rock, which was about 4 hours walking round trip and was, in hindsight, a life changing experience. It led me to research more about hiking and outdoors experiences, and to stumble across the idea of type II fun.

Type II fun refers to experiences that are stressful, and potentially painful, in the moment but become positive and fun memories in retrospect (unless the outcome is exceptionally poor). It nicely complements Type I fun—which is fun both in the moment and in retrospect—whilst adding a sense of achievement and a stronger memory to cling to. A good example of type II fun/satisfaction for me is public speaking: I’m usually very stressed and anxious in the build up to a talk, which generally plateus during the event, and in hindsight I usually find the experience very valuable and enjoyable. When I learned about this concept, and linked it to existing type II fun memories, it unlocked a potentially new and huge world of options for fun activities for me to seek out. Naomi eventually stumbled across an itenary from Travelbase to hike a multi-day trail through the Dolomite mountain range in Italy, and we immediately pounced on the idea. The Dolomiti trail involves 5 days of self-guided, hut-to-hut hiking where the aim of the day is to wake up as early as possible, carry all your belongings on your back and hike to the next hut along the trail where you will be sleeping. In hindsight, I’m glad we didn’t read too much into it as I’m not sure we would have actually gone for it if we saw the fine print (the explanations on lightning safety protocol made Naomi go slightly pale).

After spending so many years glued to a computer screen or television, spending several days out in the wilderness and meeting strangers gave me a lot of fresh perspective. So many things that used to scare me before feel insignificant after feeling the primal fear of potentially falling off the side of a mountain whilst scrambling up boulders and carrying a 12+kg backpack on your back. It’s very difficult to understand the internal shift that happens unless you experience it. When I came back to Malta, and found myself stuck in traffic again, or giving a presentation or lecture, I felt I could control my anxiety much better. One year later and, for the most part, the feeling has not worn off at all. It’s made me want to visit other beautiful places and take on other multi-day hikes. Unfortunately with climate change and serious problems in the world right now, it seems that it’s going to get harder and harder for people to experience something like this.

P.S: No Generative AI was used in the writing of this blog post, except for fixing an issue with getting the video to render. Remember if you ever go in the wilderness to leave no trace :)