France 2024 - Days 79 and 80 – La Météo

Well, I am a menteur. I had said that I was not going to work any longer over my last days but come Saturday morning I started working on the chapter about Southern California Water Supply and stuck to it until I finished it by mid-afternoon. Since I was at home, I heard my wonderful landlady, Françoise, come to clean the pigeon poop from my front terrace. We engaged in a nice conversation and she asked me if I had been to Issigeac. No, I hadn’t. “Oh, but you must go there. It is a charmant old town, and tomorrow Sunday they will have the market. You should bring your swimming suit and go into the stream.” Little did I know that Le Diable had possessed the kind lady to throw me once again into the path of torture and agony. 

Sunday morning I took my time to breakfast and get ready to go. Google Maps told me that it was a one hour and fifteen minutes ride, so I felt I could delay my departure until 9 am, so I could get there on time to see the market started. It was a fine day and, as always, I scoffed at the idea of consulting La Météo. To me they are nothing but wild guesses. Well, now I regret it, because today Sunday was predicted to be very hot, with top temperatures of 38° C or 100° F.

In happy ignorance I started biking. I was heading south, crossing La Dordogne, and going over the hills to Issigeac. Mind you, these are not huge hills, but they extend for hundreds of kilometers, in an eternal up and down. Me, I am great at going down, but am not so great at going up. In fact, I much prefer walking the upslopes. The hills are covered by acres and acres of sunflowers, which makes them beautiful, and by acres and acres of vineyards. Unfortunately, there is not a lot of shade between fields, so pretty soon I started feeling the heat. Fortunately for me there was a breeze, so by rushing from shade to shade I was able to cool down somehow by evaporation. Still, after a while I started feeling the symptoms of heat exhaustion, so my rests became longer and longer, at the same time the sunflowers were turning to catch the piercing rays of a sun that was getting higher and higher over the horizon. One hour followed another, and what was supposed to be a ride of little more than an hour lasted at least three before I reached my destination close to noon time.

Issigeac is indeed a charming medieval town, not much bigger than a post stamp. The market was in plain ebullition, but there was not a store open where I could buy a bottle of water. Lots of great looking cheeses, saucissons, tourons, and kitschy embroideries, but no water! I started to panic and had the notion that I could take the bus back to Bergerac (no good that idea, because during Les Estivals there is only one run per day at 10 am). Well, I had to use the little water and energy I had left and get back home before passing out. So I turned back, and this time using the highway, made a beeline for Bergerac. It was torture, and once again I was forced to stop often (always in the shade), soldier up walking the uphills under the blazing sun, barely kissing my depleted water bottle. I even stooped so low as to “milk” a couple of ounces from the water bottle left behind by a construction worker!

Finally, about 10 km from Bergerac, I came to the wine-producing region of Monbazillac (a part of the DAC of Bergerac), where in a small winery I found an outside faucet and was able to guzzle several liters of water. I also took a long siesta under the shady awning, which must have drawn some sneer comments from the owners of the chateau, and thus refreshed I managed to cover the last stretch back home. It was hot! Really, really hot!

But I made it home and there, waiting for me like a source of life, was my fourth and last bottle of Giulia beer. Never has a cold beer tasted so good!

France 2024 - Days 77 and 78 – Unsettled

I am unsettled. With less than a week to go before my date of return to California I am having a hard time concentrating on anything in particular. I could go back to my writing, but I can write back home whereas I probably won’t be back in Périgord for many years to come. I feel I have to soak in the spirit of the region, and of the town of Bergerac, so I can see them in my imagination at a future time.

For starters, I went back to Lascaux to once again immerse on the beauty of the paintings, taking my time to imagine the hand of the artist who, 20,000 years ago, “saw” the power of the horses and auroxes that surrounded them, or the herd of deer swimming across La Vezere, and immortalize them on the walls of a cave of difficult access, as some sort of message to future generations.

On getting back, I faced another of my last challenges: To continue eating some the magnificent dishes that make French cuisine so unique. Tonight I am trying Moules Frites at the small restaurant at the Regional Park of La Pombonne. I have been waiting for this treat for a good couple of months, first because they only offer this dish on Thursday evenings, and second because it is so popular that you have to make a reservation days in advance. Moules Frites could be translated as Fried Mussels, but that would give you the wrong idea. They should be called Moules et Frites, to convey that they are steamed mussels (cooked in a wine mariniere sauce, a Rochefort creamy sauce, or a wine parsley sauce), served with a big serving of pommes frites (French fries). I chose the Rochefort mussels and they were divine. I will need to make them back at home, for Ronnie. The only problem is that I started dining at 9 pm, and was not out of there until 11 pm, way past my bed time!

The following morning I went on a long bike ride along the right bank of La Dordogne, from Bergerac to Lalinde (east of Bergerac), and saw with great satisfaction that (1) two months of biking have increased my stamina to the point that the 50 km round trip was no big deal, and (2) La Dordogne still has many beautiful spots that I would do well to discover. Maybe on Sunday, two days from now, I will try to the path between Bergerac and Libourne, to the west.

Back to food, which is becoming an obsession. I want to try a rabbit aspic, again, so a couple of days ago I ordered two pigs feet, which I have to cook to get the gelatine. Oh dear, they are huge, so now I have the challenge of cooking them today so I can do the aspic (that would be tomorrow’s meal, Saturday), and then make a dish with the cooked pig trotters (I think I will do them in a tomato sauce) for my Sunday dinner. Today Friday, I think I will do a fondue, with veggies and shrimp instead of bread croutons. I still have fish and fruits de mer in the fridge, so maybe do a fish soup on Monday, and … My problem is that I only know how to cook for a small army, so I fear there will be a lot of left overs for Tuesday and Wednesday and then it will be time for me to take off!

France 2024 - Days 75 and 76 – Much to do about nothing

I feel I have to squeeze my last days in France to the max, but in so doing I am like a kid trying to play with all his toys at the same time. For example, I went to town trying to visit every place I have been at one more time, and so ended in the excellent display the municipality has about the history of Bergerac. I have been there at least three times, but on this occasion I took my time to read the legend of every display and study each photograph with the eyes of a local. Have I told you about the river monster that lives in La Dordogne? La Coulobre is a giant river snake/dragon that slithers up and down the river, shaping with its movement the meanders of the river, and is happy to snooze at the bottom for years on end until, in a fit of rage, comes out to upset the barges that ply merchandise up and down the river.

Also, did I already tell you that Bergerac was hit by the Back Death (the Bubonic Plague) in the Middle Ages, and lost nearly two thirds of its population?

There is a new exhibition at the Tourist Office about Cyrano de Bergerac, where you move through the different acts under the tutelage of a young actor who has just landed the role of Cyrano. Lots of memorabilia about the different representations of the play, both in the theater and film, and about the historical facts about the life of the real Cyrano, and it was lots of fun. I particularly enjoyed seeing this young actor being trained in theatrical sword play.

On Wednesday I took the bus, with the ultimate goal of going one last time to Lascaux. Ah, but the crafty French played me yet another dirty trick: It turns out there is a bus schedule for the times school is in session, because the public buses double as school buses, and a different schedule for the vacation period. So I took the bus to Périgueux at daybreak, just to realize once I was there (7h20) that the bus to Lascaux was not at 7h50 as I had read in the schedule, but at 8h50. OK, no big deal. But this is where the French duplicity comes into play, because on top of the vacation schedule, there is the summer schedule (les Estivales), which is somewhere in between. So the bus to Lascaux left at 7h55, which I missed because I had gone for a walk around town, and the next one was not until 12h00. Of course everyone knows about the Estivales schedule, except for the dumb tourist. Fine, I will go to Lascaux tomorrow, and for the day will be happy to visit the Museum of Art and Prehistoric Archaeology, which doesn’t open for another two hours. And here I was imagining that I had adapted to French life!

 

France 2024 - Day 74 – Bordeaux (aka Burdeos or Burdigala)

Dallas told me once that as part of their eternal damnation, those souls headed for Hell would have to go through Atlanta International. Well, I now believe that those penitents headed for Purgatory have to go, again and again, through the train station Bordeaux-Saint Jean! Crowded, hot, poorly labeled, and without any help, the penitent soul has to seek his way by elbowing others aside, going up and down to different tracks until, by a last-moment divine grace, he stumbles unto the right platform a minute short of departure. In other words, I did not have any love for Bordeaux, and about zero interest in visiting it.

However, I met a couple of Spaniards along El Camino, who praised Burdeos highly as their favorite French city. Really? Well, maybe I should at least take a look, so after the FlixBus from Pamplona left me at the train station, at 9h00, I decided to spend the day checking things out. Of course I was starting with a big load of prejudice and in the least appealing part of town, so I was particularly critical of the trash on the ground and the dirty facades (the porous, creamy limestone from which the city is built is fertile ground for the growth of mold, so unless washed with a certain frequency, the old buildings look somber and uninviting).

As I walked closer to town, however, the streets became cleaner and more and more of the buildings had a clean, creamy aspect to them. Once I reached the city center, I was favorably impressed by the plazas, the churches, the monuments, and the happy awakening of the city. I was planning on taking the tourist bus, which left from the Tourism Office right in the center of town, and got there in time to catch the first run of the day. It is not a hop on-hop off bus, unfortunately, so it was going to give me a bird’s eye view of the different parts of the city, and if I wanted to visit a specific point afterward I would have to take the tram.

Burdigala was a Roman city established ca. 700 BC, distinguished by its location along the left bank of the Garonne river, and by a region where the soil and the maritime climate was conducive to the planting of vineyards. Not much is left of the Roman city, because the city has gone through many stages of expansion, but Bordeaux has retained his great location as one of the prime ports of Europe (the industrial port has since migrated downstream to the estuary of La Gironde, which has allowed Bordeaux to develop their river front with many promenades, green belts, and other types of recreational spaces). Sometime during the Middle Ages the city was protected by a massive wall, of which only the imposing gates remain. The trace of the walls is now followed by wide avenues in a modest Parisian style. When Aquitaine was taken over by the Protestants, many Dutch merchants moved to Bordeaux and built fancy residences, or combined residences and wine cellars, along the waterfront. These areas have gone through many stages of renewal, particularly after the French took back Aquitaine, and were augmented by monumental civic architecture.

The one thing Bordeaux did not have until relatively recently, was a bridge to cross La Garonne, which is a silty river with treacherous sand banks. After being frustrated in one of his campaigns Napoleon I had his engineers build the first bridge, built on wood pilons pushed into the silty bottom. The bridge was not completed until the early 1800’s, a few years after the death of Napoleon. So, going back in history, that means that the right bank of the river developed in a completely different way, largely as silos for the storage of grain and other types of industrial activities. Most of that old industry has now disappeared, leaving behind ghost complexes that are now being considered for demolition and construction of new residential areas. One repurposed industrial complex that I wish I had time to visit is called Darwin, and is a demonstration project for all things ecologic.

After I completed my tour I took tram B to La Cité du Vin, an ultramodern complex that, among other things, hosts the Wine Museum. The building is “modern” and presumably represents the swirling of wine inside a carafe. “Rare”, if you know what I mean. But the museum is fabulous. At the start you collect a small device and earphones, which you then use to tap into the different displays. To begin with you embark on a flight over some of the most beautiful wine-producing portions of the world, such as France, Italy, Germany, South Africa and southern Australia, and then you get to listen to the experiences of wine growers from Santorini (where the vines need to be nested to protect them from heavy winds), Georgia (where some of the oldest grape varieties were domesticated and wine making techniques have varied but little in 3,000 years), Chile, Napa Valley, Spain, and France. Every region has its own challenges, and has developed its own strategies to deal with these challenges. I have been lucky enough to have visited these regions, so I was more and more drawn into the mistic of wine. The major lessons is that the regional quality of a wine is strongly influenced by terroir (the combination of soil type, soil slope, slope orientation, and elevation/temperature), sunlight, rainfall, suitable varieties and, of course, the ingenuity and knowledge of local growers and vignerons.

A good part of the museum is devoted to the different ways in which wine is manufactured. First step is, of course, the care of the vines. Turns out that in the Americas vines are infected by an aphid, phylloxera, which sometime in the late 1800’s early 1900’s jumped over the Atlantic and started devastating the European vineyards. Some treatments have been developed, but what seems to have worked best is to bring rootstock from America, which has developed resistance to phylloxera, and grafting unto it the ancient European varieties. According to the display, nowadays the majority of European vineyards are grafted in this way. Another interesting “pest” is the fungus Botrytis cinerea, present in the Sauterne region southwest of Bordeaux. This fungus develops over some of the grapes, slowly eating at the skin of the grape, causing the grapes to lose some of their moisture and shrivel up, concentrating the sugars and flavors in the remaining juice. The resulting Sauterne wine is sweet thanks to the "noble rot" caused by the fungus.

Then comes the tending of the vines. In Europe irrigation is considered an insult to Mother Nature and is forbidden by the wine associations, but in other parts of the world it is the only way to keep a crop going. The grower then has to keep an eye on biological pests and decide how to deal with them (pesticides or bioecological measures), thin the fruit buds so the plant is not overloaded, thin the leaves (both to delay maturation and to facilitate sun exposure) and, when the moment is right, harvest the fruit.

There are many different approaches to the mashing, pressing, and fermentation of the grapes, and every variety has its own idiosyncrasies. Then comes storing, ageing, and in many cases blending to achieve the wine that the vigneron has in mind. Finally there is the degustation of the final product, and what I think was my favorite part of the museum. How do you explain the kaleidoscope of texture, aroma, taste, and color of good wine? The museum uses different materials to show textures that could be attributed to a wine, such as soft, silky, rasping, rough. It also has many glass bells with materials such as pencil shavings, orange peels, leather, fruits, or flowers, where the beginner can squeeze a small membrane to circulate air through the glass bell and get a whiff of what that smell might be like in a wine (they even have a series of quizzes to encourage the visitor to concentrate). I am excited about conducting some wine tastings at home and trying some of these techniques!

All in all, I very much enjoyed my visit to Bordeaux, but was also happy to finally make it back to Bergerac. I have about 10 days left before I have to head back home, so from here on every moment will be precious.

France 2024 - Day 73 – Pamplona

I am taking it easy today, so I woke up late-ish (7 am), and took time over my morning coffee before going out into the world. Pamplona was built on a bluff overseeing the Arga River, but has since expanded to the flood plain, so one could speak of a High town and a Low town. The Low town has a lot of green spaces, sport and recreational facilities, and industry, so you can see that Pamplona is trying to be flood-resilient. One of the unique sports facilities are frontones, 3-sided wall enclosures where people practice hand-ball and jai-alai. The latter could be called hand-basket ball, and is one of the fastest and most dangerous sports you could imagine. Two (or four players) with helmets and hand-baskets (a type of curved narrow basket that is securely strapped to the right hand), hurl a very hard rubber ball with their curbed basket against the wall, at crazy speeds taking advantage of the centrifugal force, and the opposite team has to catch it and hurl it back after only one bounce. The players, or pelotaris, bounce high on the walls of the frontón to sweep the ball into their baskets and hurl it back to the opponent, and the game seems to go faster and faster as the back-and-forth between the players builds up. Mind you, this is a very hard ball, so if a pelotari miscalculates and gets hit it can lead to serious injury. However, like in baseball, in jai-alai the pelotari has to respect the ball but not fear it; deep inside they want to grab that ball and send it back to the wall!

Climbing from the Low city to the Upper old town one goes through the city ramparts, which in theory protected it from attack from the riverfront. The High town is where most of the public buildings and old town are located. The cathedral is nice, but cannot hold a candle to the cathedral in Burgos. In the nearby Church of San Lorenzo is the Chapel of San Ferrmín, who happens to be the patron saint of Pamplona. He lived back there in the First Century, converted from the pagan religion of the Basques to Christianity, and eventually became the First Bishop of the Roman city of Pamplona (whatever its name might had been). Eventually he felt the need to go to Palestine (bad move), where he was executed by Herod, at the height of the first persecution of the Christians, circa 60 AD, to become a martyr. He used to be celebrated in October, but some entrepreneurial spirit figured out that his feast day could be moved to July 6, right at the time the bullocks were being driven down from the Pyrenees to market, so one could have a week-long celebration as La Fiesta de San Fermín, and reap significant profits from it. Somewhere in the XVII century, the driving of the young bullocks through the town, challenged the young locals to tease the bulls to start a stampede, so pretty soon you had screaming people trying (without much success) to get to safety before being trampled. Nowadays, La Fiesta de San Fermín, includes a week-long series of events, among which is letting the bullocks (some of them would be full-grown bulls) run down the street everyday for the whole week, while the crazies run with the bulls, swatting them with rolled newspapers if they get too close. They do this every day for a week, but on any occasion the maximum number of bulls that run are between six and ten (we don't want anyone to get hurt, do we?)

Hey Muriel, perhaps they could do the same thing with the fat horses of the High Pyrenees, and have them run through the streets of Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port, scattering away peregrinos in panic! That would add a twist to El Camino.

The Pamplona running of the bulls greatly inspired journalist Ernest Hemingway to write his first novel, "The Sun Also Rises", in which, in his very direct writing style, he draws the reader into the run of the bulls and the harsh Fiesta Brava (the Bull Fight).

France 2024 - Day 72 – Burgos

If you look at a map, you will see that Pamplona and Burgos are quite close to each other, in the province of Navarra. Well, they are not, and getting from one to the other is like going to the Moon. For some reason there are no direct buses between them, so first you have to take a bus from Pamplona to Vitoria and then, on a different line, from Vitoria to Burgos. Of course the bus lines don't talk to each other, so it is a toss of the coin if you will only wait 30 minutes or 2 hours for the transfer. Double the annoyance if you want to go there and back on the same day.

I took the bus at Pamplona at 8h00 and arrived at 13h00 in Burgos, so there goes the full morning "wasted". Not really a waste because my left foot needed rest and recovery, and we were crossing some very pretty landscapes. Here in the foreland of the Pyrenees the sedimentary rocks are uplifted but not folded, so mesas form where a resistant unit of limestone covers softer sandstones and shales. One of these limestones has beautiful ramp structures, indicating that it was formed in a backreef lagoon. Another mesa, Atapuerca, is a famous anthropological site (but more about that later).

I was not going to have a lot of time to be a tourist in Burgos (my return bus was at 17h45) but I only had two goals in mind. First, of course, was to visit the famous Burgos Cathedral and its cloister, masterpieces of the XIII century gothic. I had been here 10 years ago, and well remember its monumental architecture. What I didn't remember (and maybe this is something that happened in the years in between), is that its statuary art has been restored with amazing care, so every scene is bursting with color, like it would have been when completed. The retables were shining in their fresh gold leaf, and the Annunciation, Nativity, and Ascension were an explosion of color. Unfortunately Medieval art was somber, with everyone at the Nativity wearing serious countenances as if tired of too many selfies. I had to chuckle at a scene where a bishop was addressing a crowd because, this being Spain, the bishop had an afternoon shadow on his cheeks and jaw (Spaniards have dense beards and this look is common amongst men in the late afternoon).

From there I went to dinner, because if you are not eating between 2 and 3 pm you will end going hungry. Primer plato was Moronga de Burgos (blood sausage with rice mixed with the blood into the sausage, which is then cut in pieces and fried to give it a crackling skin), and the segundo plato was churrasco con chimichurri, well irrigated with a 1/4 liter of wine and topped with a flan de huevo. Yummy!

My last and most important reason for wanting to spend the day in Burgos was to visit the Museum of Human Evolution, which besides doing a great job at addressing the greater themes of evolution and human evolution, is the repository of the many anthropological discoveries of the Mesa de Atapuerca. As I said before, this mesa is capped by a thick limestone unit, where many caves were formed as the region started being uplifted. Some of these caves are long galleries with the usual assortment of stalactites and stalagmites, which are "open" to the surface by steep pits (simas), elongated fractures, and grotto openings at the edge of the mesa. The museum does a good job explaining how climate changed significantly over the last two million years, spanning humid and warm interglacial episodes and cold advances of the Pleistocene glaciation, and illustrates the changes with impressive, large-scale dioramas. It is in this scenario that humans come into Atapuerca, including Homo antecessor (1.4 to 0.8 million years ago and defined for the first time at Atapuerca), Homo heidelbergensis (0.6 to 0.15 Ma), Homo neanderthalensis (0.12 to 0.03 Ma, or 120,000 to 30,000 years ago), and Homo sapiens (0.04 to date, or 40,000 years go to date). Of course the human family bush has many branches and different subspecies occupied other regions of Africa, Europe, and Asia at overlapping times, but at Atapuerca itself we had these four subspecies evolving into the next, or coexisting.

Atapuerca is a unique site in that the many simas accumulated an incredible variety of animals that simply fell into the holes, and in one case a subterranean sima that was used by the Neanderthals to "dispose"of their dead. It would have seem that they were just tossing them into the hole, but the finding of a large and well-crafted biface ax inside the sima has been interpreted as a sign that the burial site had some spiritual significance.

Highly satisfied with my trip I took the 17h45 bus to Vitoria, missed the bus to Pamplona by 15 minutes and had to wait 2 hours for the next one to leave at 21h00, and finally got to my lodgings at 23h00. Oh, but my foot is still hurting a lot. Let me see ... OMG, I have a huge blood blister in the ball of my foot that is pressing as if I were walking on a pebble! Nothing to do but lance it, after which I felt immediately better.

France 2024 - Day 71 – The up and down stretch between Zubiri and Pamplona

I had a most delicious supper last night (fish soup and stew of lamb riblets), slept well, and was looking forward to the day. It is supposed to be a pretty walk along the Arga River, which like all self-respecting rivers flows downhill. The trail, however, doesn't feel constrained by silly gravity, so from the get go you start climbing steeply along the left bank of the river, and from there on you go down to cross tributary streams and back up again for no apparent reason.

Well, there was a reason for the first hump, as a mining company has taken over the bank to operate several small open pits, process the material, and make big piles of the stuff. What are they mining? Magnesite, MgCO3. This close relative of the much more abundant mineral calcite (CaCO3), found in limestones, was likely formed as hydrothermal fluids exchanged ions with the run-of-the-mill limestones of Navarra. A small panel by the side of the trail lets people know that they are crossing private property, and please stay on the path, and extolls the benefits of magnesite for refractory purposes (MgCO3 is roasted to form MgO or spinel, which is highly refractory), as an amendment to ag soils, and some unspecified virtues for the purpose of environmental cleanup.

Some of the other ups and downs must have been because the property owners down by the river did not want peregrinos tromping all over their properties, which I find quite uncharitable. The river was indeed beautiful on the few places where the path approached it, and was much celebrated by the young peregrinos who delighted on swimming in it. It is delightful to see so many people making friends, laughing in many languages, and radiating energy and good cheer. I have been more like the tortoise, keeping a slow but steady rhythm so, on the average, I am moving at the same speed as that of my younger and more energetic friends.

I have been slowing down, and I will blame it on the geology because the sandstones break into small, angular pieces, that sooner or later poke through my shoe unto the sole of my foot. Mind you, I am also to blame, because instead of wearing proper boots I brought my old walking shoes, the bottom of which is by now pretty thin. But I am nothing if not stubborn, and limping a bit on the left foot I reached Pamplona around 16h00, and my accommodations by 16h30.

I am staying at one of the university dorms, in a perfectly comfortable student room with its own bath, bed, desk, and bookshelves. The residence looks quite new, and I am smack in the center of town. I have booked three nights (two full days), and plan to spend tomorrow Saturday on a flash trip to Burgos, and Sunday exploring Pamplona itself.

Oh, Muriel enlightened me about the fate of the fat horses of the High Pyrenees: They are kept up there to reproduce and grow up, while at the same time keeping the weeds (or the blackberries) from taking over the ground cover. Once they reach working age, they are brought down to auction in the lowlands (they should bring them down the “Primitive Camino”), where farmers buy them as work animals. So don't worry, you will not see them as part of your hamburger in MacDonald's. 

France 2024 - Day 70 – A perfect day

Last night I was too tired and thought only on the hardships, but today it was so beautiful (cool and breeze) that I feel I have to repeat yesterday, through a more positive lens. The Pyrenees are beautiful mountains, that from Caro looked like an endless succession of green canyons crowned by stern rocky cupolas. The canyon I ended walking through was covered on a dense forest of broad-leaf trees (oaks, chestnuts, beeches), and the darn mass of blackberries that in no time had my legs scratched like by a mad cat). There are some small farms way up in the mountain, growing mostly corn. Once you reach the tree line, the ground cover is composed of green grass and clusters of sheep. Of course it was too hot, so I had to bump the sheep aside to get a bit of the shade.

Once you reach the top of the canyon, and slug farther toward La Vierge of Ourisson, you are on top of the world! From there one can see the long valleys gracefully descending toward the plain of Bayonne. From the Spanish side fog blows through the passes, so for a moment you feel suspended at the end of the world, which is a very good reason to pray to our Lady of Ourisson.

The hard part starts here, because the grass becomes scarce, the sheep disappear, and you are alone facing your waning forces and worst fears. That is when I sighted the last big tall mountain, and in my heart prayed to our Lady of Ourisson for a miracle, which she graciously granted by moving the trail from straight up the mountain to skirting it on the south, closely following the border between France and Spain. Then you come into a different country, with steep hillslopes that seem to go on forever, while you cling to this edge path, which goes from the head of one drainage to the other, and wonder if this is going to go on until you reach the Mediterranean. This is the "wet" side of the Pyrenees, constantly shrouded in fog, which in turn results in a dense forest cover and very luscious meadows of grass. You would expect to find sheep here, right? Alas, what you find are numerous herds of very fat horses, carrying cow bells. They are fine looking animals that would look great pulling a plow, but there is no agriculture anywhere around here. Now, I don't want to start any rumors, but I suspect these are meat animals who, like Hansel, are just gaining weight until the time comes.

Eventually this border trail enters Spain and the Province of Navarra, but keeps parallel to the border until you are ready to drop off of exhaustion. It is then that it turns and, in a lull between the clouds of fog, you see for the first time the beautiful crags of the Kingdom of Navarra. All of a sudden you are transported to the hundreds of conflicts between Spain and France, and the times when Spain was flooding the French with inexpensive illegal merchandise, and the French were trying to enforce customs through this impossibly steep and convoluted border. Contraband was one thing our dear Basques understood very well, so this was a never-ending story. Even English Captain Jack Aubrey (sown into the costume of a dancing bear) and his friend Dr. Steven Maturin traversed the Pyrenees to smuggle Jack out of France!  (See Patrick O'Brien's fabulous novels for further reference.)

The way down was, as I have already told you, a Calvary, but I forgot to tell you about the dense forest that clings to the steep slopes. Perfect cover for smugglers and the occasional forays of the French border patrol, or for a desperate medieval battle.

Roncesvalles, besides being my saving port, is not much of anything. I believe it lives from the Camino de Santiago tourism, so they maintain three or four pilgrim hostels. Note to self: Forget about pre-booking accommodation. You will be paying a steep overprice. I stayed at a guesthouse that cost me 72 euros, whereas the hostel would have cost me 15 euros (same is true for the next step of El Camino, where I am paying 30 euros for a bunk bed without a towel, whereas I could have gotten the same for 15 euros a lot closer to the Puente de Rabia, and with a towel).

Oh, yes, back to Roncesvalles. So it is little more than a cluster of hostels without a village to support it. Why then does it stick to mind? Well, in 778, Charlemagne took his Frank army over the Pyrenees and destroyed the City of Pamplona. All smug he turned back home, but the Basques, mad as hornets at the destruction of their main city, fell on the Frank army at Roncesvalles (they were probably slugging up the same steep slopes I stumbled down), isolated the rearguard of the Frankish lords, and wiped them out! Among the ones killed was Roland, a Frank commander dear to Charlemagne, who elevated him posthumously to the rank of Paladin.

OK, so now we come to Thursday, when I woke full of aches at Roncesvalles, took a double-strength Iboprufen, and started the 20 km walk to Zubiri. It was a glorious day, cooler and breezier, and walking down the much gentler slopes of the watershed of the Arga River I had a much easier time enjoying the beauty of Navarra. I love walking paths that take you under the canopy of the trees, where you have to stop often to enjoy the rustling of the trees, and it was on one of these instances when I was overtaken by a group of young people, who were laughing and joking as young people do. I took a moment to let them go by when, right behind came this young Italian woman, slender like a fay, carrying an enormous backpack. We said a quick hello as she powered past me, but after a few meters she stopped cold, to hear the rustling of the leaves. Then she approached one of the trees and gave it a long friendly hug before resuming her march. I caught up to her a couple of times, because she had stopped to smell the flowers, or put her feet in a stream. Here is a person who really enjoyed the wonderful nature that surrounds us.

I was a bit more pragmatic, and between short spells of contemplation of the landscape, I dutifully stopped at every town crossed by El Camino, to have a glass of red wine (Navarra has some very fine wines), a tapa, and some light conversation with my fellow travelers. I love traveling through Spain!

I should mention that the Pyrenees are a collision mountain chain, formed when Spain got pushed against France, pretty much as Italy pushed unto France to form the Alps, toward the end of the Cretaceous. The rocks I saw are probably of Mesozoic age (I couldn't find any fossils), and form sequences of black shales and sandstones toward the bottom and limestones toward the top. The folded limestones form many of the craggy peaks of the High Pyrenees, but in the paths of El Camino we see lots of shales and sandstones. Interestingly, the paths follow the strike of the shale beds, and over centuries the peregrinos have carved deep ruts in these shales, bound by steep ridges of sandstone. Now and then the path has to cut across the strike, which makes for a very nasty rocky crossing, hard on the ankles and a real nightmare for biking peregrinos.

I made it to Zubiri in good spirits and good time, and crossed the river using the double-arched medieval Puente de la Rabia. Legend has it that to keep  the cattle from getting rabies, small stock holders used to walk them around the central peer of the bridge, and hence the name. Navarra is a land of dense forest, so all sorts of legends exist about the aquelarres that evil witches would hold in the depths of the forest. The legends were local and of little importance, because these were remote places that nobody knew about. With the opening of El Camino, however, the legends started to travel, and in the XVI and XVII centuries the inquisition "cleansed" the land of many a witch and  warlock. I think I will limit my further activities to the daylight hours.

France 2024 - Days 68 and 69 – “Over the hill and down the creek”

Borrowing the title of a book written by a geologist who crossed the Andes and went down the Amazon, I am getting ready to cross the Pyrenees and go down the Arga River to the city of Pamplona. The Pyrenees are a pretty considerable mountain range that forms the border between France and Spain, the home to the Basques--who are a tough breed of montagnards--, and the location of many a battle and epic voyage. Naturally I am going to take it easy, so I plan to follow the first stages of the Camino de Santiago, both to have some trail signs and to make sure that if anything happens someone else will come along eventually to give me a hand.

I took the train at Bergerac and after two transfers landed in the small train station of Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port, where several trails that cut across France (including the one that goes through Périgord and Bergerac) come together. The foothills of the Pyrenees, which I could see through the train windows, are green and luscious, with plenty of streams coming down from the mountains to the south. Lots of peregrinos milling around in Saint-Jean, from true mountaineers loaded with gear for camping, to singles or pairs who were getting ready to undertake the 800 km walk to Sanitago (also overloaded with gear, in my humble opinion). It was pretty warm (heat advisory for temperatures that might exceed 30 degrees C over the next couple of days) and humid, so almost immediately you were drenched in sweat that would not evaporate. I stopped by the Peregrinos Welcoming Center, where a group of kind volunteers made their best to dissuade us of the craziest plans. For example, the first stage is 30 km long and takes you over the crest to Roncesvalles, and no, starting at 2 pm doesn't give you enough time to get there today. It will take at least 7 hours. I stored this piece of wisdom for future reference, and then walked about 5 km to the hostel where I had booked a bed for the night, Le Relais de la Source, in the village of Caro. Unfortunately it is not on the El Camino path, so it was suggested to me that I would have to walk back to Saint-Jean the following morning. Me go back? Never!

I got there early, around 4 pm, and was greeted by the barks of a Border Collie, Zuki, who reminded me a lot of Cooper. The barking brought Muriel out, who welcomed me like a long-lost brother. The accommodation is pretty basic, as is common in hostels, and I was going to share the four-bed room with a couple from France who was coming by motorcycle later in the afternoon. Another friend of Muriel was there, Pascale, and in no time at all we fell into easy conversation. My French is middle-level, at best, but the two friends had no trouble understanding me (a tremendous boost of confidence that I need to improve), and were full of curiosity about what a geologist does, and about what I was doing in France. Then we started telling travel stories, dabbled into French and US politics, and talked about this and that until we were interrupted by a phone call: The other two visitors had had a minor accident in their motorcycle, she fell off, and hurt her ankle bad enough that she landed at the hospital. Dommage! That was the end of their vacation and, no, they were not coming.

Muriel then got ready to start supper, but before she got down to it I asked if there was a way to reach El Camino from Caro, without having to go back to Saint-Jean. Yes, there is, you take Le Chemin Primitive all the way to La Vierge d'Orisson, a small statue of our Lady that is half way between Saint-Jean and Roncesvalles. She even had some printed instructions. Perfect! Half way should be 3.5 hours. Say 4 hours, so I could start at 7 am and be there by 11 am.

Supper was a grand affair, with salad, pasta, a large bowl of ratatouille, and an omelet platter the size of a pizza. Yumm! Like before the conversation was quick and very lively, and I felt blessed to have found such amiable companions.

The following morning I was on the road by 6h45, and had no problems following the instructions to the start of the "Primitive Camino". Primitive it was, with no signs of anyone having walked this way in the last couple of years (or maybe since the Middle Ages?). There were small (very small) shell signs here and there, but mostly I had to go from the shape of the road, as mimicked by the luscious vegetation, which unfortunately included abundant blackberry bushes and trailers, which in no time had me bleeding from a thousand cuts. I had started early to take advantage of the cool of the morning, but by 9h00 I was drenched in unproductive sweat (unproductive because it would not evaporate and cool me down on account of the high humidity). Without evaporative cooling I got hotter and hotter. Time ticked by, and by 11h00 I was still climbing, steeper and steeper slopes. I had water with me, but not a lot of it, but was able to refill my bottle whenever I crossed a stream. The crest of the mountains--which are quite considerable--kept sliding away out of sight. The last two hours were pure torture, and when at last I reached the small statue, at 14h00, I prayed fervently in thanksgiving for having at last reached the crest of the mountain chain. Alas, it wasn't. I had only reached the first 800 meters of elevation gain, and I had another 400 m to go.

So the slug started again, but this time there were no streams to give me their waters, so I started rationing my scarce resources and became slightly dehydrated (I know because I started getting fibrillating cramps in both my legs). I also noticed that there were no other peregrinos behind me, which I imagine was because the wave that started at 7h00 had gone by around noon. So I was the straggler. On and on the camino went, and ahead of me loomed an enormous mountain. There was no way I was going to be able to climb it. Fortunately, the camino took a side trail, skirting the tall mountain, and after a kilometer or two I reached a water spring, where I was able to drink liter after liter of water. It was there that I met two other peregrinas. They were from Brazil and planned to go all the way to Santiago. They had started at 5h00 and, like me, they figured they were the tail of the procession. So from there on we walked together, supporting each other in the best way we could. They were in their mid to late 50's, and not experienced hikers, but we limped together all the way to the pass across the crest of the mountains, and rejoiced seeing the hills of Navarra extending at our feet. This is when my real Calvary started, because going down was a lot harder than going up. Not only were the knees strained, but tired and facing steep downward slopes I had a real concern about stumbling down and falling. The girls were in better shape for that, and left me far behind (but were very sweet and waited for me at different points until, close to Roncesvalles, I asked them to go ahead and secure their hostel). I had booked an expensive room ahead of time, and was all I could do to stumble into the Guest House, to rehydrate and seek rest for the night. Tomorrow is all downhill to Zubiri, but only 20 km, so I will take my time to get started and hopefully get there in good time. 

France 2024 - Day 67 Brantôme and preparations at Bergerac

I am trying to fill-in the gaps, so I took the first available bus and went back to the village of Brantôme, which I had seen on my way to Nontron, to check it out. It is a really cute village, which bills itself as "the Venice of the Périgord" because the old town is inside a tight meander loop of the Dronne river and, for safety, in the Middle Ages a canal was cut that made the old town an island. They have really embraced tourism as a money-maker, so there are parks for the kids to play, kayak rides around the old town, many cute restaurants, and an old abbey that has been taken by the town authorities as City Hall. Cute as it was, however, there was only so much to see, so after a couple of hours I took the bus back.

I needed to prepare for an absence of 5 days so it was time to take out the garbage, eat the last bits and pieces to keep a reasonably clean refrigerator (I have five different types of cheeses in different stages of consumption), pack a very basic survival backpack (at first I felt I could sleep à la belle étoile, but sanity prevailed and I booked some accommodations), and go to bed early for an early start.