Pilgrim's Progress – Long Distance Walks in Europe and the UK

Be wary then, best safety lies in fear.

Hamlet Act 1, Sc 3 – William Shakespeare

I was happy to have survived the night in the museum and wasn’t keem to repeat the experience in a hurry. People sometimes wax lyrical about the ‘good old days’ when life was simpler before the advent of the mobile phone and the internet and TV and the radio and electricity when you could happily while away your evenings sitting in tbe corner reading the bible by candlelight. But I have to confess this is not the life for me and I much prefer 21st century life than the last century. Give me a Smart phone rather than a Bakelite one any day!

Saint-Lary was a charming village with a babbling stream and a string of pretty tiled houses with colourful and immaculately maintained front gardens. A two star hotel, a café and an épicerie completed the impression that this was a place to peacefully while away an hour or so over coffee and a croissant. Sadly they were all closed at 8.30am so I was faced with amother day of surviving on an empty stomach – there were no amenities available before my destination for the day of Saint-Pé-d’Ardet.

En route to Portet-d’Aspet I met a genial old man called Eginhard walking two huge mastiffs near a small house in the middle of the forest. We got chatting. A German who had lived for 30 years in Provence working as a stone mason he was now retired and had built his entire house from ruins. It was quite a feat as he had designed some wonderful sun like motifs into the walls of the house. These reminded him of his life in Provence. The area had been frequented in the 19th century by English miners who had prospected for azurite and had left many stone deposits which he had collected and used to build his house. We could have chatted all day but I still had kilometres to cover and eventually continued on my way.

Shortly after reaching the small hillside village of Portet d’Aspet, I was faced with first serious climb of the day to the col de Portet-d’Aspet. That name may ring a bell for those of you who follow the Tour de France!

At 1,069m the pass has figured 58 times in the Tour de France since it’s first appearancd in 1910. Not surprisingly there were quite a few cyclists posing in front of the roadsigns when I eventually made my way up to the pass and slumped down onto a picnic bench beside a couple of French hikers.

I got chatting to them. They were from Toulouse, had got married the previous day and were spending their honeymoon walking the GR78. I congratulated, but I have to admit that I preferred my honeymoon in Sri Lanka than yomping 35km a day through the Piémont Pyrenees!

The descent from the col to Razeceuillé was at times extremely hazardous. In places the path was no wider than a boot’s width. One false step and a slip on an exposed tree root or some loose gravel amd you could easily disappear down the side of the mountain to an uncertain fate. Some noticeboards at the col de Portet d’Aspet had warned of the hazard of encountering bears on the path but had been curiously silent on the subject of treading carefully on narrow mountain paths in order to avoid slipping and going to meet one’s maker!

Thankfully the weather was glorious and I made good progress through the afternoon before ascending to another pass ( the col ares) and finally reaching the gite at Saint-Pé-d’Ardet shortly after 5.30pm.

I was greeted by a lady in her 50s who looked as though she could have been a French film star. It turned that she was the wife of Fréderic, the owner of the gite. Fréderic, who somewhat resembled the British botanist David Bellamy, was clearly a man of the world. After he had shown me my room, I rejoined him and another pilgrim called Margot, on the terrace overlooking the valley below.

Fréderic’s family had survived Buchenwald concentration camp during WW2. For an hour or so we discussed Brexit, Anglo-French amity during the War, Trump and the current state of French politics.

Finally it was time to make it over the village square to an auberge for supper and a few beers. Margot was retired but ran a gite at Neuf Eglise in the Massif Central near Clermont Ferrand. In September every yeat she would close up her gite and walk the pilgrim paths in France, Portugal and Spain. We chatted away merrily for a couple of hours about the dystopian state of modern society and the interesting people and things we had encountered on the eslk including the stone mason from Provence and the museum in Augirein where Margot had spent the night before me. By the end of the evening I had been invited to come and stay in her gite and had taken note to check out the pilgrim routes in Portugal.

I hadn’t had the misfortune to encounter any bears during the day but the burger and the beers had definitely hit the spot and assuaged my growling tummy!