To the top of the World…

The pretty little mountain village, Bourg-St-Pierre is perfect spot for a night’s rest. From here it is just 11.5 kms to the Col du St Bernard, the pass between the two highest mountains of the Alps, Mont Blanc and Monte Rosa. St. Bernard is our final destination on the Via Francigena.

St. Bernard’s Pass is steeped in history and symbolism. All roads might lead to and from Rome. But across the mountain range, paths are few and far between. Some experts say that this pass has been used by people since the Bronze Age, well before the city of Rome was founded, and several millenia before the birth of Christianity.

If, like me, you had been wondering all along the VF whether you were really following Sigeric’s path to Rome, here at a narrow pass at nearly 2,500 metres above sea level, you can be pretty sure that your footfall couldn’t be too far from where Sigeric walked (or perhaps rode a donkey?) 11 centuries ago.

21 June 2023 – dawn had barely broken when we set off for our final day on the Via Francigena. Other than a brief descent to cross the River Dranse, the road sweeps inexorably upwards. I feel as if the thousand kilometres walked in the last two months were just the preparation for this climb, to that mountain pass just ahead: there to marvel at the grandeur of the snow-capped hills, to reach the sanctuary that Bernard of Menthon built circa 1049 as a respite for tired and hungry walkers.

On paper, the walk to the Pass is not much steeper than the 1000 metres we climbed the previous day to get to Bourg-Saint-Pierre, though our VF app rates today’s walk as ‘challenging’ while yesterday’s was merely ‘moderately’ difficult. And just 5 days ago, a walker reported icy slopes in the final stretch to the top.

But I am bursting with so much anticipation that I hardly feel the ascent as we climb past the pine trees, and beyond the Alpine timberline.

Then: Difficulty strikes… in the shape of three young bulls. Yes, no bull! I mean yes, definitely bulls. They are standing right on the path, indeed right in front of the stone marked with the Swiss yellow track sign. And there are hundreds of other similar looking creatures as far as the eye can see!

As I am trying to recall what the brave Pandava heroes of the Indian epic did while facing various impediments on their post-retirement final walk up into the heavenly mountains (too long a story to tell, but you can read it here if you are really keen), I notice my courageous companion is silently slinking away.

To cut a long story short, after discounting many absurd options proposed by you-know-who, I walk back to the tiny cottage we had passed just a few minutes back and knock.

Not Frodo the Hobbit, but Michael the Angel answers the door in the guise of a Swiss German having his morning cuppa. Patiently, he explains that those creatures in the paddock are completely harmless to humans as they are either cows or ‘young bulls, just playing.’

Half hour later, having repeated his assurances in many languages and tones and realising that we are settling in for the night unless he walks us off his property, he sighs, pulls on his boots and proceeds to escort us through the slough of the bovine mire. For the record, even Michael has to pick up a log at one point to discourage the young bulls from getting too playful.

Archangel Michael saves the day – so what’s new?

Apparently the herds of cattle spend a week each year on these lower hills, before setting off for higher pastures. Michael is a font of local knowledge but has a devilish gleam as he bids us ‘bon courage’ (because we clearly need some) adding ‘I have never seen pilgrims frightened by cows.’

Past the cow crisis, the intrepid walkers are immediately rewarded with stunning views of Lac des Toules, the mountain lake fed by River Dranse. It gets even more exiting when a pair of Alpine Marmots put in an apperance!

Marmot show

You’d think at this point a walk could not get better. But somehow it does.

In the final three or four kilometres the path leaps over the national highway and tunnel which are now the main thoroughfare from Switzerland to Italy. Heart pounding from the climb, adrenalin coursing through the veins, it is all too breathtaking for words (yes, puns intended).

We walk skipping through melting snow and then a final tumble across ice and we are at the St. Bernard’s Pass Hospice.

The weather at the Pass turns moody. We had been walking for weeks with spring on our back, facing into summer. But suddenly in the last hour the sky turns grey. The mountain lake, crystal clear when we arrived at two in the afternoon, is blanketed in a milky mist the next morning.

There is something dramatic too about a mountain shelter that has stood open for a thousand years, every day of every year. Though much has changed. The mortuary which once housed the remains of medieval travellers who perished on the icy slopes, has long been closed. The monastery, which Bernard of Menthon established, persists but with only a handful of monks.

Even the famous St Bernard dogs are now just tourist attractions, as sophisticated search and rescue technology has made them redundant.

St Bernard’s Hospice is now a hostel and a more up-market Auberge, which continues to house travellers, though these days, unlike Bernard’s times, few are starving and many roll up on wheels, via the sealed road.

Still, compared to most pilgrim destinations, Varanasi, Mecca, Rome, the cool emptiness of the refuge that Bernard created seems an awful lot closer to a haven. But then again, Indians have always imagined that their gods live up on the top of the icy mountains (Himalaya means the land of ice). The kings and queens of the epics always head for the hills at the end of the story. So, perhaps, it is just the stories in my head that make St Bernard’s Pass such a perfect place to end a long journey.

The ‘scariest track in all of Via Francigena’?

The VF track in Switzerland has an awesome reputation as both beautiful and challenging, particularly once it starts climbing into the mountains towards the pass that for millenia has taken travellers into Italy.

But the tiny 14 kilometres between Martigny and Sembrancher has a more wicked reputation, as the scariest section of the entire 2000 km road from Canterbury to Rome.

Elevation profile Martigny to Sembrancher

Even the elevation profile on the official VF app looks wicked, as if it were giving you the finger! For the record, that finger turned out to be about 125 metres up and 100 down all in the space of less than a kilometre! Imagine climbing on step ladders angled up the face of a 28 storey building and down the other side the same way but the ladders are all rickety and higgledy-piggledy! Get the picture?

Some experienced long-distance walkers will even advise that, if in a hurry, you should opt for a quick and safe train trip into Sembrancher, before continuing the walk further up-hill to Orsieres and beyond. (In my vew it is never good to be in a hurry on a walk.)

The Swiss Alps do look a bit edgy from most angles, whether it is the serrated peaks in the distance or closer at hand when they rise like something Obelix might have hurled at Roman soldiers. (If you do not know who Obelix is, drop everything and find some Asterix comics)

Taken just off the track near the main road into Sembrancher

So somewhere on a walk that crosses the Alps you would expect something a little edgy, a little sharp – right? On the other hand, WB really does not like heights, so I have been quiet on the matter and he, shall we say, is facing his fears bravely.

Facing one’s fears when it is staring you in the face

Not that you have many options once you have set off on this section.

Most of the track is a narrow escarpment, so slanted that your two feet are almost never on the same plain. The gradient is such that your ankle is always at some weird angle and more often than not, the top-soil moves with your feet. So you slither and slide rather than stride. This is not so much a constructed track as a path yielded by the mountain in response to the footfall of humans (and animals), perhaps over a very long time.

Nothng much between the walker and the river way down below

But just when you think this really is a bit dangerous two young trail runners ‘bonne journee’ past at a speed that would put a mountain goat to shame. Reassuring, really.

There are signs of rock falls, recent and old, all along the way. About 5 kilometres before Sembrancher, we seem to lose the track completely – it simply runs into a pile of rubble and disappears! And all day the VF apps have been undependable as connectivity is minimal in the crags of the hills where we are walking.

Having nowhere else to go, we crawl slowly up the rubble. About 30 metres up, phew…WB spots a small cairn – something which walkers around the world read as a trail marker. A hiker (or hikers) ahead left a mark for us to follow. We add a couple of stones to the pile making it a little more visible to those who might come later, then tumble gratefully back onto the trail.

An hour earlier, when the track had (yet again) ducked out of sight and I was shaking my futile fists at the app, a Spanish man came down the hill. He stopped to chat a bit about doing the Camino, and confidently pointed to the correct path. Then overtook me rapidly and disappeared.

Which is the track? One side sliding into the river, the other side blocked by boulder

Really, track angels seemed to be everywhere, whenever a little help was needed. Where the usual Swiss yellow marker was a bit thin on the ground, someone had thoughtfully scribbled an additional ‘GR145’, the sign we followed all the way through France.

In Bouvernier (a village in between two forest tracks) the bar proprietor insisted on giving us free drinks because she thought we were pilgrims and all my attempts to explain that we were just walkers failed to sway her. Minutes later, we were wondering how to get around a road-block when a young man emerged to provide clear directions in perfect English!

So, does the Martigny-Sembrancher trail deserve its scary reputation? Perhaps it does. But it also takes you through the most beautiful surroundings you can imagine. River Dranse plays hide-and-seek all day – sometimes just a soothing sound, sometimes a visible torrent. Tiny caves and hollows blow cool breath over your legs – like the air-conditioned cool that spills out of big shopping arcades.

Any time the impish trail allows you to take your eyes off your feet, the view near and far is magical, wowing all your senses.

Perhaps you wouldn’t want to walk this trail in rain and snow, or on a bad-knee day. But we set out on a mild summer dawn. Most of the walk was under a canopy of trees. You don’t feel the danger as the adrenalin carries you along the slippery or rocky or gravelly patches along a path that is a crazy erratic roller-coaster, soaring and and diving, tumbling and rising with a wicked glee.

You are on alert – because you have to be. And all your senses are engaged right here, right now, both because the surroundings are enchanting and, yes, also because walking on the edge of a hill on unstable ground, is just a tiny little bit risky. Enchantment and danger: surely, that is the very definition of a good time😉

Once Upon a River

From Mouthier Haute Pierre to Pontarlier, 23.75 kms. The first six kms of track is closed due to land-slides last year. It is the stretch of path that takes the walker to the source of La Loue river. Our Alpinist host in Mamirolle could not be more emphatic about the ‘must do’ magical nature of just this bit of the road. Closed? How can it be closed?

The day before, you have met La Loue in her full glory in Ornans. On this sunny day the water is a mirror and the pretty little houses on the river bank can’t stop basking in their own reflected glory. All the eateries sell trout from the river – fish fresh enough to warm any Bengali heart.

A brief and charming walk through tangled woods and manicured parklands along the river gets you to Mouthier Haute Pierre.

Looking down from Mouthier, a tiny village clinging to one side of the natural amphitheatre of the surrounding Jura range, the Loue below is a naughty ripple at the stony pit of the mountains.

In the background the argument with my law-abiding Walking Buddy persists – to take the closed track or not to take it. He has this entirely inconvenient trust in bureaucracies: ‘there must be a reason why the path is still closed’; ‘rules are there to protect us’; etc etc.

Evening in Mouthier, the Track Angel intervenes in the form of a young walker a day ahead. She has just walked through the closed path. Nothing more dangerous here than a few fallen trees, says the angel in her Facebook post. At breakfast next morning another walker says that she is going the closed route. Decision made: we are going to the source of the Loue after all.

Down from Mouthier, past the hydro-electric plant which diverts 10% of the river’s flow to support the needs of the nearby populations, the path curls up past the closure and route diversion signs. And almost immediately it is too beautiful for words – my words that is, but there are always poets you can turn to.

‘I came to far for beauty/ I left so much behind’, sings Leonard Cohen. He was chasing an elusive woman. But it works for the long road (almost 900 kms) we have walked to get here.

‘The sun comes to light on just one side/ I see your face in every direction’

‘Nyamperin matahari dari satu sisi/ Memandang wajahmu dari segenap jurusan’, says Rendra. He was talking about an elusive woman too. But that is just right for the mountains, all around us and impossible to photograph from the narrow foothold taking us up the river to where it all begins, and begins again and again, all the time, constantly, incessantly…the mouth of a river.

The wonder of life in the heart of stone

‘ব্যক্ত হোক জীবনের জয়
ব্যক্ত হোক তোমামাঝে
অসীমের চিরবিস্ময়’ says Tagore. He was writing birthdays, his own in particular. But it works most perfectly at the birth of the river. Where better to ‘hail the victory of life…the constant wonder of eternity’?

Afterwards, there are the creature comforts of crepes and coffee at the cafe a few hundred metres up towards a carpark. Then a long climb through the pine forrest on the way to our night’s stop in Pontarlier is pleasant enough. Though it all seems a bit pedestrian after a morning’s exhilarating encounter with a river. Just a morning – gone so soon – but what a morning! You have to be grateful for legs, language and life.

For all the track angels.

There is more to walking than meets the Eye

Having farewelled my Drinking Buddy, Jacques (DB), in the picture-postcard town of Ornas, and having posted nothing (except for the gush over River Loue) for over two weeks, I confess that this is more a retrospective than a current story. We are now well into the Swiss part of VF, looking back on the final and most beautiful section in France, which passes through the two north-eastern departments (Haute-Saone and Doubs) of Franche-Comte, better known as Bourgogne (Burgundy).

Table-mat Map from a pilgrim-friendly B&B in Dampierre-sur-Salon

DB (not to be confused with the non-drinking WB) regards tasting local wines and cheeses a national duty. He believes that right across France ‘young people are acquiring global bad taste from bad American television’ giving up fine local wines and setting off a vicious cycle: closure of village bars and shops, further reducing the attraction of rural living, leading to further falls in rural populations, reduction in demand for bars and so more closures, all in a downward spiral.

Besancon, not small town; but the wine is a fine Bourgogne Chardonnay

It seems the French government shares DB’s concerns and has announced special funding to attract tabacs and bars back to rural areas. In these circumstances, it would have been utterly rude as a pilgrim in this land not to help raise consumption of local produce.

If you are used to Australian distances, France is not a vast country. About 800 kms of hiking has taken us right across its north eastern border – from the ocean in Calais and Wissant, to the Jura Mountains in Bourgogne.

The long shore-line between Calais and Wissant

For a while the dead-flat windy plains with more giant windmills than trees seem unending.

It’s quite a relief for the leg and the soul to get to the rolling pastures and vineyards of Champagne and finally to the mountains of the Jurassic age in Bourgogne. Closer to the Swiss border the Alps will get higher, craggier. For now the mountain is modest, its peaks comfortably rounded.

The architecture of Bourgogne too, has a distinctive feel, with the shiny tiled church spires and the timber framed houses.

In Champagne as in Bourgogne, bars and cafes (when open, that is) seem always to include local wines and cheeses though much to WB’s consternation the ‘salon de the’ often serve no tea at all. In Bourgogne, washed by great river systems created by the Saone and the Doubs pouring in from the Jura mountains, you can dine on local trout. ‘Caught 7 kms down river,’ one proud proprietor tells us.

Because we live in a time when visual reproduction is literally child’s play, we tend to capture our experience in pictures. But a long walk engages all your senses.

Almost always you hear the river before you see it. On forest tracks, you hear the birds constantly, though they are visible only rarely and fleetingly. It is your ears that first pick up the buzz of the bee surrendering to a poppy, the first whisper of the breeze on a still morning, and the engine noise to alert you to the tractor approaching on a lonely farm track.

And then there are the things that the adverts about walking holidays and hiking blogs (including this one😊) rarely mention: smell of cow-dung which your nostrils have grown used to before you see a single cow on the paddock! Worse (or perhaps better this way) the unavoidable stench of a dead animal from which you hope to avert your eyes if at all possible.

These flowers remind us of wattles in Australia!

But we are walking in spring and mostly the forests are fragrant with flowers. In Bourgogne, on the first day of summer we walked through our first old growth pine forest. It smells – well, shall we say piney? Part lime, part oil, a bit grassy and just very, very clean.

And what of touch, you ask? The splatter of mud on your calves is sticky, wet boots wrinkle your feet, stingy grasses irritate the skin as do the ticks, mosquito-bites, the tiny bugs that fly over head and assault your face…

But then, on a day when the heat has sucked up all your senses and drained your spirits, a sudden up-rush of breeze from the valley splashes your skin with the coolness of the stream you crossed hours ago. Ah… you had almost forgotten there is that lovely river way down in the valley below! In your tiredness you don’t recall its name, but you can still hear its murmur if you stop moving and listen.

Two hours of walking in the sun ahead of you: the cool breeze comes for just a minute and is swamped quickly by the surrounding heat. It feels like a fleeting memory – of the cool dawn earlier today, the spray of the water-fall days ago, and behind concrete memory of real things, the shadowy textures of whatever spells comfort for you.

These long walks, part urban, part historic, part wild, are nothing like a perfect tourist experience – some it is not even pleasant! But they provide a sensory intensity not captured in pretty pictures. And even words are on shaky ground here!

Out of Champagne

There are Champagne party signs all over Bar-sur-Aube and neighbouring villages.

But your senses can feel a change on the way. Jacques (henceforth J) with whom a friendship was forged on another long walk, in the south of France (Camino Le Puy) has joined us in Bar-sur-Aube. He says the best champagnes are already behind us.

Even to my untrained pallet, the local wines and bubblies (and I try at least one local product daily, out of a sense of political correctness of course!) from around Bar-sur-Aube feel a little heavier while under my well-worn boots the roads are getting hillier.

They don’t look like much in photos… but…

In inept hands such as mine, the camera fails to record these ups and downs as little more than molehills. But at the end of a day, after 20 kms or so, a 100 meter climb across that final half kilometre, off-track into your night’s accommodation in Saint-Ciergues, definitely feels like a mountain.

At the start of the climb from River La Mouche

To our accommodation at top of the hill in Saint-Ciergues

From Saint-Ciergues down to the Reservoir La Mouche, which supplies drinking water to the surrounding districts and up the next rise, the views are just as breath-taking.

I have seven photos taken from this spot alone🙄

Fortunately, from Saint-Ciergues to the walled city of Langres is a very short walk, but its’ picture-postcard appeal slows down our progress considerably by forcing yours truly to stop every few steps (how else is she going to share all this with you?).

Western gateway to the walled city of Langres

A final heart-stopping climb (mercifully short) brings you to the magnificent city of Langres, with three and a half kilometres of ramparts, opening out with 7 gates, one of them from the first century BC.

Remains of the Roman gates, first century BC

Its’ cathedral roof is like nothing we have ever seen in the hundreds of buildings we have photographed over the years, on our more than one thousand kilometres of pilgrim walks in France.

French fellow-walker, the extremely erudite J, explains it is a kind of tile roofing common in Bourgogne/Burgundy.

In Langres, we are indeed at the cross-roads. We are still in Champagne but edging into Bourgogne. Over the last few days the vineyards have given way to dairy farms – Fromage Langres is on the menu.

Diderot overlooking the main city square

The city is the birthplace of Diderot, one of the most radical 18th century philosophers, who argued vociferously against the church. His name everywhere, from streets to boulangeries. So J is a little mystified to find that the city has more than usual number of Catholic schools.

Most famously, the city contains the intersection of 12 Roman roads, some leading to that other destination of the modern pilgrim, Santiago de Compostela.

For a week now, roads to Santiago have crossed our path, tormenting me with a nostalgia for that past-perfect hike – reminding me of all the highs, the warmth, the laughter, tempting me to take one wrong turn and head for that other place – somewhere you have been before, a place that in your memory has become a comfort-zone.

But the Jura mountains, the mountains of the Jurassic times, are just ahead of us. You would not have walked 700 kilometres on a new road (well, new to you) to trade in the possibility of the new and the ‘might-be’ for what your mind has retrospectively remade as warm and fuzzy. As every hiker knows (or at least has to believe😊) the challenge of a climb, the surprise at every turn, the adrenaline when you reach the top, is the miracle that makes your water taste just as good as the finest wine!

Picture Perfect? Never quite…

Too much champagne is conducive to all sorts of good things: colour, beauty, fascination…. But not to the kind of clarity that is required for reporting correctly and sequentially about a walk.. So herewith just some images to bring you up-to-date in a summary manner, since that rainy post, which is now nearly ten days and 200 kilometres ago.

Since that rain, we have walked in perfect weather – and how can weather be anything but perfect when it leads to a glass of champagne most afternoons? It is possible that the light takes on a special gentle glow after a half carafe of champagne (which I am forced to drink by myself in Chalon-en-Champagne as WB is a teetotaller) and there is a pot of gold at the end of the half-rainbow.

You have worked out by now that we are in, what most of us think of as, the Champagne Region. Officially, since 2016, it is part of the newly formed region of Grand Est, The average walker (and yours truly, Hurry Krishna, is so called, because she is definitely on the slow side) will probably spend 2 to 3 weeks in this region. At the point of writing this post, we are about two-thirds of our way through the Grand Est.

Some paths do leave you wondering whether long-distance hiking is a symptom of mental illness. But not here where Aisne, Marne and Aube rivers and their canals criss-cross your way. If you are like me, you will ignore the official route and spend three days walking along the tow-path of canals, some of it beautifully surfaced to serve as bicycle routes.

At times you are caught between the canal on one side and the river shimmering through the trees on the other, and there is no way an i-phone camera (or even the best wide angle lense, if I had one or knew how to use it) will capture the whole perfect picture that your eyes can see in just that moment and then slide to the ghostly grey buildings on the other bank, without loosing the bigger picture painted in every shade of green, blue and white.

You are right, I took it in colour, but this is more how it felt…

Metres down the road, or may be the next day or the day after, or was it days in a row… white blossoms tumbled like cascades into the water below.

Taken somewhere along a waterway on 12 May

A single tiny bunch on a slender creeper climbing a tree provided a moment’s enchantment.

The canals behind us, and just past the lovely town of Outines with its rather unique church, we are back amongst farms: lentils and barley mostly.

Outines: rare Church in ‘colombage’ style

The high winds are turning the sheaves of barley into a green and gold waves.

Just as you are getting a little bored with the swaying barley, an elegant shape dances into view, skimming over the feathery plants. The silhouette of a leaping deer in the early afternoon sun disappears before I can get my camera. It rises again – closer now but faster, surfs across our line of vision and is gone.

It is perfect. But ‘picture perfect’ is such a lie. The moment of fascinaton necessarily escapes reproduction.

NB: For any fellow Bengali reading this: of course, the trope of the running deer as figure of enchantment, to be chased but never contained, is so well-known to us from the Sonar Horin song, as to be almost a cliche. And perhaps the song made that kind of deer sighting especially exciting. But for the record, I did not conjure it out of the song in a champagne fuelled haze. I know this, because Walking Buddy saw it too!

9 May 2023: Musing on a Very Wet Walk

One of the very few photos from a very wet day

This post is out of kilter for all sorts of reasons. I have failed to report on the whole business of moving from Hauts-de-France to the Champagne region. And there are relatively few photos to illustrate my rain-fed musings here as rain is not conducive to photo-taking.

Vineyards as far as the eye can see: taken the day before the deluge

No doubt any mention of Champagne raises expectations of a good life and favourite quotes like ‘Too much of anything is bad, but too much champagne is just right.’ (Variously attributed to Mark Twain and Scott Fitzgerald by Google – hope someone will tell me who, if any famous writer, did really say that or has it been manufactured by some Ad agency?)

But all that will have to wait. Because I suddenly find myself with a possible answer to THE question, the one that every long distance walker is asked by friends, family and well-wishers: WHY? Why do you do this?

9 May was wet – seriously wet in the Marne department of North-Eastern France. A small group of walkers, six to be precise, found shelter for the night in the one gite in Conde-sur-Marne. Others (at least two) walked nearly 40 kms to the bigger town Chalon en Champagne, and at least one resorted to wild camping in wild weather.

Follow Mick for wild-camping and Palestine

I staggered into our gite at 3 pm, with what seemed to be half the soil of the district clinging to my boots. Then gratefully collapsed in front of a wood-fire heater with a huge warm cup of coffee. Everyone had sodden boots. Some had achy knees. But every one of the six people would be out on the road again the next day, walking 20 kilometres or more. It was just the kind of night to pop the question: why?

I remember asking the same question at the end of a long and sweltering day on another long walk in France. The question always elicits interesting, and perhaps seasonally variable answers.

Some walkers currently hiking the VF have a clear purpose: a life-long unionist is walking to raise awareness about Palestine; two life-long friends are walking to raise funds for ovarian cancer care – both their mothers (and mine, too) died of the disease. Fantastic projects.

But there is something wider, bigger, less tangible, in all these contemporary footfalls along old routes – perhaps something poetic which may be gleaned without necessarily being entirely comprehensible, understood in the ordinary sense.

In the first ever published essay dedicated explicitly and entirely to ‘Walking’ (The Atlantic, 1862), the naturalist philosopher, Henry David Thoreau associated the pleasure of walking with the love of nature and explicitly eschewed ‘roads’, writing ‘I do not travel in them (roads) much, … , because I am not in a hurry to get to any tavern or grocery or livery-stable or depot to which they lead.’

For those of us walking the Via Francigena, there is no real distinction between walking in woods and walking to get somewhere – indeed we are in a sense always walking to the next tavern and grocery – along the way we might just get hours in the forests, or on river banks, or on roads of the kind that Thoreau dismissed as being designed for horses! And we are, of course, going vastly longer distances than those Thoreau saw rushing down the street for a beer, indeed mostly quite a bit longer than Thoreau’s own four-hour daily walk in the woods. I wonder too if this Grand Old Man of Walking ever walked in pouring rain and then got up in the morning and slipped his feet into soggy boots to set off again.

I have, doubtless, said in earlier posts, when things confound, Bengalis turn to Tagore. And this rainy day on which I am bogged down to a slow crawl just happens to be Tagore’s birthday, the 25th day of Baishakh on the Bengali calendar, which this year falls on 9 May. Tagore’s birthday is an occasion for mass cultural festivities and a public holiday, in both Indian West Bengal and Bangladesh.

Bengalis expect rain in the month of Baishakh – it is monsoon now all over Bengal and the time of the deadly ‘baishakh storms’, কাল বৈশাখী.

Long walks are often introspective. Lots of rainy days and drizzly songs play on my mind as I trudge, eyes strained on slippery ground. Somewhere along the way, a gust of wind fetches up these song lines of childhood.

আমাদের খেপিয়ে বেড়ায় যে কোথায় লুকিয়ে থাকে রে?।
ছুটল বেগে ফাগুন হাওয়া কোন্‌ খ্যাপামির নেশায় পাওয়া,
ঘূর্ণা হাওয়ায় ঘুরিয়ে দিল সূর্যতারাকে ॥
কোন্‌ খ্যাপামির তালে নাচে পাগল সাগর-নীর।
সেই তালে যে পা ফেলে যাই, রইতে নারি স্থির।
চল্‌ রে সোজা, ফেল্‌ রে বোঝা, রেখে দে তোর রাস্তা-খোঁজা,
চলার বেগে পায়ের তলায় রাস্তা জেগেছে ॥

In my inadequate English, it might go something like this:

Who goads us this way, hiding away?
Like the wind that blows where madness grows,
A whirlwind sends the sun and stars astray. Crazed rhythms set oceans dancing.
Our steps match the beat, we cannot stay still. Walk on ahead, let go the burden, forget about finding the street, Our strides awaken the way beneath the feet.

Of course, this is neither a logical nor a full explanation of why so many of us, from so many different places on earth are walking a thousand miles or more through inclement weather and variable terrain. And I am pretty sure that Tagore did not intend to explain long-distance hiking! But as I am sloshing through the mud, rain obscuring my view, I can sense the mad magic that is made by footfall on the path, any path, almost regardless of place and surroundings. And magic can’t be explained, it can only be felt.

Marching Into Reims

‘As it turned out, the march to Rheims was nothing but a holiday excursion:…’. So wrote Mark Twain of Joan of Arc’s march into Reims, a bit unlikely as Joan was marching at the head several thousand armed men in July 1429.

The line does, however, describe entirely accurately our leisurely walk out of the Hauts-de-France region into Reims, at the heart of the Champagne district’s (more correctly in current official parlance, the Marne Department of the Grand Est Province) and the 12th largest city in France. It is also the largest city we traverse on our entire 1200 km hike on GR 145 from England, through France and Switzerland.

Laon’s grand Cathedral waves the the modern pilgrim off with images of some ‘kickass women’ including Saint Teresa of Calcutta (better known as Mother Teresa) and a Black Madonna.

Black Madonna have colourful histories (puns not intended). They were often seen by medieval populations as immensely powerful, and of course, like all representations of female power, highly suspect. Laon’s original Black Madonna was destroyed in the French revolution. The current version, a relatively placid looking figure, was installed as far as I can tell, in the mid-19th century.

Just outside the Laon city walls, you can tumble down through narrow back alleys, between houses. Do you remember how it felt to run down a slippery slide when you were at primary school – rather than sit and slide like the good kids? Well that’s how it felt, except that as Leonard Cohen puts it, these days ‘I ache in the places I used to play’.

Knees notwithstanding, the sliding reduced the distance to Corbeny (our final stage in Hauts-de-France) by nearly 3 kms, to a more manageable 27 km, though we probably missed some stunning views reported by walkers who take the prescribed route out from Laon.

A tedious 6 km on the edge of a road, then a long straight Chemin du Roi (King’s Road) through woods, and another tedious climb on a sealed road brought us to Corbeny and a perfect pilgrim accommodation, on Rue de Dames – a road built to facilitate women travelling for assignations with kings.

Following morning, we crossed River Ainse and entered the Champagne district.

It might be more apt to say that Champagne slowly dawned on us. First, a welcoming little epicerie in the tiny town of Cormicy, open just at the right time. And minutes later our first view of the acres and acres of grape vines.

Two more days of walking between vineyards, forests and along canals brought us to Reims.

Sunny Saturday in the buzzing city of Reims

After nearly a month of mostly tiny towns and villages, it was exciting to be in a great city built around opulent squares, historic buildings and brimming wth tourist attractions. So we took a day off walking, hoping to indulge in some cultural tourism.

But, but but… it is Sunday, it is rainy, and as Monday is VE Day National Holiday in France, almost everyone has shut shop and gone off for a long weekend to Greece 🙄 Yes, the excellent English speaking staff of the expensive hotel might just be able to find a Champagne tour which though exorbitant includes several complimentary bottles of the stuff… but stop! Walking Buddy is a teetotaller. Estimates of how much champagne one person can drink in a day or carry in her rucksack the next morning were not promising.

Reims, and indeed the region more broadly has much to attract the tourist generally and the walker specifically. But May might not be the best month to walk in any part of France. For the record, there are 14 days of prescribed national holidays in France, including the Christmas and New Year period. The remainder of the year has 11 National Days, of which 4 are in May. Every weekend in May is thus a long weekend and most things, including most eateries, are closed.

Sunday, 7 May, there is nothing to do, but ponder on the famous UNESCO world-heritage listed Cathedral Notre Dame of Reims, where the Kings of France used to be crowned and whose biggest current tourist attraction seems to be the stained glass window designed by artist Marc Chagall.

The most famous name associated with this Cathedral is however Joan of Arc, who saved Reims from being razed by the English army.

A statue (from the 1850s) of a young woman on a horse, her sword unsheathed, graces the front of the cathedral. Her eyes are wide open, and I imagine, blazing.

Joan was tried and burnt for heresy, aged 19. The key evidence against her was that she dressed in male clothes!! At her captors’ insistence she agreed to wear what the church regarded as proper women’s clothing. But later the judges visiting her cell found her again in her habitual soldiering gear. When challenged, she supposedly told them “It is both more seemly and proper to dress like this when surrounded by men, than wearing a woman’s clothes.”

Inside the Reims Cathedral, the 1902 marble and bronze figure of Joan is clearly in female clothing. She has been ‘frocked,’ she has been muted. In sainthood, she has been denied her choice of clothing. The up-turned eyes of the girl on the horse are now closed in surrender.

The young village girl who was cross-dressing and slaying bad guys long before Buffy the Vampire Slayer was imagined, who should have been the Patron Saint of Girl Power, has been re-cast as good little Saint Joan to be accommodated inside the constraints of the Catholic Church.

On a day with little to do, Reims is a good place to think about how a defiant girl might be disciplined, punished and beatified – all to put her in her place as a woman.

A Mothers’ Day post about defiant women one meets on the VF

300 kms: Long Way to Walk for Foie Gras?

Foie Gras in Laon, WB has already eaten his share!

If you have been to Paris or travelled in the many tourist destinations around France, you probably would not believe that there are culinary deserts in some parts of this country, where you might be grateful at the end of a 20 km hike, for the micro-wave ready curry (which has been slowly defrosting in your ruck-sack all day); because a few nights before, dinner was boiled egg and bread kindly provided by your rural gîte host..

Some of the tiny settlements along the path we have been walking through Hauts-de-France have no shops of any description. Even in middle sized towns, like Tergnier, which you reach across vast railway yards and streets lined with blocks of flats, eateries are an unenticing string of pizzeria and friterie along a busy highway.

In smaller places you can have the strangest conversations with Google’s translation services. Here I quote the end of an sms exchange between Walking Buddy and very kind Air B&B Host at Bertaucourt (village of maybe two dozen houses, a little off the VF track):

Host: No food here. No shop.

WB: Can you perhaps leave some bread and cheese in the house?

Host: Because I already went to the races yesterday. Cannot go today. (WB can find no adequate way to respond to that)

Even in the more touristy places, like Arras, with its historic churches and city squares, the daily rhythm of the walker is often out of kilter with that of cafes and restaurants. Walkers often want their breakfast unseasonably early and dinner unfashionably so. And when they walk into town in mid-afternoon every reasonable cafe owner is having a little break between the lunch and dinner crowds.

That said, it does appear that there is a little bit of a problem with food in Pas-de-Calais, the westernmost province (department) of the Hauts-de-France region, where the first quarter of the French VF lies.

At the tourist office in Arras. I asked the lovely young woman with fluent English, what we should sample as local food. ‘Hmmm’, she said, and ‘aahhh’ after much metaphoric hand-ringing. She comes from an area further to the south and clearly does not want to say anything negative. Eventually she says ‘well, this area has a lot of chips and also some local beers.’

We have been walking between potato and canola farms for two weeks or more and some super-markets in this area stock more varieties of potatoes than pretty much all green vegetables put together. For environmental reasons one should indeed eat locally grown foods, so chips make good sense. And, way back when, this area was ruled by the English for over 200 years. And that is all I am saying about food in Pas-de-Calais Department of Haute de France.

Gateway to Laon, Aisne department in Hauts-de-France

We had walked a little over 300 kms from Canterbury when we panted up the final 100 metre ascent into the medieval walled city of Laon. The Cathedral was built to strike awe and from the top of the town the surrounding plane is astonishingly lovely. It is, however, May Day and 3 p.m – only fools and foreigners would want to eat at this hour. Fortunately, the gourmet eatery, just across the Cathedral square will open at 7 and yes they can fit us in!

Cathedral Notre Dame: with dinner over a long May sunset

Really, one should walk a long way before eating Foie Gras – there are 462 calories in every hundred grams of the stuff and then there is the burden of sin from eating food with a dubious history of animal cruelty which demands additional self-flagellation.

The chicken mousse amuse-bouche goes before I can take my camera out. Followed by Fois Gras which WB has been praying for since we landed in Calais off a stormy sea. Then the ‘local speciality’ ‘rabbit sausage’ for WB and ‘pour Madame?’ They can recommend the dish always popular with English tourists, ‘duke with o-hwr-aange’.

Half-eaten, so you can’t see how pretty it all looked!

As April turns to May, the ground underfoot is firmer. With days so long, it is less daunting to take on longer distances.

The topography is changing too. Past Peronne on the north-east corner of Department Somme, the surroundings have mellowed, with rivers and canals criss-crossing the way, some of which runs through pretty parklands. Sunday in mid-spring has brought fishermen out in droves, and yes, they are ALL men – with fishing rods longer than I ever imagined!

Walking into Laon was an up and down affair, with hillocks rounding out the harsh flat horizon we have been chasing for the previous 250 kms since Wissant. The foie gras has soothed the hungry spirit, and no doubt given us wings to take on our first 30km day tomorrow.

WB’s French is improving by leaps and bounds: he has stopped introducing me as his Mary or Mairie or Mari in turn. But I still cannot tell the difference between ferme and a ferm, which is a bit problematic when trying to book accommodation, when the only place within a cooee (in Australian parlance) is a farm gite, firmly shut since COVID killed off the trickle of tourists passing through the village…

NB: the title of this blog is inspired by Brian Mooney’s book about the Via Francigena, A long way to walk for a Pizza

Bruay to Bapaume around ANZAC Day

‘But many men are falling / where you promised to stand guard’ Leonard Cohen.

As someone who came to adulthood in post-colonial India, I have never quite understood what ANZAC Day is all about. Those unfamiliar with things Australian might want to think of it as a national day, its origins embedded in the disastrous defeat of the allied forces, including a large Australian contingent, at the hands of the Ottoman army during the First World War (you can google for more – lots more, including recipes for lamb and biscuits and, no, I am not kidding.)

They say the ‘Camino provides’ – the path you walk gives you what you need, or perhaps what you deserve?

Unlike many Australians visiting France at this time, we did not consider the 25th of April in any special way in our planning. Quite unbidden, however, our path brings us to the edge of the largest French military cemetery, Notre Dame de Lorette, two days before ANZAC Day. This place holds the remains of tens of thousands of French soldiers.

From the Necropole Notre Dame de Lorette, a boulevard runs two kilometres, to our night’s destination in Souchez. Its wide footpath is posted with images of devastation wrought in this region by the First World War. On the way in and again on the way out of Souchez heading towards Arras, you can see allied flags fluttering on the horizon, including Australian and New Zealand ones marking the graveyards that dot the area through which we re walking.

Bicycles, in memory of Francois Faber, won Tour de France 1909, ‘died for France’ 1915

On ANZAC eve, about half-way along our way to Arras, at Mont St. Elloi, we ran into Australians for the first time in 200 kms. They are driving around, and on their way to the ANZAC Day celebrations at Villers-Bretonneux – another place where young Australians fought and died a long way from their island home. In Arras, the very next day, we meet our second Aussie, sitting on a bench along the path that leads the walkers out of the city. He tells us he has just been to the ceremony at Villers-Bretonneux.

Far away from the battle fields, way down under in Australia, the war has always felt to me more like a tall tale: at best a myth to manufacture nationalism for a colony of white settlers, on an island, whose security is never seriously threatened by foreign powers scrapping over Europe.

But all across the north of France, the land is pock-marked with war. Some days we have counted more war memorials than people in the tiny settlements between farms.

In Arras, a historic town with its roots going back to the Iron Age, every significant building has been re-built after either the first or the second World War or both. Around its over-large cathedral, severely damaged in 1917 there are memorials to the many distant nations who sent men (yes, mostly men) to die for and rebuild France – even the Chinese.

Arras, plaque for Chinese war-dead in France

I don’t know enough history to comprehend this. The Indian soldiers, I guess, were dragooned here by their British colonial masters, but what were the Chinese doing here so far from home? (Though not quite as far as the Australians!)

On our way from Arras to Bapaume, where a tiny shelter measures the distance to ‘Cant orbery’ we met Dominic, the volunteer whose job it is to maintain this part of the track. Through his broken English and my Walking Buddy’s fractured French, Dominic none-the-less worked out that we have come from Australia and insisted on showing us the ‘Australian trench’. To the untrained eye, the trench looks just like a hole in the bush. And in a sense, it really does not matter whether or not it really ever was a trench – it’s a story that connects, allows for a moment’s camaraderie, even where language has mostly failed.

In Bapaume, a minute’s walk from the VF stands a beautifully maintained Australian cemetery.

On ANZAC DAY, a fellow Aussie had left a message for his grandfather who died in the war.

India’s English rulers thankfully did not regard Bengalis as a martial race. So I have no direct experience of loosing someone important in a war. The ANZAC mythology continues to be no more meaningful to me than any other story of poor judgement and foreign military adventurism. But the common human condition of futile loss to wars is made concrete here in the acres of graves we have walked past and will continue to walk past in the next week or two.

If the Camino provides – perhaps in this instance, it provides me the opportunity to feel empathy, even if the meaning of it all still eludes my grasp.

For hiker, pilgrim, blogger Joanne who is on a ‘Bloody Long Walk’ through the war graves with her own questions.