Trips around Provence

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  St. Andre les Alpes, France
Thursday, September 21, 2006

So these past two weekends, I've been on two trips to explore some other places around the region of Provence. It's been quite refreshing to experience life outside Cannes-it's a little slower, a little more nature-y, and a lot less touristy! I like having a balance though, so it's nice to come back to city life.

The first trip was north to Parc Naturel Regional du Verdon, which I understand to kind of be like a state park-still protected and public but not quite a national park. This was a trip put on by the College, so there were enough people to fill up a charter bus, which our driver commandeered like a true French person-completely crazy and not a little reckless. Let me explain that we were traveling into the mountains, the lower Alps to be exact, and the roads were super windy and had no line down the middle, but were still two-way. Our driver would just let out a big honk as we careened full speed around a corner, inches from the edge of the cliff, the honk supposedly to let whoever was coming the other way know a giant tour bus was about to run them over

01 Gorges du Verdon

. I felt sorry for all the little cars having to slow down to squeeze by the giant bus, but at least they were all small and there wasn't an SUV in sight. There were also quite a few cyclists braving the route.

Well we eventually made it to our first destination, the Gorges du Verdon, and a spectacular view of the deepest canyon in Europe. Next was le Lac de Sainte Croix, where I did some canoeing with three other people, and then a short walk around a little village called Moustiers. Out of all the French I know, by far the most useful has got to be Oł est-ce que les toilettes? which means Where are the toilets? And then of course nearly as important is understanding the answer...ie, whatever directions the person nicely gives. The public bathrooms in villages are um, interesting, to say the least...not really bathrooms at all, more like holes in the ground. I've come to appreciate those though, because in bigger cities, they have real bathrooms but they definitely cost money to use!

The trip this past weekend came about because a group of us wanted to go back to the mountains. So Friday after class, we packed our one bag each and took off for the train station. It was raining really hard, which is the first time that's happened, and there is no such thing as a drizzle or mist here

02 Darcy and me at les Gorges

. It's either pouring or not...or as the French say, Il pleut comme vache qui pisse, which literally means it's raining like cow pee. We took this old rickety narrow-gauge train that goes from Nice straight back into the Alps. I had a lovely window seat which I looked out nearly the entire time, as the tracks followed the Var river winding through the steep steep mountains. We decided to go to a town called St. Andre les Alpes, and as the train pulled away the five of us were definitely the only ones there, in the dusk and frigid mountain air, while the station master was locking up the door, with only a guide book to direct us to the hotel.

But we found it and had a nice dinner at the restaurant next door, basically the only thing open in this tiny town. I had a "norvegienne" pizza with salmon, mushrooms, and really good cheese. The rest of the weekend we ate like locals, getting bread and brioches at the boulangerie, fruit from a little stand, cheese from the fromagerie, etc. I also had some delicious ice-cream...dark chocolate and tiramisu flavored. Saturday we wandered around town, watching the French people carry their baguettes, and then we started walking on this country road, passing sheep and cows and little kids on their bikes. The road turned into a trail which kept getting steeper, but we just kept going because we wanted to see what was at the top. Well it turns out two and half hours later, we had definitely hiked a mountain, because at the top we were pretty level with the other mountains around us and looked down at a sparkling blue lake and tiny cars on a mini road below. So the rest of the day we went around talking about how we'd climbed an Alp...pretty much the highlight of the weekend! The other nice part was how inexpensive it all was, because everything is cheaper compared to Cannes. I also had a lot of fun talking in French, because a lot fewer people speak English in the countryside.

French word du jour: une eclaircie, which we don't really have a direct translation for in English, but it means when the sun comes out after the rain and clears the clouds up

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03 view of le Lac	04 ready to do some canoeing	05 on the lake	06 at the train station
07 the group at dinner	08 breakfast	09 snack time	10 what exactly is wild camping?
11 mid-hike break	12 view from the top of the mountain	13 heading back down

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