Mountain Trails
I am now back in Perpignan after having travelled about quite a lot after Titi arrived. First trip was to Girona which was the halfway meeting point between Perpignan and Barcelona which was where Titi flew into to come home. We had lunch a a great restaurant. I relented and agreed to the degustation(tasting) menu as it was recently Titi's birthday. Generally I don't like them so much as they are often at an unjustifiable price and we are obliged to spend up to four hours seated at a table. In the end we went to at least three restaurants for degustation menus during Titi's visit. They were all in Spain and the food scene in Spain is certainly dynamic but I do find these places excessive in so many ways.
Overall we had a great time together. It was definitely my kind of trip with three fantastic hikes in the Pyrenees Mountains. Each one different and all with spectacular views. The first hike was in the Ossau Valley where we caught a small train with a claim to being the highest altitude train line in Europe - Le Petit Train d'Artouste. It is in fact a tourist train but the route was breathtaking with the train clinging to the mountainside and it wound its way up the valley to the Lac d'Artouste. Once at the Lac we decided to return by hiking back down the mountain. Looked so simple on the map. We didn't take into account the elevation and the rough terrain but it was incredibly beautiful and we didn't regret for a minute having decided to do this hike.
During our road trip we stayed in different kind s of accommodations. Sometimes a room in a farmhouse, other times a boutique hotel in an old Manor House and one night is a hotel converted from an old Spanish Cathedral. Outside of the occasional good restaurant we dined on the traditional dish of Garbut, a regional soup full of vegetables and usually some kind of ham, which was always welcome after a day of climbing up a mountain.
One night we stayed in a village named Eaux Bonnes(Translation:good waters) hidden at the end of a mountain valley. On entering the village at night it seemed compact but very grand with a grand Casino and a majestic hotel with the name Princes Hotel. There was a large town square with six storey buildings surrounding it and climbing up the road towards the spa centre. In the second half of the 19th century there was a hot springs spa craze in France. Natural Spas were considered to have lots of health benefits and European Royalty were known to frequent these sites. Even today your general doctor can prescribe a visit of a week or two at a spa if you are feeling rather out of sorts, subsidised by the tax payer!
The town of Eaux Bonnes had definitely seen better days. Building after building had been abandoned. We entered inside one of these buildings which had been an hotel, I would guess operational up until the early 1980s but which now had been deserted. There was some vandalisation but the amazing thing was that with just a little investment for repair work and decoration it looked like could reopen in a month or two. The aforementioned Hotel des Princes was also abandoned but it retained many of its architectural details from the Belle Epoque. The hotel we stayed in was one of the very few old places still open. It felt like the rest of the town was just sleeping, waiting to be rediscovered and have the crowds return to take the waters from its healing spas.
Our second mountain hike was a place I had read about and had wanted to walk for a while. The main attraction of this walk is the part of the trail that was excavated out of the cliff face high above a ravine called the Gorge of Hell! The track was carved out of the gorge in the time of the reign of Louis 14th (1638-1715). Under Louis 14th a program to create an important Navy demanded timber to construct the new ships. For this construction masts were required and suitable trees were located in the forests of the Pyrenees Mountains. Access was difficult and the only solution was to carve a path out of the sheer cliff face. There is a sheer drop of 200m below the path with continues for a distance of almost one kilometer. I chose this track also as a challenge to my vertigo. if I could complete this then it would quite a personal achievement.
The site of the cliff was certainly spectacular and whilst there were some passages of a sheer drop, much of the cliff side of the path was lined with small shrubs. These shrubs were enough to mask the view of the drop below. This made it so much easier for me as I could trick my brain into denying the 200m drop below! The path was used by oxen who would carry the tree trunks down from the mountain so it was never so narrow that I felt myself at any extreme risk. And the views! Absolutely gorgeous! The rest of the walk through ancient oak forest was wonderful too as was our picnic lunch on a ridge high above the valley.