Noah’s ark…

Week 7

The Weather App on our phones has become our best friend… We no longer even consider moving without looking, first, if we have a remote possibility of being able to leave Marvin at one time or another… Venturing down dirt tracks? Don’t even think about it!, at least during a few days… We are beginning to feel a little like Noah in his ark, sailing from point to point to find a place out of the water to be able to moor ourselves… 🤓

The weather improved a little during Saturday morning, which allowed us, between two showers, to walk around the lake where we had settled at the end of last week (it is not a very large lake… 14 km in circumference). The place is quite beautiful, but the wind and freezing temperatures (this morning the lake was smoking from so much cold! 🥶) were not very inviting for long walks. Also, on Sunday morning, the people from the village a little further down had the good idea of organising a bike race that passed right in front where we had parked… Too much social interaction for us, so we decided to leave earlier than planned and take advantage of Sunday to go visit one last cave (the last one for now… 😅). We left Cantabria (taking a photo of the sign that we had missed coming in) and returned for one morning to Castilla y León to reach the Hermitage de Saint Thyrsus and Saint Barnabas. Before, we passed very close to the source of the Ebro, the poor river that, before crossing all of Spain to flow into the Mediterranean in the south of Catalonia, only travels 9 km before finding its first (and immense) dam… the first of a long series…

Ojo Guareña

The Hermitage of Saint Thyrsus and Saint Barnabas is one of those chapels built in a natural cave, whose priests had one day the idea of blocking the entrance with a church… In fact, the hermitage is part of a karst complex of more than 100 km of galleries, excavated by the Guareña River, which gives its name to the Ojo Guareña Natural Monument. The cave can be visited and, after a brief introduction, we arrive at two large stone basins that collect every drop that falls from a stalactite, strategically located just above. According to the legend, the water in the cave is magical and whoever rubs his eyes with it, according to the modern version, will be cured of all eye ailments (including contact lenses), and according to the older version, will gain the power to see the present and the past, but not the future. Instead, this person will no longer be able to leave the cave, and his gift of vision will then be his only contact with the outside world… The moral of the story somewhat sums up the spirit of the cave: sometimes, it is better to pursue a dream than to achieve it…

Legends aside, the Ojo Guareña cave has housed many generations of our ancestors, as demonstrated by the skull of a girl discovered at the bottom of a tunnel in the cave and dating back to… the Neanderthal (-40,000 years ago)!… Another discovery was that of a skull from around the year 900, trepanned post-mortem to draw a cross on the forehead. It is still not known how this man died, or why, after his death, a cross was drawn on his skull, and there are still many bones in the cave in the same situation…

The last to use the cave were priests, who built a hermitage there, dedicated to San Thyrsus and San Barnabas. The particularity of this hermitage is that its vault is entirely covered with paintings that represent the different martyrdoms of San Thyrsus (10 in total), as well as the miracles that he supposedly performed. The drawings have the typical style of the Middle Age, like those found in books from the same period. The constant atmosphere, temperature and humidity of the cave have meant that they are in an exceptional state of conservation, and that the hermitage can still be used, a few times a year, to celebrate masses or weddings…

Interestingly, the small villages around Ojo Gureña are organized into a kind of “community of communes” and, traditionally, municipal council meetings were held first under a “sacred” oak tree (still visible above the cave), and later in a small cavity in the cave, right next to the hermitage. The latter was also used to store municipal archives in a stone cabinet at the back of the chapel (probably also for the same reasons of ideal conservation conditions)…

After this last cave for the moment, we head towards the Basque Country, and more specifically towards its capital: Vitoria-Gasteiz (no, the capital of the Basque Country is not Bilbao, nor is New York the capital of the United States or Sydney the one of Australia… 🤓). Ahhh! The narrow and winding roads of the Basque Country… We had almost forgotten them since our tour of the Pyrenees… 😜

Instead of the old town, which we already know, we chose to visit the Garaio Provincial Park, an ornithological site of some interest since it is also a Ramsar site… The park itself is a little too “manicured” to feel natural, but its managers seem to take their Ramsar label very seriously, as the central area of the site (by inference) is literally fenced off to prevent any contact with human neighbors and allow the local palmipedes to splash around peacefully… It is far from the wildest or nicest place we have found so far, but for one night, it did the trick!…

Pamplona and Saint Martin d’Arrossa (France)

Before leaving Spain and entering France, we decided to make one last gastronomic stop to taste some of the famous Basque (and Navarrese) pinxos. Pamplona seemed like a good option for this, on the way to Roncevalles and the Port of Ibañeta…

Pamplona is famous for its San Fermín festivities, where hordes of drunk tourists invade the streets to run in front of bulls released in the same streets to run after the tourists… In itself, a highly intellectual celebration, made famous by Ernest Hemingway who, in his youth, worked as a journalist in Pamplona and remembered the San Fermín festivities in his novel “The Sun Also Rises”. This had (and still has) the effect that a swarm of Americans visit Pamplona every year (preferably during the San Fermín festivities) and often end up in the emergency room, either in an alcoholic coma, or gored by a bull… ( ok, ok, accidents don’t happen only to Americans, but statistics show that they are still the ones who end up, for the most part, in the emergency room… 🤓).

Hemingway apparently wrote: “I can never do more than Pamplona has done for me.” And the city returns the compliment since it is difficult to escape the multiple statues of Ernest scattered throughout the city and in its bars (yes… outside of his working hours, Ernest already had the habit of frequenting bars… to write, of course… 🙄). Let’s be honest, without Hemingway, Pamplona and its San Fermín festivities probably wouldn’t be as famous. The old houses in the city center and the surrounding fort are certainly quite pretty, but they might not be enough to compete with the other surrounding regional capitals in the area. On the other hand, what Pamplona definitely has is a gastronomic tradition!… It is definitely worth trying the pinxos (the Basque equivalent of tapas) and walking around the city looking for the best restaurant to go to. In our case it was Gaucho, winner of multiple pinxos competitions organized by the city and even recognised by the Michelin guide (in the pinxos category, of course… 😜).

One last coffee at Café Iruña (Pamplona is called Iruña in Basque), Ernest’s favorite bar, opened in 1888 (and very well preserved by the way), and we headed north for our last kilometres on Spanish roads… We crossed the Pyrenees at the port of Ibañeta (1,057 m), above Roncesvalles, to then reached Saint Jean Pied-de-Port. Basically, the Camino de Santiago, but in reverse… 😜 For this first night in France, we returned above Saint Martin d’Arrossa, where we had already slept during our crossing of the Pyrenees. Not only are wild places to sleep rare in the Basque Country, but it also seemed like a good way to come full circle with a nod to our adventure last summer… It was in this place where we saw many vultures, right next to Marvin, and… it seems to be confirmed: it is a very good place to see vultures up close, because a group of about ten individuals just landed twenty metres away from Marvin! 😍

From the Pyrenees to Toulouse…

It’s raining… And when it rains, little can be done in terms of visits or photos (plus, there are no caves around here anymore… 😁). So we turned on the radio again (which we normally have off almost all the time) to support us a little during all these kilometres…

We left the Basque Country under the clouds. We followed the Pyrenees to Pau, but we could only have a glimpse at the snow-capped peaks for a few seconds, between two enormous white clouds clinging to the mountains. We went north a little above Tarbes and finally had an afternoon with some moments of sun and no rain. But then, at night, it started again. In the morning, 100% humidity in the air. It’s not actually raining, but the air is so loaded with water that it seems like you are moving inside a cloud…

Everything is so wet that yesterday, we tried to go through a dirt track, next to a river, but between the puddles of water and the wet clay, Marvin started to slip to the side of the track, and we decided to turn around before getting completely bogged down or having to go through a wheat field to get some adherence… These days, we will have to forget about remote places and stay where the ground can still support Marvin’s weight…

So we continued east, crossing the Gers (and resisting the call of foie gras), almost to Toulouse. In fact, to compensate for the bad weather, we had two days of real influencers, getting to know our fans! 🤣 The problem is that if the sun does not return soon, between the cakes they give us and the restaurants, we will end up obese!… Here are the few photos that we have been able to take during these two days without running the risk of electrocution by touching the iPhone in the rain… 😜

PS: For those looking for a good restaurant southwest of Toulouse, the Table de Saint Lys (in Saint Lys, as its name suggests) is highly recommended!… Everything was excellent, and the desserts were also very well presented…

Montagne Noire

Today, in addition to the rain, the wind picked up… But not a nice breeze, eh! Real wind! The one that blows so hard that you have to open Marvin’s doors with both arms (both to open them and to prevent them from being ripped off once open)! That said, it probably helped clear the skies a bit as the forecast looks a bit more optimistic for the next few days…

So we continued with our fan tour (and the weight gain that comes with it, with all these good things you give us! Thanks again! 😍). Today we met our number 1 fan, the most diligent in reading our adventures, the one who never misses a post or a video. And as a token of our gratitude, she even got to sit behind Marvin’s wheel! Being a loyal follower is priceless! 🤣

We left the Bouconne forest without really having had the opportunity to visit it. We must still recognize that the locals are braver than us, because they, even in the rain, do walk through the forest… with their ponchos! We deviated a little from our route towards Carcassonne (without visiting the Cité… another time…), then we returned north to reach the Montagne Noire and the Haut Languedoc Regional Natural Park. Here a totally different landscape awaited us, just fifty kilometres north of Carcassonne. A mountain landscape with dense forests and rounded peaks, especially beautiful at this time of year when the soft green of the deciduous trees mixes with the darker green of the conifers. We went up to Pic de Nore to see its TV antenna in the shape of Tintin’s rocket ship, but the wind was definitely too strong to stay there any longer and we took shelter a little further down for the night.

We settled on the Col de Triby, a few kilometers from Mazamet, in the same place where, in 1948, a group of nature, mountain and ski lovers created the Ski-Club de la Montagne Noire and the Triby ski resort. Nature has claimed its rights over the station, today a “ghost”, and nothing visible remains of this daring enterprise that then had its hour of glory. With great ingenuity, the local youth installed a lift made up of a truck engine and a rope that dragged skiers about 150 meters higher up. The creation of the downhill track required almost a year of efforts by volunteers to cut down trees and remove stumps, but it was a success: on Saturdays and Sundays there were traffic jams in the Triby parking lot. It was even necessary to establish a one-way route to get up and down, and a workshop for manufacturing wooden skis was even opened in Mazamet.

The best skiers competed each year in the Nore Challenge, a competition that included a slalom and a jump with a wooden springboard. In fact, the jumping record set at 18,50 m still stands… There was also a cross-country ski competition, the Challenge du Roc des Loups, which counted towards the Pyrenees championship. They came from Castres and even Albi for these competitions. The adventure ended in 1970, the low snow cover (we are barely 1.000 m above sea level here) suggesting that the endeavour would probably never be viable… (the black and white photos of the old Triby resort come from: https:// www.facebook.com/triby.mazamet/.

Second family break…

The Montagne Noire and the Haut Languedoc Regional Natural Park will be our last stop before taking our second family break (this one, longer) and preparing for the big climb towards the extreme north… The adventure will continue in a couple of weeks, just the time for us to clean Marvin a little, tighten a couple of nuts and verify that everything is in place to continue our journey!… 😉

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In the Montagne Noire, as anywhere else, LEAVE NO TRACE!

– Always travel on public ways and respect the signs.
– Limit noise and interfere as little as possible with wildlife.
– Respect the other users.
– Leave rocks, plants and other natural features as you found them and respect historic sites.
– Take your waste with you and throw it into the appropriate containers, in the nearest village.
– Do not camp inside protected areas and do not make any fires.