Pyrenees vacation - Hike 4, Amélie-les-Bains to Céret

We're now on Day 4 of the "packaged but self guided" hiking trip from the Pyrenees to the Mediterranean coast.  (See Day 1, Day 2, and Day 3 if you haven't read about them already.)

So far, we could not find "turns" on Day 1 and Day 3 that the hiking directions said should be there, and ended up a little lost.  Everything worked out OK in the end, but including other errors in the turn-by-turn instructions, we had to be cautious from here on out.  

The travel company's plan for Day 4 would take us from Amelie-le-Bains to Ceret, another 650m ascent and perhaps 5+ hours across 12km.  I left the map below zoomed out so you can see how we're approaching the coast - we're still just north of Spanish border too.

At breakfast that morning in the hotel, a lady sitting across from us brought her dachshund... and had him sitting in the chair across from her!  Look at that face - he's a professional beggar.  It worked, of course.

To get to the trailhead, we had to walk through town a bit, and passed one of their larger churches:

We got to the edge of town, and found the trailhead.  It started by running along an old wall, and under heavy tree cover.  An interesting atmosphere, but pretty chilly without the sun's rays.

The path kept winding around old walls, and since we had a few turns where we knew we were in step with the instructions, we stopped and took a photo -- so far, so good, but very early.

After perhaps an hour, we had ascended to the point where we could see the town of Amelie-les-Bains below, with the small river snaking its way through the buildings.  Another nice day!

We continued our climb through the forest.  In Germany and Austria, fallen trees like this (below) would be cleared from trails pretty quickly.  We concluded then that either the French and Spanish don't maintain the trails as well, or decide that such minor things are OK and leave them.  Interesting, though.

Frau A found this particular mushroom interesting, and stopped (and contorted herself) for a photo:

The hiking trail now started winding in-and-out of large rocks...

...with glompses through the trees of the mountain peaks across the valley.

At one point, the rocks were so dense that they were almost like steps up the mountain.

A note here about trail markings:  the major trails are given names or numbers (like the GR 11 that we saw on Day 1) but they are also marked with color.  Look at the photo below, and you can see painted onto the large rock on the right is a horizontal stripe of yellow.  This mark will appear perhaps every 10 minutes on a rock or tree, and lets the wanderer know that he/she is still on the same path.  The GR 11 uses two stripes, one red and the other white.

This is, of course, very helpful (and part of the regular trail maintenance that we mentioned earlier).  The instructions from the travel company would almost always reference these, saying things like "after 20 minutes and Xmeters incline, take a right at the fork and continue following Yellow".  Just a FYI, but this is important later in the story...

Below, more interesting fallen trees along the trail:

After a few hours, we arrived at a wall of a French farm (and in line with the directino too!).

A little further down we could see buildings on the other side.  Everything stone - very cool.

This is looking back from the way we had come, the the chickens we had to walk around!

So at this point, we're on track and have had some nice sights too.  Back into the woods for more climbing.

We even arrived at an abandoned farm building, just as the directions said.  Again, very cool to see.

The old sign is still there:

Not long after this milestone, however, things got worse.  There was a cross in the road, and we had to follow the correct path.  The problem was this: the sign pointing to our path was a ambiguous.  Below is the picture of our dilemna.  We were coming from the bottom, hiking upwards, and had to interpret the sign.  Is the sign pointing to the path going upwards, or is the sign telling us to follow the path going from left to right???  Do we continue the same direction, or turn right???

It's not so easy on mountain trails, either, because they wind so much -- switching back to make an ascent.  So you can't just decide "that is heading the general direction we want" because the trail may swing around rapidly.  We eventually decided to turn right -- that the sign was point along the trail rather than to the trail.

Interestingly, we continued to see the correct color markings on this trail, so it seemed that we had chosen correctly.  We saw this peak ahead, and hoped that this was the top of the climb that day, and that we would from there descend to Ceret.

Although we were still getting the right trail color markers, they were not as fresh and consistent as before... not a good sign.  Even worse, we encountered yet another peak on our path (below) that we had to go around, which added even more ascent.  We were getting higher, not lower, and these twists and turns were not in the directions.  Lovely view though!

(We obviously still felt OK enough to stop & take a bracketed photo for later HDR processing):

After a few more hours, we were getting concerned.  The trail color markings had stopped (and there were no turnoffs that we could have mistakingly taken).  This made no sense.  Eventually, we came to a high clearing with horses grazing - interesting!  Even better, there were two signs at the edges of the clearing (look at the yellow one back right, and the second one on the back side of the tree, left).  We discovered that we had indeed taken the wrong way, and had gone South instead of East.  Waaaay south.

What was most irritating was that the trail had teased us with the right color markings for a while.  Ugh.

We had now two choices:  return the entire way we came, or continue on a loop back to Amelie.  Those were the only options.  So we decided to at least keep seeing new things, and continue the circle back to Amelie.  We were rewarded with the ruins of an old mill:

Unfortunately, we realized that we had gone 3 miles out of our way -- and done a total ascent of 1200m !!!  This was twice the climb planned for the day, and returning to Amelie would put us at 25km total... also 2x the distance in the printed plan.  We were getting tired, and it was starting to get dark again.

You can see how it's getting dusky as we finally got back down to the river-level:

(And, of course, the obligatory bracketed and HDR'd version of that same shot, below.)

The river had some great rocks and mini-falls too:

At one point along the river, we came to where it crossed a road.  Frau A was beat, so we decided to walk along the road back to Amelie and see if anyone would give us a ride.

One car came along, going in the wrong direction.  Sure enough, as our luck was going, the next car that arrived was a police minivan!

We waved them down, but had a problem:  neither of us speak French well.  We showed them them map and drew and hiking path that we had taken.  They faces showed how shocked they were at how far we went that day, and when we said the hotel name they understood our request.

They invited us to climb in... but wait!  One of the two policemen had to clear off the back seat.  He didn't want us sitting on the wild mushrooms.  Yes, the French policemen had stopped to pick wild mushrooms, which were laying on the back seat.

As soon as that was taken care of, we got in.  As they drove, we tried in broken French to have a concersation.  They were very friendly.  In fact, they stopped along the way and showed us a "secret lookout" -- we ducked through some dense bushes and came to the edge of the rock face, looking down over the town.  They said it was one of the nicest views around -- the photo below doesn't really do it justice.

Even more interesting:  as part of their duties each evening, they have to close and lock the old thermal baths in town.  They invited us in and we took a photo of the baths (below).  Cool!

They dropped us off at the same hotel where we started that morning.  We said thank you often and loudly, and then took a taxi to Ceret.  THANK YOU FRENCH POLICEMEN!

What was quite an adventure.  We were incredibly frustrated with the directions (or our inability to figure them out, in German and all) but ended up with a much more interesting hike than the plan would have given us.  Plus, we again had luck as kind Frenchmen gave us a ride, and we knew it'd be a great story.

And there are still a couple days to go, to be documented in the next blog posts...

Pyrenees vacation - Hike 3, Coll de Noell to Amélie-les-Bains

Despite a few unclear hiking directions on Day 2, we felt pretty good heading into Day 3.  We again got up early, thoroughly translated the instructions from German at breakfast, and put water in the backpacks.

Today we would be heading mostly north, further into France.  On the Google Map below, you can already start to see the Mediterranean Sea and our final destination of Banyul sur Mer.

One unique part of this day's agenda was that the hike would start outside of town -- they provided a taxi to get us to the starting point.  Day 2 ended in Prats-de-Mollo, but Day 3 started in Coll de Noell.

The taxi basically dropped us off in the middle of a dirt road.  50m further, a hiking path veered off right.

The first hour or so had a completely different environment than the pine forests of Day 1 and 2.  It seemed much drier here, dominated by grasses, wildflowers, and shrubs.  And the sun was really beating down.

For a while were were hiking along farmer's paths, and slong some woods that were small deciduous trees.

Eventually, we ascended beyond the farms and up to the peaks that we had to cross in order to reach the next town.  These mountains were a little more dramatic that what we had seen so far.  You can see the narrow trail heading up to the first apex - we would have to do two of these today.

Looking back, the hiking path snakes its way back and disappears over the ridge we had just climbed.

The second peak was even more photogenic.. and we had some company!  Two Frenchmen had already arrived and were having lunch.  We said hello, and opened our packs for food and water too.  The guys were NOT doing the Wikireisen tour -- they just lived in the area and were having a nice day in the mountains.

As we started the descent towards Amelie-les-Bains, the way became quite rocky.  Oddly, this was more difficult to do that a grudging incline.  But we took it slow and steady, and so far all directions looked good!  No problems... yet.

Eventually, through a clearing we could see a town in the valley below - presumably our destination.

Unfortunately, this is where the directions failed us again.  For you doubters out there, check out all the hiking we have done in Germany and Austria - and I promise we double check and backtracked twice... but there was a turnoff the directions noted we should take that did not exist.  So we kept on the main trail and headed down towards the town (that's Frau A coming down the trail, below).

We did arrive in town... but unfortunately about an hour walk from the part of town where our hotel was.  We asked a man driving along the road to clarify directions - not so easy with our terrible French.  However, his eyes lit up when he saw the name of our hotel, and he motioned to get in the car.  Why not?

Yet again, fate dealt us a great hand.  This man was friendly (singing to himself in the car) and dropped us off right at the hotel!  That was nice, because it gave us some time to shower before dinner.  I took the chance to take photos of the locals playing bocce next to the river, outside of our hotel window.  My favorite is the man in yellow shirt, tie, and hat.  He liked to be the judge rather than play the game.

So ended Day 3.  Mostly on track, with an instructions problem towards the end of the day that landed us an hour outside our destination.  But we had some luck again, and all worked out well.  It was another day of hiking 12km, ascending 650m, experiencing the Pyrenees, and ending with a nice dinner - we slept well again that night.

As you'll read in the next post, Day 4 had more dramatic surprises in store for us...