Lourdes help us all

Here are some things you may not have known about Lourdes, a small mountain town in the Midi-Pyrenees in the south of France, population 15,000:

- Lourdes hosts 6 million visitors every year, making it the second most important tourist centre in France;

- Of French cities, only Paris has more hotel rooms 

Day 1: Lourdes

We certainly had no idea of either of these facts, when we dart boarded Lourdes as a good place to base ourselves for a hike or two in the mountains. Why might this be the case, one might ask? The reason all comes back to a woman called Josephine* who, back in 1858, was visited by the Lord whilst doing her washing at the local grotto. The Lord told her to build a whole bunch of tourist shops filled with all manner of wonders, including thousands and thousands of empty bottles for the faithful to capture a few drops of the miraculous water that managed to get Josephine's clothes so clean and white. 

*Or something along those lines. I may have mixed up one or two of the facts, but you get the picture. 

And  so it goes - every year millions of people from all over the world make the pilgrimage here to visit the grotto and dip their hands in Lourdes water. 

So, what the hey - we said it in Rome, we'll say it here - when in Lourdes...

Day 2 (morning):

In addition to the 'main attraction', Lourdes is also blessed with being an hour's drive from some truly spectacular mountain hikes. I had originally written 'an easy hour's drive', but then I recalled the roads... Whilst many of them are mysteriously freshly paved (more on that later), they are still very, very windy as they make their way through the mountains. And having already scraped Franz's mirror on some narrow laneways in Avignon, I was conscious of not repeating the exercise with some far more aggressive cliff faces. 

So, the next day we set off south deeper in to the Pyrenees. Unfortunately we weren't able to fit our camping gear and 'outdoorsy stuff' in our packs, so we had to limit ourselves to a day hike this time. We chose a very popular one (but surprisingly not terribly crowded) called the Cirque de Gavarnie. The route we chose was about a four hour hike around a natural bowl, ending up wih a scramble up a steep gravel slope to the foot of a massive waterfall (highest in Europe, apparently). Rather than do the usual tourist road we chose a longer route up the side of the mountain, hoping to make to a mountain pass view point called Hourquette d'Alan. Alas we didn't have the six hours we needed to do this full hike but did make it to the Cirque. 

The waterfall waaay in the background is our eventual target.

Note the baguette sticking out of my daypack. I never go anywhere in France without a trusty baguette.

Some pretty amazing scenery along the way.

Day 2 (evening):

So, that was the morning. We got back down to the car and had to skedaddle back up north to beat the road closure at four o'clock (more on this later, too). 

This was turning into another one of our ridiculously long days. We'd read about an observatory in the Pyrenees quite close to where we were, and it just so happened that on that very evening they were hosting one of their 'nights under the stars', where you go up the cable car late in the afternoon, and stay up there til about midnight looking through telescopes and eating dinner at the restaurant up there. 

The place is called the Pic du Midi, and it's actually quite a significant observatory globally due to its location. (I now know that) atmospheric turbulence, along with light pollution, is one of the key challenges for terrestrially-based observations. Atmospheric turbulence is, well, basically, wind. And because this observatory is at the top of a mountain surrounded by other mountains, much of the wind  is blocked by the mountain ranges around it.

The other thing about this observatory is that it should feature in a James Bond movie, because it is seriously cool looking.

That's the observatory - that little smudge on that mountain over there. We're about to get on the cable car over to it.

Check. it. out.

We're even higher than the mountain goats.

For the rest of the evening you're going to have to use your imagination, because it got kinda dark and we weren't allowed to use flashes or any light other than red. But we got to see Jupiter, and Venus, and Saturn - we could even see Saturn's rings!! It was amazing. It was also freezing... we had on every last stitch of clothing we brought and still were pretty happy to make our way back down the gondola to our car, and negotiate the hour's drive back to our hotel, tired but happy and ready for... 

Day 3: le Tour

Earlier I mentioned that many of the mountain roads we were on were mysteriously well maintained, and that we had to deal with a number of road closures. For you bike buffs out there, you would have already guessed why. We had unwittingly crossed paths with that greatest of all bike races, le Tour de France for its mountain stages. 

Every year the Tour includes about three days of mountain stages, either in the Alps or in the Pyrenees, and in and arounnd the area we were staying in is quite famous for its spectacular mountain passes and steep, gruelling roads and is a frequent host of the race. On our drive up to the observatory yesterday, we actually had to drive through possibly the most famous pass in the Tour's history, the Col du Tourmalet. At 2115m, and with grades exceeding 10 degrees at times, this pass is a worthy test to find the 'King of the Mountain'. We drove through the pass on the day before the race, and the road was lined up with caravans, tents, trucks, cars, and fans all camped out in readiness for le Tour madness the next day.

Back in Lourdes, it was kinda interesting to see how, I guess, lackadaisical people get about le Tour coming to town. The day before there was nary a hint that the circus was coming to town, and we had to ask around a bit to figure out exactly what the route was, when the roads would be closed, etc etc. Eventually we got the facts, and after a leisurely morning lie-in, we wandered out to the corner and had front row access to..... wait. For a couple of hours after the 'tour caravan' came past, which is basically   hundreds of sponsors' vehicles, in all shapes and sizes, all with music blaring and people harnessed to the top of them throwing out free....crap, basically. And the hungry hordes of people would shout at them and wave their arms and gnash their teeth and beg and plead to be thrown something - anything - stuff that you wouldn't bend down to pick up if you saw lying on the street. I saw grown men push children aside to grab keychains. 

And the flingers - those harnessed in the vehicles - they had some venom in them as well. I guess if that's your summer job for three weeks, to be harnessed to a car and forced to throw garbage at people for 6 or 7 hours every day, you might become a litttle jaded after a little while. Or perhaps they were just getting a little too excited about their role, because some of the stuff they were throwing was a little heavier than I would think makes sense to be whipping into crowds. Michelle was hit in the chest with a pack of Haribo's so hard it left a bruise! I still ate them though.

So after about three hours of standing and waiting, we saw them!! First the lead pack of about six riders, then the main peleton came racing past. In about the same amount of time that it takes you to read this paragraph, the whole pack had come and gone, and the van with 'Fin du Course' had driven past. Within another ten minutes, the barriers had been removed and once again Lourdes returned to its normal, quiet self, flogging empty bottles to be filled at the grotto of truth.

With the roads cleared, we were free to bid farewell to Lourdes, the Pyrenees, and indeed, France, for our next destination takes us to yet another country - Spain! Or, as I like to call it, Thpain. Next stop, Than Thebathtien!