Walking and Gourmet Tours in the French Pyrenees

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Article written by Trevor Sykes, journalist from the Australian Financial Review who spent his holiday on our May 2002 walking tour. Published on the 18th July in the Australian Financial Review.

Duck paté, blisters and the thrill of it all!

Against some strong competition, the Pyrénées may well be the most beautiful region in France. The countryside is dotted with green fields, neat white farmhouses and stands of birch and oak.
The villages are picturesque and any of them would win a tidy town award in Australia.
The mountains are spectacular. The Pyrénées are not much higher than the Snowy Mountains but they are more dramatic because they rise suddenly from the green alluvial plains of the Béarn region - obviously the result of a collision of tectonic plates when Spain bumped into France.

Seventeen of us had gathered at the village of Monein for a week of hard and soft walks under the guidance of Patrick Arrieula.
Patrick is a native of the Béarn region (his father is deputy mayor of the nearby village of Abos) who now lives in Bowral, in the NSW Southern Highlands, and organises half a dozen walking and gourmet tours of the Pyrénées each year.
We stayed at a hotel in Monein, which was generally the starting point for the soft walks - strolls along undulating roads through farmland. For the hard walks we were bused close to the Spanish border and then set out across rugged terrain.
Most days we walked about 16 kilometres and lunched at some scenic spot in the mountains. We carried backpacks containing lunch, water bottles and wet weather gear (the weather can change suddenly).

It was a mixed group of up-market hikers, mostly with bushwalking experience. Tom was a radiologist with a prospering business, Bruce was a public company director, the Colonel used to run an official money market dealer, Helen ran a knitwear company, Malcolm was a former stockbroker, Julie was a high school librarian and Fran was a keen botanist.
We worked a buddy system, under which everyone was responsible for ensuring that his buddy was not in trouble and was back on the bus at the end of the walk. So although we started as strangers we soon knew each other very well.
Nothing bonds a group like shared experiences, especially if they involve a little hardship. If one hiker suffered a cut or a blister, the rest would rally around with medical kits.

The first day, to warm us up, was a walk to the spectacular Cirque de Gavarnie. Here massive geological forces produced an upthrust semi-circle of granite with an intervening layer of limestone. The snowcapped ridge towers over the village of Gavarnie, where souvenir shops are the main industry.
The walk was short and only medium tough. We munched our sandwiches (plus a drop of red thoughtfully carted up by Patrick) alongside a snowfield, where chamois and marmots were frolicking in the distance. Looming above them were the precipitous walls of the cirque.
This is nearly as far south as you can get in France. Anyone who climbs to the top of the cirque (a task which would require the assistance of Sherpa Tensing) would be standing on the Spanish border.
After each walk we returned to our hotel in Monein to shower, dress our blisters and gather at the bar for an aperitif or three before dinner. Dinner was always a three-course meal, invariably delicious and mysterious - because we weren't told what we had been eating until afterwards.

The specialty of the region is duck paté, and we must have consumed half a dozen variations of this delicacy during the week.
The softer walks included a stroll from the village of Monein to a country farm for a lunch made entirely from its own produce (which included duck paté again).
Another was a stroll to the village of Abos for a delicious lunch of local delicacies, including pork paté, St Agur cheese and an apple pie made by Patrick's mother. That day also included a chance to try our skills at pétanque and the traditional skittle games of quille de neuf and quille de six.
The hardest walk was to the Olcarte Gorges, which started with a stiff climb to a suspension bridge over a deep gorge. We then wound further upwards until we reached a grassy ridge of such panoramic splendour that we would not have been surprised to see Julie Andrews singing "The hills are alive . . ."

We lunched there and spent the afternoon scrambling down a near-vertical goat track to return to the car park at the bottom. Or rather, to reach the hotel next door, where many an ale was downed with a feeling of exhilaration and high accomplishment.
We got the same exhilaration from our last walk, which started with a climb of 600 metres and then a hike through a greener valley than Greer Garson ever saw.
To our right was verdant green pasture speckled with yellow buttercups, tiny white daisies and purple wildflowers. To our left were mountain peaks still spread with sheets of hard snow even though it was late spring and the farmers were about to move their livestock to the uplands.
As we marched, we saw vultures soaring, searching for carrion below. Pyrénéan vultures are today multiplying to the point where their numbers exceed available food - a point which concerns owners of sheep who fear the big birds may change their dietary habits and develop a taste for lamb.
A few kilometres further, around the shoulder of a hill, we came upon the windswept green waters of Lake D'Estaiens, our final destination for the week. We sheltered in the lee of a limestone outcrop, lunched and took photographs of the wildly beautiful surroundings.
An icy wind whistled down from the mountain snows, ruffling the lake surface. A raven wheeled aerobatically across the lake, soaring, gliding and swooping into the breeze. The bird wasn't hunting for food or a mate. It was just relishing the sheer thrill of being alive. So were we.