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Sunday, Oct 7th, 2007
A mixed bag, the hotel in Brianconnet: on the one hand they served the largest, most heavily laden pizzas that I have ever seen (and charged a pittance for them), but on the other the beds were like bananas, and the owner was incapable of providing us with a packed lunch. It seems as if Sally had the best of it: her chambre d'hotes (B&B that also does dinner) was very nice, the food good and plentiful, the bed comfortable, and the company congenial. Worth the walk, she felt.
Dinner table conversation apparently turned to hunting and her hosts told her a couple of things. A little disturbingly, they said that the hunters shoot one another all the time. And amusingly they said that the wild boar appear to be way smarter than the hunters: when the hunt is on the south side of the valley, they regularly see boar trotting by their place on the north side heading upslope into the forests. I wonder what the kill ratio is of hunters vs. boar? And vs. hikers?
The hike was very like the day before: beautiful countryside, no other hikers, frequent sounds of hunters, and lots of whistling. We went over the watershed between the Var and the Rhone (well, actually the Verdon, but it ultimately flows into the Rhone) at a village called Soleilhas around midday. All downhill from here! We wish....
We got lucky with lunch: there was a restaurant in Soleilhas, and it was open, and it served plentiful and hearty food, so we were not forced to eat the slowly defrosting loaf of bread which was all that our host in Brianconnet had given us. That cast a completely different light on the afternoon than I had feared, and it was with a significantly improved attitude that we walked off after lunch over the highest remaining point on the H2H: the 1365m Col de Saint-Barnabe. Quite a change from the Pas de Cavale!
On the way down along a forest road we stepped aside to allow a convoy of eight vehicles to pass, one of which was a pickup truck transporting two dead wild boar. Apparently the hunters do win from time to time. On a related note, I saw no dead hunters or hikers.
After a long downhill, shortly before we got to Castellane, we stopped for a few minutes to rest our tired feet. It was another fairly long day -- almost 7 hours -- and since it was the fifth in a row our feet and legs were starting to feel severely compromised. Russell being Russell expressed his feelings at this state of affairs in a series of loud incoherent cries, prompting the lady of the house behind which we were sitting to come and see what was wrong.
One thing led to another and we spent a pleasant hour chatting with her and her husband over coffee and orange juice in their garden. We talked about the usual subjects -- our hike, the drought, hunting, and wild boar. He works in Nice and he said that it has only rained twice there in the last 12 months and that the trees are starting to die. They said that they detest the hunters, and also whistle whenever they go out into the woods at this time of the year, usually when looking for mushrooms, but that there haven't been any this year on accont of the drought.
On the subject of wild boar, he pointed to his rooted up lawn and said that if he had a gun he would have been able to shoot a couple from his living room window the night before. Apparently there are tons of the destructuve little beasties around, and, one assumes, would be even more if the hunters didn't kill a bunch each year, so maybe the hunters are something of a necessary evil.
Castellane is a slightly larger village than those we have seen over the last few days, and with a spectacular setting on the Verdon River just next to a huge rock monolith (200m high) on the very top of which is perched a church. Another time I'd be interested in climbing up there. But not today. Today, our rest day, I'm going to do as little as possible!
