Short summary -- vilely misled!!
Dinner yesterday evening was a little mixed -- so-so main course, smallalthough excellent dessert -- but the hosts were nice and the conversation at dinner interesting. They were French, but not from the area, and had moved there four years ago to open a B&B... and for the first three years nobody local spoke to them, despite seeing them every day on the street. Even at school their five year old child was only spoken to by the children of other "immigrants". Apparently this is not unusual in the more remote regions of France -- there was nothing personal, nor were the locals irritated by their opening a B&B... they just didn't want to interact with people who were not from there.
Another interesting thing -- our host told us that it would take no more than two hours to get to our lunch place, and then another two hours to get to the refuge. So we set off around 9:30, in excellent spirits since in the meantime four hours of hiking is almost like a rest day!
As if.
It took three and a half hours to get to the lunch place (although in defense of our host, 45 minutes of this was due to a bridge having been washed away by a river, so we had to go to the next one). And then it took another two and three quarter hours of tough hiking (over scree and rocks of varying sizes) to get from our lunch place to the refuge. Frankly for most people I think it would have taken closer to four hours. And since it is always all about expectations, we were suprisingly tired at the end of the day (5:30PM)... and a little pissed off at our host!
Beautiful countryside, though. Very steep mountains (like in Ticino, for those who have hiked there), narrow valleys, high peaks (2500-3500m). Still scattered patches of snow around -- looking out of the window here in the refuge I can see a couple that are lower than I am (1810m)! Tomorrow we go over a pass at 2760m, and having seen the low-level snow I was a little concerned, but we heard at dinner from some other hikers who had been over the pass today that there was no significant snow. In addition, the weather is supposed to be fine. So, it may be a long and tiring day, but there appear to be no major risks, other than that there is a 1km length that is of particular difficulty. How difficult we will find out tomorrow!
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