The day begins with thunder and a flash downpour at seven. Madame drops an umbrella outside my door to facilitate my getting to breakfast dry.
Again I have half a fresh baguette, butter, loganberry confiture, a glass of orange juice, a monster cup of tea, a succulent fresh peach, and a small bowel of sultanas. It’s the same as yesterday but for one item; the warm croissant is replaced with two burly slices of freshly baked plain cake.
It’s prefect, but the Philistine in me craves a big bowl of weeties. French grocery stores don’t stock cereals.
Madame says the weather today will not be good; tomorrow will be better. Around nine the thunder booms again and more rain lashes the garden outside my door. I sit in the comfy chair and read and nod off and read some more.
Around midday the air is warm and Madame is in the garden snipping the heads off things. I put on my cycling knicks and the rain starts again, a soft steady patter. I fiddle with the bike computer, reset the home altitude to 550 metres, shift the time function back eight hours, and convert the language to French.
At two it’s now or never, but the finish of Stage 9 of le Tour at St-Flour is out of the question. I will ride to Saugues, departing Langeac on the D585 via Chanteuges, then taking a big loop with Saugues at the bottom of it.
It’s impossible to find words to describe the endlessly stunning sights in every French village. Chanteuges has a some sort of 12th century religious edifice beetling overhead. I feel obliged to point the camera at it.
I duck off the main road to Saugues, under the railway, over La Desges, the river whose valley I am about to explore along the D30. It’s narrow, winding, lush, and dark. The valley is deep, then steep, especially when I turn onto the D32 to Venteuges. Surely there is no way out of this vertiginous place.
But the narrow road twists its way inexorably up the sheer side of the valley. Everything is deeply green and densely forested, except the floor, so far below, that looks like an exclusive golf club fairway. No buildings cling to these hillsides.
When I finally haul my carcass over the top I expect a rollicking descent, but to my surprise verdant farmlands extend in all directions. Four kilometres on at Venteuges an expansive pastoral vista unfolds with Saugues in the middle, a neat stone town—at this distance—with its pink tiled roofscape.
And now the descent begins, a fabulous five-kilometre open and sinuous high-speed blast through rouleaus of hay under a huge blue sky. I sing and yell unintelligible sounds for the sheer rapturous joy of it.
In Saugues I eat dried fruit, an apricot bar and a banana in the high street before remounting and pounding up the D589 out of town on my way to Monistrol, fourteen clicks away in the heart of the Allier gorges.
Another high-speed descent, this time through pine forest and marred by roadworks, but mostly exhilarating, lands me in Monistrol, another amazing village of ancient three- and four-storey dwellings perched over the Allier. Indeed, many seem to hang off the sides of the gorge.
The D589 goes on to the major town of Le Puy-en-Velay, but immediately over the bridge at Monistrol I turn left, then immediately 180 degrees right onto an impossibly small, bumpy, nondescript track. The sign says Langeac, otherwise I’d never have believed this was a road to anywhere.
The track points my nose to the heavens and the Cervélo and I slug it out to the D301 high above the gorge. For ten kilometres we rollercoaster our way around the gorges of the Allier, before a hair-raising descent to the river on the D48.
I haven’t gone fully sick on any descent, and just as well. Rounding a 180 degree blind curve, I hug the rocky embankment as a Porsche hisses around the arc and disappears behind me. F-u-u-c-c-c-k!
The last 12 kms to Langeac are torturous: my legs are empty. Two crossings of the Allier on long narrow bridges and several sharp corners under bridges of the tourist railway make a pleasant end to the ride.
It’s after seven and I’ve had no meal since le petit dejeuner, and it barely qualifies. It’s more like a morning snack; barely enough fuel for eleven hours sleep let alone for 80 kms on the treadly and over 1400 metres of arduous climbing.
The madame at Langeac’s swanky little pizzeria greets me with a sneer. She gabbles something at me. I tell her I don’t speak French and says d’acour—of course—in a tone that makes it clear that she picked me straight off as being from another planet.
Fortunately the waitress is a different story, gypsy-dark, with an arc of Roman nose that would span the Allier elegantly. Even though she’s typically Frenchly small-breasted, my gonads are incandescent.
I tell her I’m a vegetarian—Je suis végétarien—and ask if the forestrière pizza is végétarien. Yes, she says, it’s vegetarian.
The pizza arrives smothered in sliced ham and reeking of dead pig. Madame of the surly sneer has prepared it. My disgusted look tells her the pizza is not to my liking. Végétarien, she ventures. Sans jamon?
The French refuse to get vegetarianism. It’s wilfully perverse of them. I know. I have a degree in wilful perversity.
[84.0kms @ 21.1kph. Montage 1420m, max 1094m, max grade 12%]
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