Notes From My Travel Journal - Up Into The Queyras (April 2014)

Journal  Part 24 – The Queyras

We woke to brilliant blue sky with scarcely a cloud and I wanted to get off on the road for a day trip up into the Queyras, an area of the French Alps which is also a National Park. Just up the road from the camp site is the town of Guillestre, a town a few centuries ago that was pillaged by troops who had struggled across the Queyras and down the narrow gorge of the River Guils from what is now Italy. It is easy to see why the French built Fort Mont Dauphin, at the French end of the gorge: to make sure this attack couldn’t happen again.

I can imagine why they wanted to pillage after making that journey because they did it without the help of 20^th century technology which created the need for passable roads and enabled them to be built. By the 20^th century men may not have been able to move mountains but they could certainly move parts of them and the way the road through this gorge was made was a good example. 

No doubt in the 19

^th century beginnings had been made so that the small towns further up the valley where the gorge had opened out could communicate with the rest of the world or at least the Durance Valley. And in places the road seemed little better than it would have been then. There has been no real widening of the road and the most of the tunnels have none of the 2oth century improvements such as being genuinely two lane or being lit up. So the drive is hard, intense care and concentration is needed and when you see the drop you know that going off the road meant certain death.

The first real sign of the imperious power of the 20^th century is a high dam, built by Electricite de France (EDF) for generating power. The French have been good at this, much better than we are in Britain, and a large percentage of French electricity comes from these dams. And behind the dam was a beautifully blue lake and the road beside it was much better, no doubt improved at the same time as the dam was built and the valley bottom had been flooded. And this road was straighter and allowed the brain to relax a bit and not be so concentrating on driving well that it could observe and consider at the same time. Having seen quite a few almost without noticing them, I was struck, as I have been throughout my wanderings in the mountains, by the number of colourfully Lycra-dressed and helmeted mainly male cyclists heading up the same road as me. Some of them looked older than me yet I have to regard them almost as a different species. No way would I be attempting to cycle up this road, my Winnie hardly ever got out of third gear and a lot of the time struggled to get over 30 mph.

Suddenly there was a ridge nearly closing the valley and we were back to narrow hairpins as we approached the Chateau of Queyras, a beautiful structure looking most medieval but nothing like 19^th Century which dominated the passage. Just before there was a big memorial to the French Resistance with loads of names etched in it. I can imagine that the German invaders must have had problems getting up into this area as there was no room for tanks and no way round, the mountains going up almost vertically at this point. Behind the castle, in the valley beyond the ridge, sat the old town, on the Italian side which suggests that the town would have considered danger to be coming from the French – the present Italian border is less than 20 miles away as the crow flies – and would suggest that this area was once not in France but in Piedmont, the Italian province just up the road.

And just up the road there were roads going off, this one to Briancon in the north and one to Italy in the east, but both passes were marked as closed. The small town of Aiguilles was just a few miles up the road and I decided to go to the end of the line, to the next village whose name I cannot remember but which was a ski station with chairlifts next to the road. Going on from here the road was declared unsuitable for vehicles over 3.5 tons, which the Winnie certainly is, but the track looked to have once been metalled and not too bad. I stopped somewhere there to take some photos and thought about having lunch but Eddy cleared off back towards the village and wouldn’t come back – he must have spotted another dog. I had to drive back and get him, the only incident that was not perfect and he got me angry, anger, an emotion I was rarely feeling these days.

A bit further and there was a sign saying 10kph for the next 6 kilometres, the end of the track which was indicated as leading to a viewing point for the surrounding mountains. We pulled over onto some grass and I hoped to see some marmots but instead we just had lunch then continued, only stopping to read a plaque that announced that this track had been made by the army in the early thirties to facilitate the movement of troops in this border country. After lunch we discovered why there had been a weight limit. There was a wooden bridge whose floor was planks. I went over this one very slowly.

We had been passed whilst eating lunch by several mini-buses of the sort they use for moving tourists about, the sort of tourists who are fit and are going to be climbing, walking long distances, white water rafting, kayaking, cross country cycling and other such activities well beyond me these days, if ever. They were parked up in this large area indicating the end of the track. So we turned round ready to head off back home and got out and took a load of photos. We spotted some huge boulders, the size of a small dwelling, which had obviously rolled down the mountainsides at some point. I would not like to have been driving when these came down. There were often biggish rocks by the road but none nearly as big as these monsters.

The journey back was fairly uneventful. I was more relaxed and really enjoyed the scenery. We spotted a young long-hair with a lovely dog picking up litter by the roadside, old men digging small patches of earth which had had all the stones removed at some point, the stones being used to mark out ownership. I spotted a marmot crossing the road and was sure I got it on camera but no.

We pulled over at a ‘tabac’, a licenced tobacconist. Getting hold of cigarettes can be difficult because, unlike in the UK, they are only sold in such licensed shops. In there I also bought a referee's whistle on a yellow cord to use with Eddy – I’ve tried it on every walk since and it seems to work, alerting him to come back to me and receive head strokes and be called a good Eddy.

Because of my low speed compared to locals, particularly school bus drivers and the like, I was constantly pulling off the road to let them speed on and received thankful signs from the other drivers when I did so. Then we were back, quicker than I thought and I couldn’t wait to see how my photos were. As usual, most the ones I had taken whilst driving were not brilliant, mainly due to my dirty windscreen.

When I took Eddy out an hour or so later, we got into a meadow where he could run around exploring while I sat down enjoying the view and the sun. I got to thinking about the book I am reading, about the authors presentation of the classical and romantic views of the world. This I remember had gone straight over my head when I was doing my business studies degree but been of great interest to me during my teaching course and even more so when I was studying for a M.Ed. By that time we were talking about the paradigms of objective an subjective realities and I was firmly in the subjective camp, particularly as a result of working with disturbed young people. I was fed up with the scientific, logical, mass-data approach which I had seen failing. I knew that reality changes from person to person, that for every event there would be as many perceptions as there were people involved and that clinical, behaviorist's approaches failed time after time with young people who fell outside of ‘the norm’. I had considered myself an outsider for years and saw nothing in life likely to change that view.

After dinner I watched a good recent film called The Railway Man, a moving, well acted film about the effects of war and about the healing power of forgiveness, for the forgiver and the forgiven. That led to more thought so I finished the night with some outtakes of Mock the Week, some of the best (or worst, depending on your point of view) comments by this irreverent bunch of comedians. Late night followed.