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Published: July 26th 2007
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Lyon
with Dan and Kate This blog has suddenly become a joint blog with my good old mate Dan. We are friends from way back. We jointly decided that there would be nothing better in the world to do than bike through the Sahara in the northern summer. So here we are getting closer. We´ll have turns about at writing up the blog, and I´m sure that Dan can spell better than me.
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Five days in Paris soon turned into three days in Lyon, again through couchsurfing. I finally met up with Dan, and we're now travelling together through wild southern France and into boiling hot Spain. We got off to a disastrous start for our combined travel. We were supposed to meet at a certain metro station but Dan's plane, from London, was delayed for over an hour, so by the time he had got to the meeting point, I was out of there, gone, had departed. So poor old Dan, without a clue, nearly slept on the street with the homeless. I meanwhile was busy writing emails to arrange a new meeting place for the next day. In the end it all worked out. We had a good time
in historical Lyon. The city has a great bike hire system too, which we took advantage of as we cruised around the old town and along its river banks. We took the bikes all over the show like down steps, which Lyon would unlikely have approved of.
When it was time to leave we attempted the hitch hiking option. We hired bikes as far as we could take them and then headed for the 130km/h motorway. After about 20mins of zooming passed cars and trucks, we decided that we were probably breaking the law so moved to an on-ramp down the road a bit. We took turns, and while watching a bit of a police drama next door, it rained and no-one would pick us up. Finally, at last, but nearly two hours later we did get a ride: the bus back to Lyon.
So just as we´d waved Lyon good-bye and good luck for the future, we were back. But the city of Montpellier was in sight. Hitch hiking had failed but the high speed train got us there in less than two hours. We had a good look around the city and were really impressed by
its windy hilly and narrow inner-city streets and had some magnificent buildings and art work. Our next job was to find an inner-city camp spot where we could camp for free. We'd purchased a two person tent back down the road in Lyon so we were adamant to try it out. We walked ground for a good hour before finding a piece of grass along some busy road. Grass seemed to be few and far between in the areas where we were looking but at 2am it was time to simply pitch the tent, sleep and see how it went from there. Well the tent, as advertised, was not a two person tent, far from it. And with our packs taking up half the space it was a bit of a disaster. By around 6am, all the traffic started up, trucks, cars, buses: good morning Montpellier!! what a great night's sleep! We also spotted some homeless people lurking around the area so it was really time to leave. We packed up, went back into the city, explored some more and had a coffee before taking a bus to Gignac so we could try our luck hitching again this time aiming
for Millau.
There´s not much to say about Gignac, apart from being a town in the middle of no-where and having such an unfortunate name, we soon got on the road and about 45mins later we finally got picked up. Take that Lyon! The drive to Millau climbed to around 800m and then down again. Millau has a really impressive and new Viaduct that we really wanted to see. It was impressive enough and we found a nice camping ground surrounded by mountains and valleys. After another pretty poor sleep we decided that it would be our last night in that ridiculous tent.
The next day was all pretty good fun. In the heat, our aim was to get as far as we could to Spain and hopefully find a Gosport (shop) to trade the tent. Well it all worked out pretty darn well. We really enjoyed rural southern France and all its villages, towns and great scenery. In four rides (two semi-English speakers, two non) we got to Albi and spotted our new god, the Gosport! The staff there, who spoke no English, seemed happy for us to exchange our tent and of course couldn't ask any
Camping Millau
with good Muesli questions so that suited us very well. They simply put our tent back on the shelf- and we could clearly see which one we had used. So if anyone plans to go to Albi's Gosport in search of an expensive kid's tent, you have been warned.
From Albi we hitched our way to Toulouse (another important French city), but we only stopped for a wee while as we wanted to push onto the Pyrenees. Our last ride of the day turned out to be a really friendly French man Patrick. His English consisted only of a few words but he was adamant to speak French to us even though we couldn't understand a word. So this carried on for some time until he suggested that we could stay the night at his place- especially as his ´farmer´spoke English. Turns out he meant ´wife'. So in the end we crashed at their place (and their two children) and enjoyed some very hospitality in the small French village of Le Fossat.
Hitch hiking was all pretty good fun. Whenever there was a language barrier, we´d get out the phrase book which was always a bit of a winner. ´Enshante´ always
Montpellier
rough night but good coffee got a humorous response, meaning 'pleased to meet you'. I got confused one time to and asked a man if I could buy him a drink, clearly he didn´t have a clue what I was on about. Next, hitching to Barcelona.
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emu
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Looking very metrosexual on those hire bikes mate. hey, reference me on the old couchsurfing, I did you already.