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Published: July 28th 2008
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Sunday’s often our walking day with the Rando del’Aubo. Not this week, not for Malcolm - he’s still nursing a poorly back. But I went - the excuse was that if it was a good walk I could learn all about it to do it again later with him.
It took a long time to get there. It’s well on the way to Andorra, and up a long mountain road - usually single track - that hurtles back and forth through woodlands with streams and waterfalls, with barely a sign of human settlement. We emerged into the sunlight, a reservoir, and space to park.
It was a bright hot day, but because of the altitude - 1700 metres as we began, 2150 by lunchtime - it was never uncomfortable. Wonderful bleak mountain scenery - ‘sauvage’, my friends called it, which seemed about right. It could so easily have been the North York Moors or the Lake District. Malham Tarn would not have felt out of place here, though perhaps a little hot and sweaty. Early on we spotted a quite enormous herd of Gascon cows following each other down the mountainside to their daytime pasture, a lovely sight accompanied
by the music of their cowbells. Marie-Therese enjoyed teaching me about the flowers on our route - the tall yellow gentian apparently related to the better-known blue one, magenta sweet Williams, gloriously vivid pink dianthus, bright yellow arnica, and a lovely tall blue flower related to the lettuce. It quite took my mind off quite how hard it was scrambling over and between the rocks and boulders which were our path on the earlier part of our route. It was the rough path itself which was tiring as the ascent was never too challenging, but always with the Andorran peaks ahead to admire, and the little rocky stream whispering alongside or below. Alain had warned us that as we were walking towards Spain, we were to expect a Spanish lunchtime - 1 o’clock rather than 12.00, but suddenly, at quarter to one, there was the first of our 3 étangs, and we all sat down immediately and unwrapped our picnics.
After lunch, I was the only one to paddle (‘les anglais!’), but lucky me: I was the one to see first of all a baby frog, then a medium sized one, and last of all, a big daddy of
a specimen swimming in the shallows.
A break-out group of us went to visit the other 2 étangs in the group - odd to see lakes so close together at completely different heights from one another: all three so clear, so blue, so very like their cousins in the Lake District (apart from the sunshine).
And then it was time to go down. If going up had been tough, going down was harder still, but the sweeping views down into the valleys, the uplands with their stunted, wind-deformed trees, the dramatic falls of scree, made the experience an exhilarating one. Someone ahead spotted a movement in the grass - a lérot, or garden dormouse! It shouldn’t have been out and about - it’s nocturnal, so was rather confused at its moment of being ‘un people’, with several paparazzi in the form of us randonneurs snapping away in our efforts to get the perfect shot.
And this wasn’t the last of our Natural History moments. Down in the valley, the cattle we’d met in the morning were being expertly rounded up for the evening by 2 - er - sheepdogs (cowdogs?). One cow wasn’t having any. She decided
Arnica
I had no idea it looked like this to break away and charged at the dogs. THEY weren’t having any either, and charged back. While the cow herd took charge of the cattle in the obedient herd and led them off, it became a battle of wills between the dogs who worked as a perfect team, and the cow, as each party feinted and lunged and charged and retreated. The dogs won of course. I don’t know whether they realised they had a large audience of at least 3 parties of randonneurs who greatly appreciated this unusual version of ‘One Man and his Dog’ played out against a wonderful Pyrenean backdrop.
And that was it really. A slightly weary team ambled back to the reservoir and the hot cars before the long descent down the mountain and a quick visit to the nearest bar (a mere 40 minutes away from the car park) for a long cold drink and to watch the last moments of the Tour de France post-race laps of honour in Paris.
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