Day 23: Condom to Éauze
- Simon Pollack
- May 19, 2024
- 4 min read
Updated: Mar 27
’Tis long the green way in, and a tunnel tree-lined straight
It happens not to turn into a happy bouncing gait
The monotone of plodding, the jarring-joint of bore
You walk until you cannot ever face it any more
19 May 2024, Sunday
Distance hiked 32.5km (20.2m) | Ascent 617m |
Mentally scarred and feverishly keen to avoid mud, I researched today’s route last night in bed. Around 10km into the walk there’s a very attractive village called Larresingle, and I got a note from Sybille saying her host had told them it was muddy up to there and recommending they walk on roads to that point. This made more acute my Pilgrims’ Mud Avoidance Syndrome. I discovered there is a “Voie Verte” (a Green Way) from Condom to Éauze, a paved-over disused railway line. This seemed like the perfect solution to me (having previously visited Larresingle anyway, with Jon, 5 years ago), and I set off to find it and walk it.
What a mistake. A mile or two outside Condom I got on the Voie Verte and stayed on it for 15 miles. It’s straight. It’s a tunnel of trees. Its tarmacked. You can’t see anything. There’s no variety of direction, elevation or surface. There are no other walkers, and certainly no pilgrims to chat with: although many tried to avoid the mud I was the only genius to discover this Voie Verte. About 3 cyclists and a couple of joggers went past me (though I may be double-counting one of each who returned the other way). It’s pure sensory deprivation. And it rained literally all day, ranging from hard to ferocious. This was my worst walking day of the whole Chemin, utterly and irredeemably joyless. A mile or two in I realised I was in for a mind-numbing slog of monotony and I rather sped up to get it done as quickly as possible: mistake again! The knee swelled and suffered.
Happily the destination and evening were of typically sociable quality. I stayed in a location I’d stayed at before, 5 years ago, though it was in new ownership: Les Lodges d’Éauze, owned by Madagascan couple Eric and Mia, is a chalet-style hotel complex with a central restaurant / bar building located alongside their swimming pool. Eric and Mia were perfectly charming, with Eric in particular being a sociable and chatty soul. In the short time I spoke to him I learned where they were from, that he was a retired airline pilot, that they’d owned this place for just a few short years and enjoyed it but were deeply frustrated at the way the state regulates them and taxes them and were planning to sell up and move back to Madagascar within about 3 years. That was basically just the golf-buggy journey from reception to my chalet.
At the restaurant I met Richard and Cathy, an Australian couple in their fifties who were settling in with a glass of wine (bless her, Cathy called it “vin rouge” rhyming vin with pin). I really enjoyed their company and saw a lot more of them over the remainder of my time on the Chemin. They were chatty, interesting, intelligent, and doing this as a great adventure relatively soon into Richard’s early retirement as a very senior executive in an explosives company. He had travelled everywhere where there are mines or quarries – in other words, everywhere. They’d booked through an agent (they don’t speak French and live the other side of the world) and this led to some amusing moments whereby I bumped into them several times later and they hadn’t realised they were staying in the same place as me because they didn’t look at the schedule till the last minute.
Natives of Queensland (Brisbane), one comment brought me back to something I read as a young boy which just astounded me: plenty of Australians have never seen snow. In my youth this had made Australia seem incredibly foreign, alien and exotic (even as culturally and linguistically they are as cousins). And sure enough Cathy, who as a nurse hadn’t travelled anywhere near as extensively as Richard, saw snow for the first time in her life a couple of weeks ago when I experienced it in Nasbinals.
They already knew Michèle, who joined us shortly after for the aperitif. She is a retired investment banker, having worked in New York and London in the 1980s (the boom years, when Greed was Good if you remember the film), now living in Paris but enjoying particularly her holiday home in Normandy. Michèle spoke English and we four decided to dine together. It was again heavily duck, and it was again topped off with an Armagnac. A grand time was had and I again slept like a baby – the walks around this time are challenging ones and I’m restoring my body strength each night with excellent food and plenty of sleep.
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