Westbound Raid Pyrénéen

This July I did the westbound cycle-tourist Raid Pyrénéen, a 10-day, 790 km ride through the Pyrenees from the town of Cerbère on the east coast of France, just north of Barcelona, to the town of Hendaye, near Biarritz on the Atlantic, over 28 cols (mountain passes), some of which feature in the Tour de France. I took my itinerary from Lonely Planet's "Cycling France" guide (a bit dated at six years since publication). Here are some (rather blurry) pictures and a description of the route.

I flew into Barcelona and took a train to Cerbère. You can walk along the road a little over 1 km to get into town or, just outside the train station, you can descend into a graffiti-spattered tunnel with a handwritten sign outside it that claims it goes to the sea. For about a hundred meters' worth of flickering electric lights, the tunnel descends into the earth and this claim seems increasingly less likely, but at last it indeed opens out onto a pebbled beach, with the small town behind it.

I stayed at La Dorade, the main hotel there. I bought a bike on German eBay and had it shipped to the hotel. There was some uncertainty whether the bike would arrive in time on account of a strike by DHL, but there it was...

An early 2000's (I think) Dura-Ace equipped Pinarello. The stem was rather high so I put the spacer above it and rode the bike with a few inches' worth of steerer tube sticking out. Stylistically this is doubtless the bicycle equivalent of putting truck nuts on your car, but I neglected to bring a hacksaw to cut it down to size. At least such a tall steerer suggested nobody had been racing this bike, which, based on my prior experience in the Italian Alps, which you can read about here, was probably a good thing.

The next morning there was a little market set up in the square that sold fruit, vegetables, and meat products.

I bought some nectarines and bread and took off. This is looking back toward Cerbère on the way up the coast...

The first day, to the town of Llauro, roughly 60 km away, started off biking through little seaside towns like this:

Eventually I arrived at a campsite in the small town of Llauro. For 10 euros, the Dutch lady who runs it will give you a beer and a mallet to hammer your tent stakes anywhere you like. I could hear the mosquitos bouncing angrily off my tent screen all night. At some point during the course of the evening a bag of kiwis I had saved for breakfast vanished without a trace. Perhaps it was a bear...

I had dinner on somebody's back porch, which he had turned into a restaurant by concealing his kitchen behind one of those Japanese paper screens and then putting up a sign that said "Restaurant" with some Christmas lights. He said he had closed the kitchen already because nobody had shown up that night, but he had some quiche lying around so keeping this in mind perhaps I would like some quiche. Two minutes later, I was eating quiche, heated by what was doubtless the finest microwave in all France.

The next morning I left for the town of Escoloubre, roughly 108 km away, being careful to observe the peculiar local laws of the road, such as respecting the salamanders...

For which courtesy the traveler is politely thanked...

What's the french for "fixer upper"?

This day's passes were the Col Fourtou, Col du Xatard, Col de Palomère, Col de Jau, and Col du Garavel. It was rather foggy, so I didn't get much of an idea of the scenery.

The roadside livestock invariably stared at me as if wondering what strange business I was up to.

Atop the Col de Jau. Who knows what lies beyond?

Descending into Escoloubre as it begins to grow dark...

That night I stayed at a chambre d'hôte (like a bed and breakfast but not always with a breakfast) called Le Cochon du Madres. The dinner was the kind one's grandmother might cook, and it appeared someone's grandmother had. It was some sort of meat dish that I could not identify, partly on account of I'd already eaten most of it before it occurred to me to wonder what it was.

After I finished dinner the grandmother took the initiative to bring out an extra omelette filled with potatoes to make sure I was quite full.

Day three's destination was Tarascon-sur-Ariège, over the Col du Moulis, Col de Pailhères, and Col de Chioula. Here's the beginning of the Col de Pailhères, a 15 km climb with an 8.10% average grade to the second highest elevation in the Raid...

Midway, another cyclist descending...

Getting close to the top...

Almost there...

As you get to the top, a bunch of horses descend upon you looking for carrots...

I wonder how many bicycles a foal has to bite before deciding that as a general rule they don't taste very good.

"Well? Where are the carrots?"

This is looking back down on the ascent...

Took a detour to Ax Les Thermes. This is a hot springs bath where the Knights Templar once soaked their feet. It's called the Bassin des Ladres (Lepers' Pond). As you can see, the lepers in this pond look almost completely healthy. It's amazing what they can do with leprosy these days. Nonetheless I kept my distance from them.

It was in Ax Les Thermes that France's famous work-life balance first became something of a nuisance. All the bakeries and grocery stores shut down from 12:30 to 3:30 or 4:00 for an extended siesta, which makes getting lunch tricky if you don't know exactly how long it takes to get to the next town. Also, French store hours should be translated adding an "-ish" at the end, and 3:30ish might be 2 or it might be 4, depending on whether the proprietor finds something better to do with his afternoon. Ofttimes I would be waiting in front of a shuttered door for a shop to open as 3:30ish stretched on to 4, listening to the shopkeeper converse idly with his friends on the other side of the door until such time as he presumed it fitting to do business.

Another oddity is the fact that while many stores have "OPEN" ("ouvert") signs in their windows, the presence of such a sign seems to have little bearing on whether the shop is actually open. The logic seems to be that if the sign is correct, you know the store is open, and if the sign is incorrect, then you know that the store is closed.

I think this is Col de Chioula. The are many more trees in the Pyrenees than the Alps, which makes the heat somewhat more bearable than it might otherwise be.

These were old ladies gathering up grass clippings with giant rakes. At the rate they were managing it, I expected they probably started sometime in the late nineties. No doubt they reaped the kind of spiritual cleansing only honest labors can provide, but I couldn't help thinking some gas-powered gizmo would have made short work of the job.

A sign said a rockslide had taken out the road to Tarascon-sur-Ariège so I made a detour through Verdun (no, not that Verdun). Here are some children playing in front of the church.

Campsite in Tarascon-sur-Ariège...

My guidebook said this place cost 10 euros, but apparently it had since been taken over by some sort of commercial chain possessed of aspirations to make of it a downmarket Disneyland, complete with bouncy castle, playground, incessant 80's rock music, and an interminable variety show, all for the low, low price of 24 euros (plus 5 euros for electricity). After forking over an additional 8 euros for a pizza the size of a Ritz cracker I sat down to watch the proceedings, which started with a juggler whose act suggested he had taken up the art only earlier that afternoon, with indifferent results; a singer attempting a song in English when it was obvious she didn't speak the language and was just winging it phonetically, with the result that it sounded like she was repeating a song she was listening to for the first time through a pair of headphones; and as grand finale, a fellow in a penguin outfit playing air violin to Lindsey Sterling's Elements while what appeared to be a barmaid with lousy union representation suffered to extend the purview of her normal duties to lumber about on tiptoes in a tutu. This all would have been acceptable entertainment save that the penguin costume was one of that half-hearted kind of costume with the beak appearing on the actor's forehead and his face unobscured, rendering suspension of disbelief impossible.

I was at that moment accosted by a knife-wielding hobo with greasy shoulder-length hair and a maniacal grin, who had been bobbing and weaving amidst the crowd pestering with good cheer an understandably querulous audience. That this fellow was the manager of the establishment could be inferred from the fact that nobody had yet kicked him out, not to mention his giddy smile suggested someone successfully parcelling out patches of a weedy lot at hotel-room prices to people providing their own accommodations. Seeing that I had already nibbled my pizza down to its ultimate crumb, he now raced to present to me, with all the pomp of the Lady of the Lake delivering unto King Arthur his sword, a steak knife for to divide this crumb into the slices this pizza had not been cut priorly (eight euros failing, in the region of Ariège, to prove sufficient consideration for a restaurant to trouble itself in this regard).

The next day it was on to Seix, roughly 70 km away over the Port de Lers, Col d'Agnes, and Col de Latrape. It seems every other building in this area is a church. Later I would notice that most churches have clocks, but most of the clocks appear to have stopped, so you will go by a church where it is forever three o'clock and shortly afterward arrive at one that demurs, insisting rather that it is invariably eight thirty. I decided that I were pope I would declare a single hour at which all these stopped clocks should be stopped at out of fear that some latter-day Martin Luther might otherwise happen along and exploits the disagreement to start his own franchise. (When one is riding a bicycle ten hours at a stretch, he tends to think a lot of things...)

Everywhere I've been in France they have these handy water fountains, often with the spigot in the shape of an animal's head, like a duck. Today's services were provided by a mossy lion...

The local pig slinger, going about his appointed rounds... His pig suit has a little hood on it so his hair doesn't end up smelling like bacon.

Sheep and cows dot the landscape. They wear these big bells that clang constantly, producing a sound rather like a gamelan orchestra warming up.

A paraglider taking off from (I think) the side of Port de Lers...

Descending Col d'Agnes...

The road flattens out as you get close to Seix...

Seix...

Had dinner out of this pizza wagon, fortunately not on a Sunday. You can't really see but the sign below the window says it's closed on Sunday in the summer, while the sign to the right of the window says it's open Sunday, but only in the afternoon. When the place is closed on Sunday, it appears that the shut awning will conceal the sign saying it's closed Sundays in summer, while the hours it's supposedly open on Sunday remain visible. Thus only if the store is open on Sunday can you know that it is actually supposed to be closed on Sunday. This looks like an accident but you see this kind of thing so often in France I think they do it on purpose.

At least, if these paradoxes get to be too much, it is always possible to console oneself with a pastry. These never seem beyond arm's reach.

I asked someone where the campground was. This person turned out to be the town butcher. The next thing I knew, I and my bicycle were in the back of his van. To my surprise, he actually dropped me off at the campground, rather than packing me into sausage casings and stringing me up in his shop window. The campground registration office was open till 8:00ish, so naturally at 7:45 I was far too late, though some while later someone pulled up on a motorcycle outside the office and out of the kindness of her heart let me in anyway. Once again I camped next to a river, and a noisy one indeed, which is one of the pleasanter things about campgrounds.

Had dinner at Ar Menez Creperie Bretonne after some guy driving by stopped in the street while I was outside looking at the menu and told me how delicious the food was. Perhaps the owner paid him to drive around the block and do that to everybody, but it was a good place.

Next day, the destination was Argelès-Gazost, up Col d'Aspin and Col du Tourmalet, the second most famous route of the Tour de France after Alpe d'Huez. This is on Col d'Aspin...

Along the top of this route and Col du Tourmalet the camper vans were assembling for the passage of the Tour de France later that week...

Apparently even as France yet waded through the welter of the Crimean War some far-sighted Minister of Water Fountains had the good sense to station one right at the bottom of Col du Tourmalet, where it has been filling water bottles ever since...

Roughly two hours later, at the top of Col du Tourmalet...

I'd probably be a candidate for slowest-ever unassisted ascent of this climb except that on the way up some octogenarian, first having himself a hearty chuckle over the fact I was shouldering my luggage up Col du Tourmalet, gave me an assist (running behind and pushing me for about fifty feet before his legs, lungs, or heart gave out, I'm not sure which). Thus I fear I'm disqualified. The top of the ascent was packed with camper vans and crowds milling about, so it was almost like riding up during the Tour itself.

Here's Chris Froome stealing my look on his way to winning the 2015 Tour de France, allowing us to play "Who wore it better? Dura-Ace equipped Canary Pinarello edition"

Looking down the other side.

Up till now I had had no real technical problems. My front tire went flat coming down Tourmalet and almost sent me off the side of a turn. While I was patching tube some guy trudged up from a camper van to offer a tub of water if I needed it to fix the tire (it being occasionally necessary to hold a tire under water and watch for air bubbles to find a small hole). This proved to be the first of a number of friendly people my bike would introduce me to over the next couple of days, on account of the fact that I now had a persistent problem, as I went through both spare tubes and all the patches in my patch kit (I think I went through at least six patches) trying to keep my front tube inflated.

It appeared that the rim tape was too narrow and had taken to sliding off the spoke holes, causing the tube to go flat on the rim side when one of the spoke holes punched a slit in the tube. Each time this happened, I would move the rim tape back into position, but it would just slide off to the side again.

En route to Argelès Gazost, riding through Luz St. Saveur...

Camping in Argelès Gazost... A small problem I had with these public campsites is the ground is rock hard from all the camper vans and I didn't bring a sleeping pad, so it was like sleeping on concrete... On the plus side, this was next to a cemetery, so my neighbors were reasonably quiet.

Next day, the intended goal was Arette, over Col des Bordères, Col du Soulor, Col d'Aubisque, and Col de Marie-Blanque. Here, a sheep decides to play chicken as I get close to the top of Col du Soulour...

I was having problems getting the patches to work on my tube, I think because the hole punched by the rim was so big (or else maybe the glue was old or something, but the patches were failing after a few km). A couple swedes at the top of Col du Soulor gave me another tube, which lasted for a while.

Col d'Aubisque runs along this road cut into the side of a mountain...

Looking back the other way...

Near the top of Col d'Aubisque, my new tube went flat on account of the same problem. A french guy in the kind of thick-framed spectacles one might see worn only ironically in a place like New York City, but which suited his earnest demeanor, stopped and offered me another tube, then after saying he had to leave because he had to get up at five in the morning for his government job (peculiar, given that presumably 5ish might mean any time before noon), he proceeded to expound upon the virtues of some pan-french organization of bicyclists whose annual meeting he planned to attend that week, not appearing particularly bothered by the fact that I could only make out about 10% of his speech.

Top of Col d'Aubisque

A small herd of giant bicycles...

My tire went flat again on the descent, then again at the bottom. At that point I was reduced to standing by the side of the road hoping somebody would happen by with an extra patch. Another frenchman and his daughter's fiancé rode by but they had no patches and their only spare tube was for a 26" wheel. I then flagged down a car with bikes on the roof. The spaniard inside said he had no patches but offered to drive back to his campsite and get some. He returned a while later (with family in tow) and I was on my way again, although by the time I finally got to Col Marie Blanque it was getting dark. This is looking back toward Col d'Aubisque from the bottom of Col Marie Blanque...

I went up Marie Blanque a ways to see if there might be a town of some sort, but finding nothing promising, went back down, continued along the road till I found a campground, and set up my tent. The restaurants were all closed so I had a protein bar and a stray after-dinner mint for dinner. The next morning I got up at 7 and made my way over to the (closed) registration to figure out how to shove my 10 euros in a mailbox or something when Larry David appeared from out of a camper van looking somewhat more put upon than usual, opening shop early while shaking his head and gazing up at the sky as if for heavenly assistance in translating my butchery of french into some semblance of coherent thought.

Traffic jam on Col Marie Blanque the next morning. This horse was making sure no traffic passed in either direction...

"That's a nice bike. Pity if something were to happen to it. Say, got any carrots?"

Col Marie Blanque descent...

Flatted twice more on descent, some guy driving a van full of mountain bikes tossed me a couple patches. I went through both of those. Luckily, the next person to stop, a swiss guy, had some duct tape, and he stood there portioning out 1 square cm pieces of tape while I taped over all the spoke holes in the wheel. This took a while, so he had plenty of time to tell me about his biking travels across Europe and South America (on a titanium bike frame he welded himself). 3 km later I flatted again, but this time it was just the patch failing from the last repair. The next guy I met was a local of about 70 with calves the size of footballs and veins snaking all over them. He was on a mountain bike but insisted on biking 6 km to his house and driving back with a tube, which he pulled off the wheel of his own road bike. After that I had no more problems.

Next I raced to Arette (my original destination of the previous day) trying to beat the 12:30 siesta, since I'd had almost nothing to eat for 24 hours. I got to the grocery at 12:26 and the bakery at 12:32, where the blinds were already drawn. I tapped on the window till a suspicious face appeared, then started singing "Nobody Knows the Troubles I've Seen" until the baker relented and, after looking left and right out the door to ensure no one was observing her sending the work-life balance two minutes off kilter, sold me a couple of baguettes.

Next I bought new tubes and a new patch kit. (The shop was technically "closed" but was full of people getting their bikes fixed. The owner had already started trying to figure out what was wrong with my bike and how to fix it before I even told him I just wanted spare tubes.)

After that I went up Col de Bargargui, which is by far the steepest climb in the whole Raid, with extended sections of grades in the double digits.

Following that it was Col Hegui Xouri, Col de Burdincurutcheta, and then an extremely long downhill zipping along on new asphalt...

After that I arrived in St-Jean Pied de Port. The campground there is on a slope, so you get to sleep at an angle. It also seemed to attract a seedier element than the more remote campgrounds. There was much cackling and retching going on all night from all sides.

The next morning I set off for Hendaye. There are two tiny cols on the way, but mostly the ride goes along flat terrain and highway. At Hendaye I took a swim in the Atlantic. I found the Mediterranean Sea to be warmer, but figured I'd save bicycling back for another time.

Outside the tourist office I happened to meet the guy who had given me the duct tape on the descent of Col Marie Blanque and we split a room in a chambre d'hôte. After dinner and a pear and chocolate ice-cream cone, then woke up early the next morning to set off for Toulouse...

I would like to see the expression on the face of the architect of the convent that now houses Toulouse's Musée d'Augustin were he to walk through the building's halls today...

The son of a local professor of Hegelian philosophy showed me around the churches and museums. He'll be riding my bike along the Canal du Midi and shipping it to the location of my next trip.

A few general notes:

I brought paper maps but never used them. I always wondered why people keep duct tape in their tool kits for, and learned the hard way.

The MapMyRide android app consistently under-reported distances, making it hard to follow the cue sheet. I think the GPS was occasionally failing to lock on, and when it reconnected, the app would assume travel in a straight line since the point of last connection (missing all the curves in the road), so distance got less and less accurate the longer I recorded the ride. It would have been useful to have had a regular odometer.

My bag weighed roughly 25 pounds.. I probably could have got bag to sub 20 by strapping lock to frame and removing a few non-essentials. I brought a flimsy aluminum u-lock but I might lean toward even flimsier cable lock. The swiss guy had an inflatable sleeping pad that looked like a good idea.

The tent I brought was really nice, a Marmot Eos 1P. It has this tinkertoy-like skeleton of hollow tubes filled with elastic strings, and practically assembles itself. I could set it up in near dark with no problems. The stakes were kind of useless for camping in campgrounds with this tent. I never had a mallet after the first night anyway. The tent stuff sack makes a nice pillow with clothes in it.

The usual way to do the Raid Pyrénéen appears to be to hire a van to follow you with your luggage and ferry along your lunch and water supply (and long-suffering wife, often enough). However if you do this, you pass up the opportunity, as you linger over the measly crust of bread and chocolate bar you lugged to the top of the latest pass, to look askance on all those van-hiring namby-pambies whinging about how the distribution of mayonnaise isn't sufficiently uniform in their footlong hoagies, the ice-cream's gone soft, someone ate all the pistachios out of the mixed nuts, and once again Le Maillot Jaune Tours has brought the kind of Perrier with the lime in it instead of the lemon when the speaker has told them time and time again he's allergic.

The market stalls tend to sell ripe fruit, whereas the convenience stores appear more likely to sell unripe (or just less palatable) fruit. Fruit is also kind of heavy to carry relative to the energy content, since it's got so much water in it.

I'm not exactly sure how the star system for campsites works. I never saw a one-star campsite, so I suppose it's possible that this designation exists only to make two-star campsites seem slightly more palatable, just like "small" sized supermarket eggs only exist in theory, serving only to make "medium" sized eggs seem bigger. The difference between two and three stars seems to depend on how many bugs inhabit the light fixtures, how energetically they dance around as the bulbs flicker in a kind of insect disco, whether someone appears to be waiting to hear you turn on the shower before turning off the hot water for the evening, the number of gaggles of intoxicated youth roving about the premises at all hours, the volume and melodiousness of the songs they sing, and how likely one is to find a toilet with the seat still attached. Four-star facilities are to be avoided at all costs, as such venues aspire to justify this lofty designation by way serving up what one might only in the loosest sense of the word describe as entertainment.

All along the route of the Tour de France there are cheers spray painted on the road such as "ALLEZ ALBERTO! ALLEZ CLAUDE! ALLEZ CICERO!" and then occasionally "PAS OURS" ("NO BEARS"), which discouraging words might explain why it is that no bear has managed to win the Tour de France in the modern era. A shopkeep explained to me that these "PAS OURS" markings were put there by farmers who thought that the bears the environmentally minded government was reintroducing into the area from Slovakia were eating their cows, though she averred that it was in fact dogs and wolves that were the culprits, the farmers were all idiots, and the bears were themselves quite congenial. Occasionally you also would see "OUI OURS" ("YES BEARS") on the road, but not very often, suggesting either that the bears enjoy only lukewarm support amongst the local populace, or else maybe that the bears themselves, lacking opposable thumbs, find it difficult to manipulate spray paint cans.