May 3: The long march

We had our longest day today: 30km, which was also under a “severe weather warning’. The sky lowered dramatically, but was extremely photogenic, with overcast light making landscape shots (finally!) keepable. It diidn’t open up until after dask, long after we had settled in. The walk, too, was far less intimidating than it sounded: we only had about 700m climbed for the entire day and, confusingly for a long walk in a national nature park, was mostly on small roads, so firm/secure underfoot.

To be fair, I had us take a detour (on a tarmac road) to see if we could find a series of 3 dolmens marked to be closely together. This area is a neolithic landscape – full of standing stones and megalithic tombs. It is also full of flora, streams, working farms and private landowners coopting bits of public land with spurious “privé” and “access interdit” signs (and new walls, driveways and coloured-chains). So, actually finding them is a bit of a challenge. The single dolmen (that is a “stone table tomb” made of 3 to 5 large stones, creating a shelter for a grave) on the marked way is reconstructed, poorly, with one concrete side and iron-bar reinforcement. The ones we found were ruined, but evident, like broken sarcophagi overgrown with orchids and grasses within the landscape. They were moving and beautiful and worth the turn-off.

The environment is very clean here. We walked passed many different orchids (see the photos), including bee orchids, which are unobtrusive to walkers, but wonderful mimics (hoping to attract amorous bees and, thereby, be pollenated). There are also many blue butterflies (it’s quite chalky land), which are very environmentally sensitive.

A camino lesson: the best way to film a blue butterfly is when it is busy, which they frequently are, on the piles of deer poop on the trail. To a delicate, blue butterfly, a poop is just as attractive (more attractive than?) as a flower. Equally, if several hundred butterflies flared up at me from a giant donkey poop, would I have been so disgusted? The camino does not judge. Utility is utility in nature. I am reminded of The Big Bang Theory: Sheldon’s phobia for butterflies – “flying sex worms”. It’s all a matter of culture and perspective.

Our gîte tonight is a large, 6-person room, which sounds wonderful. But, the small print is always the kicker: should we want to use the kitchenette (for which no crockery, cutlery etc has been provided), we will need to pay an extra 10 Euroe each per day; the drains are pungent. I had to go and ask for some bleach (“du Javel”) to help with the smell and heaven forfend that we should go upstairs (where the other 3 beds are! 2 beds are made up downstairs, pointedly highlighting that the other 4 are not for us. But, it is nice to have a large space, which we do, for our day off tomorrow, and a terrace, should the rain break.