Word Of Mouse

We didn't have time to go to the Descartes museum: the next day we were up early as usual in a bid to escape the increasing midday heat, and cycled through some beautiful small towns and villages to Saint Savin, where we knew there to be a campsite thanks to some Dutch people who lent us their camping guide. The countryside was by now significantly "lumpier" (technical cycling term) and included some steep sided river gorges. Beautiful to look at but hard work grinding up out of. By the time we reached St Savin we were definitely ready to stop and the municipal campsite was shady and inviting. We took a dip in the river - delightfully cool but a bit muddy.

We took a day off in St Savin, and went round the abbey to look at their medieval frescoes of the Creation from Genesis: unfortunately many of them were covered up for restoration. It was a good excuse to cool off from the midday glare in the quiet dim interior of the abbey (which included a statue dedicated to Saint Hilarius. Apparently he was a bit of a joker). The nicest bit of St Savin was the old bridge across the river.

After our day off we rode onwards, aiming to reach the town of Bellac. After less than an hour in the saddle we were startled while descending a quiet shaded road by a loud "ping". This turned out to have come from one of our rear spokes, which had snapped. The wheel seemed OK and we cycled on gently for the next 10km to the nearest town, hoping that it would have a bike shop of some kind. Luckily it did, and furthermore it was run by an enterprising couple of Brits who had set it up from scratch a couple of years ago (with limited French) and created a thriving business. They were also tandem fans. They not only supplied us with a new spoke plus some spares but also a new tyre to replace the rear one that had suddenly delaminated on one side a few days previously: not of such supposedly good quality as the original however so we put it on the front instead (but how good quality could the old one have been to have worn out after only 1000 miles or so?)

We set off again into the heat, only delayed by an hour or so, passing by Le Dorat, where we stopped for much needed cold drinks. We have taken to ordering two cold drinks each... the first seems to disappear very quickly. Monsieur le patron took our order. "He on the front looks much sweatier than you," he said to Ali, "so he must be working much harder." He realized his error, and quickly corrected himself "but then you are on the back, so you must be the engine: he is just le direction, non?.

We left Bellac the next day, soon facing a long steady climb through the wooded valleys of the Monts Blond followed by a delightful descent into the small village of Cieux. It may have been named Heaven but did not look very heavenly: it did however possess a small boulangerie where we got our daily fix of patisserie products. From there we passed through the village of Oradour-sur-Glane, passing the sombre reminder of the WWII atrocity that occurred there when the population was executed in one night by a unit of the SS. The derelict and ruined village still stands.

A lovely descent to the river valley at St. Victurnien seemed to promise the prospect of an easy riverside ride along to Aixe sur Vienne, but we reckoned without the small scale of our map and the steepness of the river gorge: in fact it was hard and hot work. We eventually made it to our chosen campsite at Nexon but both feeling that we had overdone it: for me my spirits finally hit rock bottom when seeing that after all we had been through just to get there, some inconsiderate fool had chosen to build Nexon on top of a hill. We found a supermarket and Ali nobly took charge, acquiring all the necessary ingredients for a good evening meal and letting me just sit outside and recover. She also bought a jar of isotonic sports drink mixture: I had never tried this before but it seemed like a good time to give it a go.

The next day we left Nexon. By now we had entered the region of Limousin. Limousin is a bit like Herefordshire, but with more French people. There were lots of herds of beautiful brown cows to say hello to as we passed, and orchards of apple trees. (The cow herds frequently included a number of calves. This is the way calves are reared properly, in a field with their mothers, not taken from them after the first day and put into a veal fattening pen, as seems to be done in the UK). Beyond Vigeois, the countryside suddenly seemed to open up and get much bigger. After a long morning where we seemed to have done nothing but sweat up hill, we were rewarded with a twenty minute freewheel down into Brive.

After a steady haul back up out of Brive we had a lovely ride on high ground with spectacular views to the side, taking us past the dramatic hilltop town of Turenne down to the floor of the valley where we hoped to find a campsite: we eventually tracked one down after a few false starts. The map had showed one at a place called Les Quatre Routes du Lot, but it was closed. Not surprising- LQRDL seemed like an absolute ghost town, hot and dusty, and devoid of humanity, almost post-apocalyptic. The only sign of life was an enormous dog. What good was that to us? None whatsoever. The campsite we eventually found was still in the process of reconstruction but the owner was very friendly and chatty, with another very large dog in tow. We watched thunderstorms flickering over the hills to the north of us and went to bed, tired but content.

The next day was one of our toughest yet. We knew it would be. It started with a hard slog up out of the river valley of the Dordogne to high ground marked by small stonewalled fields, golden corn and short stubby oak trees. It felt quite different to the vegetation of the alluvial plains of the Loire or the rolling hills of Limousin. We hoped that from there, it would be a steady smooth descent into Figeac (our map, pages torn from a road atlas, shows very little in the way of contour information). But it was not quite like that, needless to say. The day's highlight was seeing six eagles (count them, six) taking off in formation from an adjacent field as we passed.