Randonnee #3 - Bedarieux

Another sunny (but chilly) Sunday, another randonnee ...this one followed a path down the river Orb, in Bedarieux, then climbed a very gentle wooded slope and returned via a decommissioned railway track - including a tunnel! Bedarieux itself was quite an ordinary French town, with lots of big box stores marring the landscape. Unlike Sete and Beziers where the locals were actively friendly, engaging us in conversation, the people we passed in Bedarieux didn't even return our 'bonjour'. Oh well, we came to see the river, and here it is ...


It's amazing we found the walk at all really - all we had in the way of instructions in the randonnee book was 'park in front of the Campotel'. Uh ... what's a campotel? So we drove into Bedarieux and suddenly there was a sign - Campotel! We found it, parked in front of it, and there, clearly marked, was the trail. Each randonnee is marked with coloured strips painted onto posts, walls, and even trees. Where there is a crossroads, there is a cross in your colour indicating where not to go. Yellow seems to be the colour of choice for the shorter walks. In addition there are numbers stencilled above some of the markers. This usually indicates that there is something to see, or you need to take another path, or something like that. I think this is all done by the randonnee association, who also publish books detailing the walks (and the numbers, and what you should be able to see, and what colour your stripe is, etc).

We stopped for lunch at a tiny chapel that is supposed to have a water source, a spring I guess, that will miraculously cure your eye troubles. Unfortunately for my eyes it was closed, I'll have to keep wearing the glasses I suppose. Flicking through the book as I ate I noticed that a torch was listed as essential equipment for this walk. Uh, honey, did you bring a torch? What? No .... Hmm, I started to worry about that railway tunnel....


Luckily the tunnel was short enough that you could see light at one end or the other wherever you were. It did get pretty dark in the middle, and E kept her (and our) spirits up by loudly singing Christmas carols..

On the hills around Bedarieux were these interesting looking retaining walls. From what we could decipher from the interpretive panel (it was in French of course but we were glad to have it - most of the others had been torn apart by vandals), the walls contain no mortar to stick the stones together. The small stone shelters, built in the same way presumably, looked charming as well, although were probably full of spiders and scorpions. And snakes.


Here is one of the locals we met enjoying the sunshine. He didn't return our 'bonjour' either...