Day 2 St Privat d’Allier to La Clauze

Definitely a day of two halves today – the morning spent going up over a ridge from St Privat before dropping 350m over about 2km and then climbing 450m over a similar distance, to put us well and truly into the Central Massif, followed by an afternoon basically walking 12 or so km through undulating hills.

But, to start at the beginning, we kicked off just after 8am (not long after the nice man picked up our luggage to take it to our next destination) in 8C temperatures. Al wanted to go left and I wanted to go right – Al turned out to be correct so we followed the route about 500m to end about about 100m up the road from our gite d’Etape which turned out to be pretty good by the way). We walked along a mixture of roads, good pathways and the occasional rough, rocky path, fairly gently ascending to Rochegude and the chapelle and tower in the pictures. The views out over the valley were outstanding but then the fun began as we descended down to the hamlet of Pratclaux. Nothing we had done on the Camino del Norte prepared us for the steepness or roughness if the track and it took us about an hour to ascend the 2km or so.

The going got better after that as we walked on roads and fairly nice paths into the very pretty village of Ministrol-d’Allier in the Allier river, where we had a coffee and sandwich and ordered another sandwich to go (the “sandwiches” are enormous rolls that could feed four!).

After Ministrol we descended up the other side of the river in a vertigo inducing path, past the Chapelle de la Madeleine to about 730m, from which you could see the Chapelle and tower across the river valley, before the path become smoother and we ground it out past Montare to Le Vernet de Sauges where we had the other sandwich and a coffee.

From there a drop into the biggest town we have seen since Le Puy, Sauges. We expected to be able to get a beer or a coffee but nothing was open so we pushed through and had some apricots and cake we had bought in Le Puy by the side of the road.

By now we were pretty well stuffed and just went head down for the last 7km into La Clauze, where we are in a 5 room Chambers de Hotes built into a medieval tower (pictures tomorrow!)

29 long kilometres today, 54kms in total so far!