Day 3 La Clauze to Saint-Alban-sur-Limagnole

Last night was an interesting experience – all the guests were asked to leave their bags and backpacks in a locker (to stop the spread of bed bugs!) and take out of them what you needed for the night, which we found a bit weird. All of the other guests were French with only a little English so it was a bit hard to make conversation, which was also a bit weird.

We had a much better day today, with mostly flat, mostly good roads and tracks underfoot, travelling 6kms or so through the gently undulating valleys of the high country known as the Massif Central. Overnight the temperature dropped quite low and we started in 4C but brilliant sunshine and fantastic conditions! The scenery was quite spectacular and we passed through a few hamlets, Le Falzet and Villeret-d’Apcher with a spring in our step, all at around 1100m. At Contaldes we decided to take a detour of about 800m to the pretty village of Chanaleilles for a coffee break, which was very nice, adding about 1.6km to our journey. Although we enjoyed it, in retrospect it was a bit of a mistake as we passed a (better) cafe/snack bar about 800m after rejoining the GR65 and by the end of the day we could have done without the extra kms!

From there we started climbing again on mostly very good tracks up to 1320m just before Domaine du Sauvage, which I think will be the highest point of the walk. The Domaine is a refurbished 13th century hospital that was originally run by the Templiers. The book said no meals were available here, so we had bought a sandwich at Chanaleilles, however the menu looked great and we were disappointed to be eating our sandwich. I think the facilities are improving to capture the tourist traffic faster than the guidebooks can keep up!

The terrain between Contaldes and, much later, Le Rouget was very different from the lush green valleys we had been encountering. First we walked through pine forest, with clouds of pollen flying around in the fairly stiff breeze, then through scrub above the forests. It seemed to take an eternity to travel the 9.5km from Domaine to Le Rouget, not least because the signs kept showing much longer distances than my calculations! In this stretch we passed from the Haute-Loire department into the Loziere department and the standard of infrastructure for walkers, which had been excellent, seemed to drop off.

Eventually we emerged from the pine forest into Le Rouget, hoping for a break and a drink before taking on the last 3.5kms to Saint-Alban. Although there was a gite with a snack bar, there was not a soul about so we kept moving and limped into Saint-Alban just under 7 1/2 walking hours after leaving La Clauze, a distance of 28kms by my watch, including the detour, 82kms now in total.