Esbintz

Backblipped: I took about 80 photos today (i.e. on Saturday), and while I didn't think this was the best, it's the most representative of our day: green and wet. We drove up through Mirepoix, Foix, and St-Lizier to get to Esbintz, a mountain refuge on the GR10 route in the Ariège. S has been there several times and knows Gila and Francis well, but it was my first visit.

When we got to the fortunately named village of Seix, just a few kilometres from Esbintz, the weather was overcast but warm, but without warning it suddenly started to pour with rain. As we drove up the winding, single-track, barely maintained road to Esbintz, it wasn't actually raining, but that was because we were literally inside the clouds. Mudslides and the odd pile of rocks made the road narrower than it might otherwise have been.

The welcome at Esbintz is warm though. Gila's daughter-in-law Adeline had lit a fire for us, and after dropping off our luggage we went out for a brief, damp walk before dinner in Adeline's log cabin. As you can see from the photo, the Ariège is very green. Francis and his son Mathias are shepherds, and the hamlet is surrounded by pasture and woodland. Their way of life is marginal, to put it mildly; making a living as a shepherd in the Pyrenees is nigh-on impossible, and walkers prepared to put in the effort to get to Esbintz are getting rarer. The gite is one large dormitory with a toilet outside and a single shower. Fine for serious walkers, who understand that accommodation in remote parts of the mountains is basic, but no longer acceptable to the average tourist! Adeline is planning to make a subsidiary income by growing fruit and making preserves, but even that is not without problems -- the land is so steep and inaccessible she has to work it all by hand.

My spare blip today is a self-portrait -- kind of.

On the way to Esbintz we stopped for lunch (warm enough to eat outside!) in the attractive village of St-Lizier, which used to be the residence of bishops. It has a large church with a lovely Romanesque cloister which is definitely blipworthy; I put a set of photos on Flickr.