Cascades

I woke up with the song ‘Girl Named Sandoz’ in my head this morning, and difficult to shake, presumably because of it’s reference to another Swiss(ish) town name ending in ‘oz’ (certainly there was no more lysergic reason.) It’s funny what occurs in the suggestive mind when its cut off from its usual sources of musical sustenance. The hinterland of the campsite, where our tent is, is nice and quiet but the area at the front, around the Reception area and the toilet blocks, becomes, in the evenings at east, this amazing seething mass of feral children of all nationalities, screaming at each other and tearing in and out of the toilets, banging on the doors. Last night this was exacerbated by the fact that there was a ‘mini disco’ operating in the vicinity – seriously, you were taking your life and sanity in your own hands just venturing out there for a pee for a couple of hours. Anyway, we drove round to he other side of the Lake today to the town of Talloires and hiked up the mountainside, through the woods, to the spectacular Cascades de Angon. There are two waterfalls, and you walk behind the first, under the overhanging limestone, to get to the second, scrambling over some fairly treacherous wet rocks to get there. Higher up there is a ‘fairy bridge’ (Les Pont des Fees) over the rapids of the feed river in a delightful, dappled dell. We were all pretty knackered by this point, mind, despite the map describing the walk as “fairly easy” after a “steep beginning” (which was true only in so far as ‘the beginning’ meant the first two thirds of the walk and might better have been described as “very steep”, or maybe “very, very steep!”) We went back down and ate our picnic on the port at Talloires afterwards and rewarded ourselves with a nice ice cream. I’m very much enjoying Tracey Thorn’s autobiography, ‘Bedsit Disc Queen’ (not that I’ve ever been a fan of Everything But the Girl), which I bought with me for holiday reading, though, strangely enough it’s the Young Marble Giants that it makes me hanker after listening to…