Châtelus-le-Marcheix

It’s good that I write this every day, as I already find it hard to remember this morning!! The days would just merge together….

We had a very good morning, quite cool - in fact I even got rather cold at some times…so good! And again it didn’t rain, but the cloud cover kept the coolness for most of the day. The countryside has now definitely changed…we are in a sort of mountainous area - not alps, but hilly and extremely pretty. We walked mostly through forests - largely oak and chestnut trees - in endless tree tunnels, just gorgeous. And the ups and downs were gentle - we climbed quite high (Amr said we had an altitude gain of 582 metres!) but not in drastically steep inclines, except one at the end which was gentlish but endless, and one other one which was a surprise! Another surprise today was seeing some donkeys in a field of cows…Also we met another lone pilgrim today - a man from Nantes who was pulling his large pack in a little cart behind him. So we are not entirely alone, just very few walkers visible.

We were to walk 19.5 kms from Bénévent and all worked perfectly…we followed the directions and markings with few worries, and got to the sweet little town of Châtelus-Le-Marcheix at about 2.45, even feeling quite cool and refreshed, and ready to find our BandB. Well it turned out to be another of those occasions when our accommodation is not actually in the town, the only address was “lieu-dit la clupte “ which was vague and when we asked in the town they said..oh far away…so our hearts sank and Amr turned on his Google maps and it was about 5 kms away…more than on hour’s walk! Luckily this place, La Pissarelle, featured on Google maps and we followed the directions - and of course there is a happy ending, as there always has been, as this place is just lovely. Right up out of the valley (that was our surprise climb) but a charming place - we are the only guests and have our own petite maison and are actually in heaven. Annie and Wolfgang, the hosts, are delightful. He is German of course and they both speak perfect English so we can even communicate relaxedly. We are having dinner with them at 8pm and I think we will enjoy it. And another plus is that the extra kms didn’t exhaust us at all, but we plan in future to check the address of these guest houses (we have quite a few coming up) the night before so that we don’t have any more surprises. Tomorrow we officially get picked up by taxi (with bags) and get dropped off so that we only have 20 kms to walk to St Léonard de Noblat, which sounds an interesting larger town (surely we won’t be staying out in the countryside!) and from the map it looks as if we cross the Dordogne river, (no have relooked at the map and it isn’t the Dordogne, but a big one) and it should be a beautiful walk.Read more