the kindness of strangers

 

Today we arrived at our first Italian wwoof farm, but for the last 10 days we’ve been on the road.  We left Paris and then went down to Clermont-Ferrand, over to Annecy and Grenoble and then down to Corsica, via a ferry from Nice.  While we had a very good time, 10 days of bouncing around is about my limit.

During this time we often relied on the kindness of strangers. I was amused that on three separate occasions we ran into our helpful strangers a second time, by chance.  I’ll tell you the stories.

We stayed the night at a gîte d’étap in a town called Lathuile, at the south end of Lac d’Annecy.  The plan was to hike from there to another gîte d’étap, farther south, in Faverges.  We bought the best map we could find, which wasn’t particularly good and set out on our hike.  There were tall mountains all around us and sign that claimed to mark trails.  Due to our skills, our map and the assumption that Les Combes (from a hand sketch of a map we consulted briefly at the gîte) was related to La Combe (which was on the trailhead sign) we hiked up a mountain and around in a four hour loop that left us back in the same valley we started in.  Before you think too poorly of our navigation skills, we realized we were hiking down to the same valley, but opted to do that rather than to be lost completely.  The signage was bizarre in that every bend and twist was marked for about an hour and then they disappeared completely and we were guessing our way along logging roads and then markers (to a different place) reappeared our of the blue again.  I would swear that we didn’t just miss a turn, but that’s probably what happened.  Anyway, we hiked 4 hours and ended up in nearly the same spot and then walked about 16 km on the road to our next gîte.  About 6 km from the gîte we asked directions of a guy parking his scooter in Faverges.  He said something like “Glaises?  You’re going there tonight?  on foot?  It’s really far!”  And it was really far, but we made it and the next day we hiked back down to Faverges to catch the bus to Albertville.  The guy who had given us directions was our bus driver and he asked out it was.   I suspect he was happy to see us alive.

Below - The first gîte and the futile mountain (we hiked to below the cliff) and the interminable climb to the second gîte.

Two days later we caught a ride-share (from covoiturage.com) with a guy named Malal from Grenoble to Antibes which is a suburb of Nice.  The trip cost us 50 euro rather than the 180 euro it would have been by train.  There were two other friendly passengers and Malal helped us out by taking us to a good cheap hotel, because we didn’t arrive until 10:30 pm.  The next day we were walking to the train station to get to Nice and Malal drove by on his way to work and honked, seeing that we had understood his directions to the station.

From Nice we took a ferry to Bastia, Corse (Corsica) and we couch surfed for two nights with Fabienne and her roommate, Sebastian.  Sebastian works as a waiter and he cooked us an excellent dinner the first night.   Then on our last afternoon when we were scouting out restaurants, we ran into him crossing the road to the outdoor seating area of the restaurant where he works.  This last anecdote might be a bit weaker than the others, because Bastia really is a small town, but when you only know one or two people in a 300 mile radius of where you are, it is quite surprising to run in to them.