Scary Roads of the Cévennes

Robert Louis Stevenson may have trod this perilous area with a donkey named Modestine in his short novel Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes written in 1879, but that was nothing compared to driving these routes with a GPS, a difficult finicky animal Mark and I have named, appropriately, Modestine.

Nice town - where are the people?

The Cévennes is a wild mountainous area in the southwest of France. Stunningly beautiful and green and overgrown, with red rocky cliffs and twisty trails and roads, it’s surprisingly untravelled, at least in June. In fact some of the towns we have stopped in seem a bit like eerie shuttered ghost towns, though, we are told, in 10 days, it will be bursting with tourists.

Too bad. I love it like this. Although sometimes, I must say, it is a bit weird, like after the third time you’ve eaten at a restuarant without actually seeing any patrons.

But back to the roads. We travelled from our chateau (oh, I plan to say that as much as possible … our chateau) to the town of Saint-André-de-Valborgne and decided to take a scenic route back. Modestine recommended it. But Modestine did not have our best interests at heart. The road was the size of a bowling lane with dropoffs of hundreds of feet. I’m not making that up – Mark thinks some of them were five or six hundred feet. No rails.

Turn sharp or get wet

Arrgggh! I said, as we twisted around a blind corner. Accckkkk! I said at another as I stared straight down into an impossibly low valley.  At one point, a perilous one ( I plan to say perilous as much as possible in addition to chateau), we turned yet another blind corner and came upon a volcanic peaky-looking mountain smothered in an orangey misty gold from the late afternoon sun.

Yikes! What happened to the guard rails?

At another point, when we were feeling a wee bit more relaxed we actually came upon quite a crowd. And who has the right away on a steep mountain road, I’d like to know? The grizzled man walking with his dog coming toward us, the two cyclists ahead of us who we were about to pass or the two motorcycles on our tail. As this was the only traffic we had seen so far on the road it was quite exciting. And just so you know, in case you ever find yourself in such a predicament, this is how it unfolds: The man and dog step to the side of the road, the car (us) pulls over to let the motorcycles pass, the two cyclists grudgingly let the motorcycles pass them and then as we all round a bend on a narrow road (except for the man and his dog who went the other way) the cyclists, quite wisely refuse to let us pass, and then eventually we get by them and we all enjoy the mountainous view. Except perhaps, the cyclists, who were going straight up hill.

I like hiking. Can we sit down?

In the end, though Modestine is difficult and I quite hate her – as Stevenson hated his Modestine – maybe she just wanted to show us the most spectacular parts of the Cévennes. And maybe when we give her up at the end of our stay, I’ll cry. Because that’s what happened to Robert Louis Stevenson.