Diesel Power!

I must have actually driven a diesel vehicle before at some point. It obviously didn't leave much of a mark, since the only diesel experience I can think of was filling the mini up with Gazole (which I now know is French for diesel, not gasoline!) and learning that that was a rather expensive error to make. That's all changed now though - I'm going to remember this diesel!

I had decided I was going to drive through the French countryside, the Alps, and the Col de Turini (the 'best world's best driving road,' according to Top Gear) on the way up to Geneva. I would have liked a convertible for the trip, in fact I would have very dearly liked the convertible BMW that I used to own, but compromises have to be made, so I ended up with a Renault Megane, a fine sporty little French car, powered by a diesel engine. I called her Megan.

Megan[e] and I in Southern France

I left Montpellier and drove off towards Millau to see the giant bridge. Pretty soon, I was discovering just what we are missing in the States, where we don't have any of these sporty little diesels. It was a six-speed transmission, but in any gear, if you want to accelerate to pass, you just step on the gas, and the car takes off! I was mesmerized... I also had trouble keeping up with the speed limits... On occasion, I did glance at my gas gauge, soon discovering that it was refusing to change. A hundred kilometers passed by, it stubbornly showed the gas tank full. Damn, these things really do get good mileage... Another hundred kilometers passed by - still a full tank of gas! It must be broken!? Fifty K more - hot damn, we are down to 7/8ths! So it works then... this engine just doesn't use any fuel. That's a nice sidebar, of course, but I was here for the roads! I quickly ducked off the Autoroute after the Viaduc and headed deeper into the countryside along a route my map called Gorges du Tarn. True to its name, the road winds through mountains and a river bed following the gorge - the views it offers are spectacular, with little French towns dotting the side of the road, centuries-old church steeples punctuating the skyline at regular intervals. I started to think of what it could be reminding me of, and quickly came up with Albania: the very best roads across the empty deserted (but very similarly green) mountains in that long-lost European country were a lot like the roads here... well maybe the worst stretches of road here, in the South of France. And minus all the churches, of course...

Viaduc de Millau

The road along the Gorges du Tarn

Bright, pretty sunsets above the French countryside, shortly before I had popped into a fancy roadside winery/restaurant for dinner - tres Francaise!

But the drive across the Gorges du Tarn was, as it turned out, rather tame. Picturesque, but very tame indeed. The roads are fairly straight, and the elevation more or less constant. The real star of the driving show was to be Col de Turini, and that's where I headed the following morning. First, I struggled for an hour looking for my hostel in Nice, after arriving at two in the morning, without a map. An hour later, I was sound asleep though, looking forward to making Megan[e] conquer the Alps!


Center of Nice - Quai des Etats-Unis. Nice seemed a lovely sea-side resort town, where I would have liked to have spent more time - I have had more than one person tell me it was their favorite place in Europe... This wasn't in the cards this time through though as I was back on the road shortly after 11. I suppose I'll have to come back.

Oh, they are funny with their 'Do not Enter' signs here in Nice!

So, on I went, driving to the very last exit before the Italian border, then turning off onto a minor road winding up into the hills towards the town of Sospel. Here the road become tinier, windier, and devoid of traffic. Adrenaline pulsed through my veins. I pushed the car up into the rarefied heights of the Alps. I pushed it fairly aggressively in fact; pretty soon, my arms and legs were getting soar from all the shifting - I loved every last second of it! Shortly after leaving Sospel (around hairpin #7 - yes, I kept count), the road arrived at a little church sitting atop a hill. I was a bit reluctant to leave the road, but quite exhilarated to jog up the stairs to get a look at Notre Dame de la Menour and catch a glimpse of the twists and turns I'd conquered leading up to it!

That's my road!

This is called a 'hairpin' turn, mom - it's when the road makes a full 180 degree turn in direction - usually while climbing up or down the mountain

Notre Dame de la Menour, on a mountainside in the middle of nowhere

Jesus still suffering - clearly the man didn't drive up here!

Around hairpin #27, I arrived at the village of Col de Turini - the high point of this section of road. Most other people on the road, not that were many, were German bikers

Little tunnels carved into the rock, as I was heading down

French towns in the High Alps - I believe this was Saint-Martin-Vesubie

At hairpin #40, the Col De Turini section was finished and I stopped for lunch. I figured I could stop counting hairpins at this point, since I was switching to a fairly straight road towards Jausiers. At least my map showed the next section of the road as being fairly straight, on the way up towards Geneva - I drove on, the road was heading up all right - in fact, this "fairly straight road" turned out to be Route de la Bonette - the highest road in Europe, traversing a 2,802 meter pass. It was windy, and twisty, and incredibly scenic. Adrenaline remained in high gear. The scenery now had some new additions - snow banks, spectacular views of the Alps in the distance, an occasional waterfall, and flocks of sheep crossing the road. The Megan[e] and I were excited! The diesel purred to life as I pushed the car up to the top of the 2,800m pass - that's only the highest elevation the road reaches, I got out and climbed the last 100 meters to the top of the peak we were passing, losing a few more degrees of temperature. Suddenly my flip flops, so perfect for the beaches in Nice, seemed a little out of place... And that was before it started to rain and hail. I returned to the car a bit soaked and with some fresh concerns about the windy, twisty road heading down the mountain, now with slicker pavement. Excitement did not, however, wane very much. Fortunately, the rain did wane, as the cloud apparently extended only to the very top of the pass, as after half an hour climbing down the hill, I was once again back to a perfectly dry road. With occasional flocks of sheep, waterfalls, authentic French/Swiss Alps houses, and slow cars that gave me regular chances to push my little diesel into over-drive past them. At one point, I [briefly] found myself behind a Porsche though - he wasn't so slow...

Not the Southern Alps, nor the Japanese Alps - these are the real thing! The ones that Hannibal somehow crossed with a bunch of elephants and without paved roads. I have no idea how they did it!


The Megan[e] blending in with the snow banks, in black and white

A couple of hours later, I was crossing from Italy back to France, this time under the Alps - via the Tunnel de Frejus. A 35km tunnel bored into the mountainside is one of the longest in the world. Speed limit in the tunnel: 70 kph - it takes a while. Cost: $35.10 Euro! In retrrospect, I would have rather skipped it, had I known that was the cost!

And here, the Alps came to an end (the adrenaline rush lived on for a couple of days though). The mini may have made me a little leery of traveling long distances by car any more, but given a good car, and fun roads, and a relatively manageable distance, driving is still an incredibly fun way to get around! But on this day, I was done - after paying a few more tolls (you can't really afford to drive around Europe anymore), I arrived in Geneva just in time to watch the streets explode in celebration after Brazil's World Cup victory over Chile. There's a few things I had imagined about the city of Geneva - crowds of Brazilians out in the streets, wildly cheering on their football team, wasn't high on the list...

Multi-lingual Rescue Operations

So, there I was enjoying the Switzerland the way it was meant to be enjoyed - climbing up a windy, twisty path in the Alps with a big blue glacier looking down on me invitingly.

That's the glacier!

Lynn and I had just spent an hour hiking to get up here, but she had to turn back at this point, hoping to catch an earlier bus and get back to Geneva in time to take Loki out for a walk (yes, Lynn named her dog after the Norse God of mischief). I kept going, the path quicly turned twisty, windy, narrow, and steeply climbing. I felt this was just fine - I was, in fact, pretty excited about the whole thing. I was just upset that I wouldn't have time to reach the ridge above me and get a glimpse of Mont Blanc... but you can't have everything. Regardless, the path I was happy with. Turns out, not everyone shared in my excitment - the first sign of trouble was when I ran into a Spanish couple hurrying down the mountain and asking me [in Spanish] how far it was to anything down below. My brain initially refused to accept the situation and had to do a double-take - they are not talking to me in French, but I understand, must be English, right? No, don't understand that well - oh, right, Spanish... There's a little restaurant a little ways down below - you can probably get there in twenty minutes, treinta tops! What's going on? Turned out, a little ways up above there was a woman who had broken her leg. I considered the path we were climbing and decided this didn't seem entirely unexpected, unfortunate nonetheless.

By this point, I couldn't climb much further up the mountain anyway if I were to make the last bus back to Martingy, so I settled for simply going up to investigate. I discovered two women, both probably in their 40's or maybe early 50's - one in seemingly good spirits, but with a broken ankle, which was starting to swell; the other seeming a bit frazzled. We chatted a bit - I started with Spanish, they turned out to not be Spanish. Didn't speak any English either, so we were stuck with French - the chatting was rather limited. The frazzled one was on the phone with someone trying to explain where we were - I produced a map and pointed roughly to our location. It didn't seem to help the other end of the line all that much - I wished I knew more French. By now, I figured friends or family, not rescue personnel, had to be on the other end of the line - we started talking about trying to make it down the mountain. I offered that I'd be perfectly happy to take her pack down - I actually think that's all she had really wanted, but through some combination of misunderstandings and my trying to help, we decided to see if she could make it down to the hut-restaurant below herself as well. We tried to come up with some sort of a workable way of getting down without putting any weight on the broken foot, which was a challenge, since the path was tiny, twisty, and steep. Eventually we settled on slow progress with me holding the woman around the waist, while she hopped along on one foot.

By now, I was starting to give up on the bus, figuring I could always hitch-hike my way down to the train station at the bottom of the mountain, so I could play Good Samaritan for a while - maybe learn how to say 'broken ankle' in French. So, we hopped for a while. Not entirely surprisingly, it turned out to be fairly tiring for both of us - we took a break. The frazzled one was worried too. We chatted - they asked about my bus. I, in turn, asked if they had a car taking them down the mountain? No, they were staying somewhere in the mountains and had some sort of a car arrangement (that I wasn't entirely clear on), that would pick them up, if and when they made it down the mountain. Or maybe, they'd send a helicopter... Either way, I should probably go and catch my bus... and see what the Spanish had managed to accomplish down at the hut?

Fine... after a few more assurances of calm and safety, I grabbed her pack, and took off down the mountain. Well, the first thing I actually did was trip myself and watched a rock accelerate at an alarmingly high speed towards my face, but I've still got hands for occasions such as these, so I came away largely unscathed. And proceeded down the mountain, a little more carefully this time. The Spanish were, in fact, waiting down at the bottom of the hill. I tried switching from French to Spanish to explain to them what I had learned, but my brain refused to process language switches quite that quickly - fortunately, they now had somebody that spoke English with them. My brain acquiesced to processing English. A few minutes later, Spanish became acceptable too, so I learned that the Spanish were from Tenerife, and lo and behold, they had been up in the Swiss Alps just last year too, when she had also broken her leg - and had to be airlifted out by helicopter... interesting... Anyway, I headed on down towards my bus, while the English speaker, whom I gathered to be some sort of a guide, hastened up the hill to try and help the two women get down. The people at the restaurant had apparently just shrugged their shoulders at the report of the injury, so a rescue team was probably not imminent. The Swiss seem pretty calm and stoic...

Anyway, I headed down the mountain, reflecting that all I was missing at that point was somebody speaking to me in Russian about what had happened. I've no idea what happened in the end, but from where I had left them, getting down to the little restaurant shouldn't have been all that difficult with the help of the guide. And from the restaurant, they could probably get a stretcher, so she'd be fine, presumably - just a memorable day in the mountains! Probably not even a helicopter ride to add to the excitement... Supposedly, a doctor was coming to see them wherever it was that they were staying.

As for the Alps!

The Trient Glacier stretches for 4.3km in the Mont Blanc Massif, flanked by a pair of snow-capped peaks

I've been to the Southern Alps in New Zealand, and the Japanese Alps in, well, Japan - finally time to see the originals!

Stream of snow-melt heading down from the glacier

Just wouldn't be Switzerland without cows grazing in the mountains, cow-bells ringing


Switzerland, I've discovered, is also rather fond of some utterly random sculpture, like this Minatour in the middle of Martingy