Montpellier and le Cirque de Mourèze

/ Languedoc-Roussillon, France/
Montpellier and le Cirque de Mourèze

One style of travelling is to not make any plans and just see where the wind takes you. At the other extreme, there is planning everything down to a tee months in advance. I would place myself in the latter category, but with elements of the former. For instance, travel destinations are typically chosen many months in advance and planned out carefully, and likewise as soon as it is possible to purchase train tickets, they will be purchased. This has the benefit of saving a lot of money, but also gives you the “looking forward to an adventure” sensation. However during the adventure, we are often flying by the seat of our pants. So sometime during autumn, a mid-winter trip to the south of France was booked with the assumption being that we would escape the freeze of the north. As we were saving some other destinations in the south until spring/summer, we chose a location with equal length train trips from Geneva and Paris and ended up with Montpellier. When the time arrived, as the winter had been extremely mild, the “escape” was not to be the jealously-inducing weekend that we expected, but it would be a welcome adventure nonetheless. The region has some amazing landscape, so we decided to spend half our time out and about, and the other half exploring the city.

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Arctic Norway

/ Tromsø, Norway/
Arctic Norway

Being raised in Australia seems to instil a fascination with snow and all things cold, stemming from a complete lack of exposure to sub-zero temperatures. Winters are by no means warm, but snow simply does not fall at low altitude, nor does the temperature remain below zero should it happen to drop there, so something that is “naturally” frozen is very novel. Possessing the near-polar opposite climate is Norway, and in particular, northern Norway. The Norwegian landscape, characterised by spectacular fjords and soaring mountains, has always been one of the places that I dreamed of visiting. With the winter break offering an opportunity to travel and my desire to experience “a real winter”, Norway seemed like a great option. More than this, the frozen landscapes of Arctic Norway offer many experiences which simply cannot be found anywhere else. This trip was always going to be cool.

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Grenoble and Mont Aiguille

/ The Alps, France/
Grenoble and Mont Aiguille

With the festival of la Toussaint (All Saints’ Day) falling on a Friday, it seemed like an opportune time to sneak in a late autumn hike. I had seen a picture at some point of a very distinctive peak in the Alps and bookmarked it as an overnight hike, with the only problem being that getting there and away was a bit of a pain from Paris, due to a lengthy changeover in Grenoble. So with a long weekend providing the buffer day, we headed to the central Alps to explore the crown jewel of le Parc naturel régional du Vercors, le Mont Aiguille (Needle mountain)

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Les Gorges de l’Areuse and Le Creux du Van

/ The Jura, Switzerland/
Les Gorges de l’Areuse and Le Creux du Van

The end of summer heralds the arrival of autumn, and a really nice time to be out and about. Due to the lack of deciduous trees in Australia, the display put on by the trees here is something that really captivates me. With colour beginning to bloom, it seemed appropriate to explore one of the lesser known regions of Switzerland, the Jura. The Jura mountain range is a really fascinating place which is often overshadowed by the neighbouring Alps. The range straddles the border of France and Switzerland in the north and then stretches into Germany, where the range is known as the Swabian Alps. It is much older than the Alps and in recent (geological-scale) times has been compressed laterally due to the rising Alps, resulting in long and very narrow peaks and often deep valleys. In addition, a longer life means a lot more wear and tear, which has resulted in many deeply carved canyons and caves. Here we explore one of the most famous canyons, that formed by the Areuse river, and a geological anomaly, Le Creux (the cavity) du Van.

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La Dent D'Oche

/ The Alps, France/
La Dent D'Oche

The summer was rapidly drawing to an end, so it was necessary to fit in some hiking before the snow started piling up. An excursion to climb Les Dents du Midi in Switzerland was planned, but aborted due to bad weather. With some early snowfalls at altitude, a more modest target was chosen: La Dent D’Oche. (Une dent is a tooth, quite a descriptive (and apparently popular) name for a mountain.) Located in the Chablais massif, it is the northernmost summit above 2000 metres in France and is situated more-or-less on the French/Swiss border. Easily accessible from Geneva, an overnight hike camping on one of les balcons du lac Léman seemed like a good choice.

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