Food Feature: Destination: Exploration

Canyon du Verdon a blast for adventurous travelers

People always talk about the lavender fields when they talk about Provence. Travel books, travel agents, adventure magazines ... they’ll all tell you to expect beautiful mountains and fields overflowing with clusters of purple buds. One thing they never mention is the explosions.

I guess France just doesn’t have the barren, testing-ground equivalent of Nevada. Still, practice bombing was the furthest thing from my mind when my boyfriend Tim, my family and I embarked convoy-style for a day of sightseeing at the Gorges du Verdon. Running 21 kilometers long and 300 meters deep, the canyon forms a border between the Alpes-de-Haute-Provence and Var, two stunning regions of central Provence — at least that’s what our guidebooks said.

After an hour-and-a-half of driving, Tim and I came upon a mountainous stretch of military property where tourists were warned, as far as our translation skills were concerned, not to get out of the car to hike or walk.

We left the area and shortly after stopped to admire a gorgeous expanse of rolling green hills, and to wait for the other half of our convoy to catch up. Minutes earlier, rounding the last corners of the reserve, we noticed a group of soldiers lined up by a tank. So maybe we shouldn’t have been so surprised to hear the big kaboom of a detonating bomb. But we were.

Moments later our “other half” pulled up, cameras in hand, unaware of the ado. Now, my mother is a top-notch worrier — one not incapable of envisioning French cadets with terrible aim accidentally blowing us all to bits. She also loves every single thing about France. So we didn’t mention the bombs to mom. Instead, we ventured calmly toward the canyon.

I first read about the Gorges du Verdon in a travel magazine. Also known as the Grand Canyon du Verdon, this majestic area was formed when the Alps swelled upward. The erosion of the Jurrasic limestone caused by the Verdon River formed the sheer limestone walls that have made the canyon a world famous climbing destination. After flipping through a few glossy pages worth of aerial shots, I told myself if I were ever to visit France, the canyon would be one of my primary destinations.

And here I was, in my rented orange Peugeot, finally winding my way into the heart of it without one shred of climbing gear. The only rock I was destined to touch in the canyon on this visit was by the river’s banks just after entering the canyon’s eastern side. We walked down to the cloudy blue riverbanks lined with cream-colored stones, smooth as eggs and perfect for skipping.

Following the road a little farther, we spotted a climbing team a few hundred meters up and stopped to spy on them with the zoom lens of our video camera. Then we continued, mouths open in awe, as the narrow road twisted and turned through dynamite-blasted caves and under looming cliffs.

About half-way through the canyon, we reached a point where we could see hunks of rock, biblical in proportion, that looked like the mouth of a giant shellfish. Way off in the distance, below our rail-lined lookout, we caught glimpses of the afternoon sun glinting off the river. Though I couldn’t see them, I knew there were scores of people down there, braving waters that just a hundred years ago had gone un-navigated. Until 1905, the majority of people who had attempted to explore the canyon were woodcutters who rappelled into the gorges looking for boxwood (buis) stumps that they used for making Petanque boules (the French version of Bocci).

Today, adventurous travelers regularly traverse the canyon in a variety of ways. Rafting the canyon is said to take six to eight hours. The river flows several hundred meters down between rock walls with no exit until the Lac du Saint Croix on the west side of the canyon. With widths at the base ranging from 6 to 100 meters, there is a danger of sudden changes in the water level caused by the upstream dams.

We began our own relatively tranquil descent in the bucket seats of the five-speed Peugeot. After the breathtaking midpoint views, the road began to switch-back down toward the Lac du Saint Croix, but not before passing a smattering of stone ruins, herds of grazing sheep and a few alluring camp grounds.

The Verdon River finally exits into the blue-green lake at the Pont du Galetas where kayakers often linger to admire the reddish, smooth rounded walls of the canyon’s end. The lake itself is man-made, formed by a dam built on the river in 1975. The village of Les Salles sur Verdon now lies 40 meters beneath its surface as a result.

After spending a few quiet minutes there, we began the return trip to our rented home on the coast. The route we chose this time took us through small villages rather than training grounds — villages with bell towers, fountains and fields of mustard and lavender spread between their perimeters. The views were stunning. We passed farms built hundreds of years ago and by plots of grapevines being primed for summer growth. At one point, in the tangerine light of late afternoon, we even had to stop abruptly in the middle of the road to wait for a herd of sheep to pass. Surrounded by an ocean of pink-nosed creatures, I reached out to touch one woolly ear. Try as they might, there are some things guide books just can’t explain.






Restaurants
International
Food Events