Spectacular!
That sums up our day really. An hour here, two hours there, on roads that at times seemed only fit for goats, and indeed there were a few of those as well as a menagerie of other livestock to keep us company as well.
Within a few minutes which is all it took to negotiate the first dozen or so turns for it became apparent that Julie knows the roads through the mountains as well as the goats that we came across from time to time. This is her territory, and her cousins’ as well, and her cousins’ cousins' too. As we drove in what seemed to be every direction including up, (mostly up) Arlo Guthrie’s lyrics “on one side there was mountain, on the other side there was nothing”, pretty much summed up our day.
We were happy that we were on the “mountain” side of the road, not sure at times how those on the “nothing” side managed to squeeze past, and completely amazed that somehow defying the laws of physics the occasional tour bus, or errant motorhome managed to avoid catastrophe, but they did, and Julie soldiered on, with us so nonplussed, that we are sure the breaks she took to visit villages en-route were for our benefit and not ours.
At exactly the right time during one of those breaks they discovered the best pancake restaurant on the planet, a place with a simple fare so extraordinary that adequate description defies.
Fortified, we managed the final assault on the mountain, ultimately to check in to her mother’s cousin’s hotel (with pool and extraordinary views) which as it happens is located one and a half kilometres as the crow flies (two and a half hours on foot) from his cousin’s auberge, which gave us the opportunity of travelling those very same roads in the dark, and dining with one of the cousins of those road-side goats, although he was in a splendid stew with fresh onion and mountain herbs.
No comments
Post a Comment