Grand St Bernard to Nus

Grand St Bernard to Nus

Our room at the Hospice is lovely. Pannelled entirely, floor ceiling and walls in golden pine with two extremely comfortable old fashioned beds with doonas in yellow seersucker. There's an antique table and desk in the room. It's shared facilities but somehow that feels different in a monastery. It's super-clean, everything is, and walking on huge flagstones in a cloister to get to them just feels different. Even a motley lot of coathangers doesn't give you the grubby feeling a cheap pension wardrobe does. And no locks on the doors, that's an interesting thing to comtemplate.

The whole building is awesome, perched on the little saddle between these huge ranges. Everywhere 1600 and something or 1700 and something is chiselled into the doorways. So many famous names passsed through here, Charlemagne and Napoleon to mention just two. Napoleon came through with 40,000 men, created an enormous impact, every town in the area seems to have a record of it on display.

We take our boots down to the bootroom, down in the cellar. The floors are protected by everyone having to wear slippers. In French these are called pantoufles. Doesn't that word seem just so warm and fluffy, visions of cocoa and knitting beside the fire?

The hospice has been here for a thousand years (it really has!) and the monks have an amazing history of rescuing and succouring travellers in trouble. The famous St Bernard dogs with their brandy bottles around their necks have saved countless lives and there are fantastic old photos from 100 years ago of the monks, hats on, robes flying skiing downhill with the dogs on rescue missions.

There is also a local history of guides which was a privilege of the local villagers. Amazing pictures of them bringing up people on stretchers (some bound for the morgue that was also here). Apart from the other dangers, avalanches are common here.

It is very cold and a thick fog has blown in. The weather today has been perfect, clear and blue, but there was snow down to 1500 metres a couple of weeks ago, so we are lucky (although I would have been excited to see some. Not complaining, though, even a bit too much would have stopped us in our tracks) . The pass closes to cars on October 15. In the winter this is a very popular site for cross country skiing, the fitness level that would require is awe-inspiring.

Dinner was lovely – half a dozen other people I guess (as well as a whole school group of young teens, but they ate in another room, with deafening noise). Two Swedish women who are mountain trekking guides in Switzerland, very confident, and fluent in English, three women who are doing some day walks in the area and a lady who has been serving here as a volunteer for a few months and will go home on Sunday.

We had a lovely friendly and chatty meal, lots of good cheer. In the middle something funny happened. The one who has been here was explaining why she comes to volunteer. She does a week or so of prayer and contemplation, then works, preparing rooms for the guests, running the little video theatre where there is a movie about the history of the place. She was just telling us that one of the things she loves is the peace and silence. Just as the words left her mouth a horde of teenagers ran past the door shrieking. We all collapsed in laughter.

Renato has been saying for days, Someone will lend us a computer. And he asked at dinner, I wonder if any of you have a computer we can use. Of course, says Jacqueline, who has been to Australia, I have a laptop (we took a few minutes to struggle through working out what laptop was in either of our languages) and we could keep it overnight. So we went to our cosy, lovely little room and got some more onto the thumbdrive before the battery went. Now to find a place to send it from.

Time for bed. Tomorrow Italy and the long walk down towards Aosta.


Grand St Bernard to Etroubles 8 October

Sorry, can't write. Every time I pick up my pen La Signora brings out another sensational course of what is turning out to be a memorable dinner. We were sitting in her very pretty bar and restaurant filling in some time in front of the Swiss tiled heater and asked her about dinner. She claps her hands across her ample chest then flings them wide. Do you have confidence in my cooking? Of course Signora! So out it comes. We're up to three divine courses so far, how many more! Don't know don't care. Just bring it on. It's just us in the restaurant and La Signora is fully engrossed in the kitchen just for us, pots banging, steam rising.

When we first walked in and said we were Australian, her face lit up, she grasped my hand (Australians are always popular, because we are not brits, yanks or germans and people have family members who have come here).

Nothing much else to say about today. Lovely morning at the Hospice, breakfast with several of the ladies, then in came the guides and their troop of vikings with a great gust of testosterone, dumping bags and backpacks, pulling on boots and getting ready for the day's activities. These were the clients the Swedish girls had been waiting for (they offer high energy trekking with yoga and at the end of the day massage). Renato asked to join the group but resigns himself to walking to Rome instead.

After 3 courses the Signora says vegetables from my garden, ingredients not from the supermarket. No kidding! We had 1. Finely sliced smoked pork with chestnut relish 2. Shredded white cabbage, tomato, local fresh cheese (fontina) and prosciutto 3. Vege soup with local chees from the mountans and one aniseed flower 4. apple and blueberry compote with whipped cream and a sweet bisuit (dolcetta).

That was the end of the day but at the beginning we set out and it was mostly downhill to Etroubles.

The photo op at the start of the day was rather hampered by the thick fog. Leaning out the window of our room it was cold and damp. But once we are on our way, the scenes are quite ethereal. The start is a difficult descent, we take a slight wrong turn around the statue of St Bernard, ghostly in the fog and it is tricky to get down and back on to the path.

Past the avalanche galleries, roofs over the road. I don't care if you would be safe, I reckon if you were driving along, minding your own business and an avalanche came down over them, it would still stir you up big time.

Stunning scenery again all the way down, managed to get a coffee and tried to get food at lunch time – doh – this is Italy. Closed for siesta of course.

At one point, the path was closed because of concreting and we are wandering around trying to find a way down the mountain. A man dashed over to show us how to find the path by climbing some fences and following the river down, He had ridden a bike for part of the Camino a couple of years ago.

We walked on to Etrouble sustained only by chocolate which we always carry for safety and found a darling B&B and this fantastic tiny restaurant with its great slab tables, bench seats and La Signora.

It's cold and dark, the mist has closed it's clammy hand around Etroubles but we are warm, dry and well fed.

Etrouble to Aosta 9 October

Adios rosti says Renato as we sit down to dinner in the Gourmand de Pelerin in Aosta, a little underground restaurant with a low vaulted ceiling of patterned brick and hello pasta. In front of us are plates of tagliatelle alla funghi, local wine and a carafe of crystal clear, local sparkling mineral water.

After an unpromising start, dragging ourselves through the suburbs at the end of the day, this has proved to be a great little town. Like the food, it is a totally different culture. Down the valley on the southern side of the Alpes and into La bella Italia. The centre is a big town piazza, thronged with families walking the evening passagio, back and forth, chatting and greeting each other, just like we first saw in the Greek Plateas so many years ago.

Said goodbye to pretty, artisitic Etrouble (with sculpture scattered everywhere) this morning. It was still covered in mist. What follows is a very pretty and very downhill day through leafy lanes. A new colour today – orange is in the mix. Sensational autumn leaf vistas along the forest pathways look almost surreal through the veil of mist. Towards the end of the day we can see Aosta further along the valley and the landscape has subtly changed to have a slightly Tuscan air with pencil pines on some of the hillsides.

When we finally arrive in Aosta, we find a little adeqate hotel room and go out to explore. The town has Roman walls, bridge, towers and the old town is very attractive but it is so Italian people dress, walk, talk act differently. Within 30 km – amazing. The lithe, brown, shaggy haired young women with short skirts tottering along on high heels, the brash, nattily dressed young men with tight pants and cool sunglasses swaggering along the road in groubs, masters of the stubble beard.

And no more bonjour, in France and Switzerland even people walking into a coffe shop would say a general bonjour to the room and you couldn't walk past anyone in the street with an exchange of greeting, Here, nothing. Now one more thing that is very noticible. Tootle do do loo car horns. Actually horns at all – we haven't heard one since Paris. On our day walking along the Rhone we even watched a car spend about 5 minutes patiently and carefully moving through a flock of swans with out so much as a bip of the horn to move them off the road, but here the boys like noise and speed.

Aosta to Nus 11 October 

Sitting in a bar in Nus haveing a cuppuccino with the television blaring, like Spain, loud mindless TV. The jounalist is doing an ad for coffee, walking down the street sideways interviewing people and just walked into a lampost – intentional? The audience loved it anyway.

We had a short day today, we had to break the 37 km stage into two and the villages en route are so tiny so we had to stop at only 14 km and here we are in little nothing Nus installed in a 55 Euro hotel room. The foyer and dining room are a perfect period piece. They would have been the cat's pyjamas for two star decor when it was done oin the 1960s. Heavy wood furniture, ceiling lights on wagon wheels, strange panels of mirroring. However, the rather dour man at reception has let us use his computer to type this up for the blog.