Walking Into Prehistory

France is a hiker's paradise. It's big enough to have enormous variety in terrain and climate*, so there're plenty of choices. It's full of parks and protected areas of all sizes. And it has tens of thousands of miles of trails, from short local loops to long-distance paths across regions or even the whole country, all of them marked and maintained and many of them interconnected. You can almost-literally walk anywhere. There's a company that publishes guides to all of these trails, a set describing short hikes and another for planning trips along the long trails (or sections of the really long ones), both organized geographically. The guides fill an entire section of shelves in bookstores. It's frustratingly difficult, if not impossible, to find useful free information, but the guides are fantastic. They break down each leg of the trail with directions, give distances and time estimates, point out sights along the way and where to find hotels, food, bus stations, etc., and have tons of short side articles about the towns, landmarks, and local culture along the routes.

I bought two of them at the beginning of the Toussaint vacances: a guide to day hiking in the Parc naturel regional d'Armorique, which is only a short distance away from Brest, and a guide to the Morbihan (southern Brittany) section of the GR (grande randonnée) 34, which follows much of the coast of Brittany.

After marking all of the interesting-looking possibilities in the guide to the Parc naturel regional, I starting looking into how to get to their locations. It was at that point that I began discovering the limitations of the French bus systems. (See my earlier post about transportation.) Forced to concede that I was not going to be able to access some of the places I most wanted to and that others were going to require a lot of additional walking, probably along roads rather than walking paths, from the nearest town with a bus stop, not to mention the hassles of timing any trip to correspond to the severely limited bus schedules, I gave up and turned to the other book to plan a trip to Carnac. There I discovered still more transportation issues (though at least not the kind where I simply couldn't get where I wanted to go) and the issue of nonexistent budget accommodations. After attempting multiple itineraries, I eventually managed to settle on one that was a lot more limited in scope than I'd wanted, but was relatively straightforward in terms of transportation and involved only one overnight stay, in a reasonably priced (but definitely not cheap) hotel in the town of Carnac.

Here's how it worked: I got up in the dark on Wednesday morning of that week and left, still in the dark, a few minutes after six a.m. I actually really like being out that early, when I have a good reason to be. Everything is still and quiet and you can feel that you're right on the cusp of a brand-new day. And when you've just gotten up at that hour, as opposed to not yet having gone to bed (probably the more common reason I'd be awake two hours before dawn), the darkness and the empty streets are thrilling instead of threatening.

I took a seven o'clock bus, the first of the day, to Quimper, where I caught a train to Auray, the first train station beyond my ultimate destination. (Yes, I could have taken the train all the way from Brest, but I'd also have paid a lot more for it.) Then I started backtracking, by taking a bus a few kilometers back towards Carnac and getting off in a seaside town called Trinité-sur-Mer, 10 km and 2.5 hours, according to my guidebook, from Carnac by foot. And there I started walking.

My original lofty goals for the trip had involved a lot more walking from place to place and a lot less waiting for buses, but with all of the various time constraints I was facing I unfortunately had to prioritize my destinations over my journeys. I was determined to see the alignments at Carnac and get to the town of Erdeven the next day with enough time to do an interesting loop hike there, and to accomplish both of those I had to give up on spending the majority of the trip on the ground. But I was still determined to arrive at Carnac on foot.

The stretch of the trail from Trinité to Carnac is probably not the most interesting one, although some of it is very beautiful. Leaving Trinite, the shoreline was rocky and I watched people gathering shellfish, obviously taking advantage of the beautiful weather and, in some cases, of the fact that the kids didn't have to go to school. The small rocks gave way to boulders, and I stopped for lunch on a windy headland looking out from the tip of the point. Someone had been there before me and gathered up enough little white rocks to build a tiny model dolmen** surrounded by a little stone circle—which I thought was way cooler than a sand castle.

After rounding the point, the rocks thin out suddenly and the trail crosses over sand dunes and though a stretch of pine forest before eventually hitting a road, which crosses a lovely marsh and runs alongside a couple of nice beaches, but which makes for a long, dull walk on a sidewalk instead of in nature.

I should point out that the hiking guide was actually written for someone going in the opposite direction, so not only was I trying to decipher directions in French, I was trying to do it backwards, which would have been confusing even if they were in English. Fortunately, most of the trail was well marked or unmistakable or both, but I did have a couple of moments of uncertainty. I also eventually lost it entirely somewhere on the outskirts of Carnac, but since at that point I was on my way into town anyway, I just kept walking instead of going back to try to find the official route.

I should also point out that the French like to close up shop (and that's any imaginable kind of shop, along with banks, post offices, assorted other kinds of offices, museums, and anything else you can think of) for a couple of hours in the early afternoon. The French like their long lunches, and they take their not-having-to-work time very seriously, and it's all very frustrating to an American who's accustomed to being able to get stuff done in the middle of the day. Anyway, I arrived in Carnac around 1:30, which is exactly the wrong time of day to be able to do anything in France other than eat lunch or have a drink. Especially in a small town.

So I walked around for a bit just to see what might be interesting to go back to later, and then I sat outside the tourism office waiting for it to reopen, which turned out to be a waste of time (because I didn't find anything very useful there, not because it never reopened). Then I went to find my hotel, where I found the door locked even though I was well after the 2 pm check-in time (oh, France...), so I grudgingly continued carrying my backpack with me as I headed up the road towards the alignments, which are just north of town. In fact, they turned out to be closer than I thought—maybe a ten minute walk from my hotel.

And they're awesome, of course. I took far too many pictures, but else can you do? There is no photograph man could take that would encompass the scale of the place, but you have to try. And try. And try.

The stones vary in size from up to about my waist to several times taller than me, and they seem to get gradually larger from one end of the alignments to the other. The rows are very straight and all completely parallel. And they go on and on, as far as the eye can see. There are actually several different sets, and I only visited one and still couldn't believe the enormity of it. I just stood in the middle of the field and stared for the longest time.

And yes—I did just say “the middle of the field”. Because in the off-season, when the crowds are less, you don't have to pay for a guided tour to be allowed to go in among the stones. They just open the gate, and you're free to wander as you please.

When I couldn't look anymore, I went back to my hotel and then back into town. Carnac is divided into two parts, the town proper and the beachfront town a short distance away. (Archaeology and the beach all in one spot--what more could anyone want?) The beach had come to life since my stop in the afternoon, and felt just like an American boardwalk in the summer, which for me was both weird and really cool. I walked around watching families and looking at the arcades and carnival rides and peeking into tacky souvenir shops, and eventually succombed to the lure of an awe-inspiring snack stand where I bought a waffle covered in salty caramel (a Breton speciality) and white chocolate, which I ate on a bench overlooking the ominously rough ocean, watching the crowds that hadn't already hit the town packing up their cars. 

From the Neolithic to the epitome of modern tourism in less than two hours and no more than a few kilometers. France, my friends, is an interesting place.

Also, one of the fun facts I learned this past weekend is that the French for "time machine" is "machine à explorer le temps". I like that, but it seems unnecessarily complicated, if you ask me.

Like many things in France.

* France has four different climate zones, if I remember correctly. The US, by comparison, has about ten or eleven. That's not exactly a proportional difference considering France could fit into the US almost 15 times. (Yes, I did the math.) You could easily hit several different climates in France in the space of a couple of days, which would be considerably more difficult in the US.
** A prehistoric stone tomb.