Map Note: For reference purposes, Col du Grand-Saint-Bernard in the lower right corner of the first map is the pass over the Alps and the last stage of the Via Francigena in Italy.
At the abbey in Saint-Maurice, I met John, a seasoned walker from Melbourne, Australia, who has completed numerous epic treks in Europe, Africa, South America, Central America, and the Middle East. Over the past two days, John and I have ended up walking together several times as we have bumped into each other on the trail. I ’ve loved hearing some of his travel stories, and he has been a good walking companion.
Another small world story
John asked me how I came to be interested in the Via Francigena, and I told him I had been invited to walk the Camino Portuguese from Porto to Santiago a few years ago by my old college friend from Phoenix, Jerry Strauss. Jerry’s son, Zac, was planning to walk it and asked Jerry to join him, and Jerry invited me. Zac was in his early 20’s at the time and was traveling around the world. We all met in Porto, Portugal and walked together to Santiago, Spain, and I really enjoyed getting to know Zac on the walk. It turns out that John and Zac walked together on one of the Caminos in Spain a few years later. It really is a small world.
It starts getting genuinely mountainous.
After Saint-Maurice, the Rhone river valley begins to close in, and it feels like you are beginning to enter the Alps!
Martigny
The walk to Martigny was relatively short (17kms), so I was invited to join John for dinner along with Margaret, a walker from Germany who is sampling a couple of weeks on the Via Francigena before planning a full-scale attempt over the next few years. She was a delightful person to get to know, and we have since had a chance to visit at length and to share other meals together as everyone’s walking schedules begin to synch up as we approach the Great Saint Bernard Pass.
Next up: Martigny to Orsières, the toughest stretch of the Via Francigena thus far.
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4 Responses
Charles, how is the heat? I’m hearing on the news that France is experiencing some record highs in temperature. Maybe one advantage of being in mountains is the cooler weather!
Scott Spencer aka Groovy Chaos!
What a waste of time, lives and money. The Little General must have had a passion for Italian women to go to all that trouble. They are appealing . When the ship anchored in Naples, there was a long line of ladies greeting us as we headed to town, after 3 months at sea. If you have a problem on the trail, just imagine what Hannibal and the Little General had to deal with
These episode updates are getting more exciting each time. Love the pictures, dairy cows, round bales, stone mountains and streams. So glad you are making more trail compadres. Nothing better. The pilgrimage path through the Alps may be close to the one Hannibal took on his way to conquer Rome. If you see any elephant bones in ravines, it was not a traveling circus. Many thanks for letting us in on your trip.
The Hannibal story is an incredible one, but since they aren’t sure it was the Great St. Bernard Pass or one of two others, it doesn’t get as much attention. What does get a lot of attention is Napoleon’s crossing of the Great St. Bernard Pass in 1800 with 40,000 troops. The scale of that crossing is unimaginable. Feeding 40,000 troops and hauling artillery through the mountains is insane.