We should have gone skiing, we admit it! There was even a little dusting of fresh snow at the top of Flaine this morning and sunny skies. We can't quite believe that we are dragging our feet!
But we did manage to get ourselves motivated and off the couch after lunch and go exploring in our area. Today we visited a cave network in the cliffs just below Araches, the climbing areas near our village and then over to the historical village of Samoens for a late coffee.
Every time we drove up the winding mountain road to Araches, we had noticed, what appeared to be some large caves in the side of the cliff. Today, we decided to take a look. The track to the foot of the cliff was well defined and the climb/scramble up to the entry of the cave was well defined. I mean this is France after all! There were handrails and helpful ropes everywhere.
2/ Andy at the entrance to the "serious cave".
The caves turned out to be massive. Meeting a nice french lady and her son, we learned that at the rear of the cave was an entrance to a well defined underground passageway. It is appears to be open to the public even though there were serious warning signs everywhere. It takes 2 hours to scramble through the cave network to "pop out" somewhere further up the road. Obviously it was fairly straight forward, as aside from a small head torch, the lady and her son were not carrying any other specialist gear. Typically, my "part wombat husband" was excited to explore these caves further. Not me! I will give most things a try - bungy-jumping, sky diving, ice-climbing, but crawling around in a big black hole is definitely my limit. I was content to just make myself dizzy with vertigo while looking over the edge of the cave entrance to the valley floor about 400m below us.
3/ Awesome - Antique Grafitti
Sorry, as an antipodean, decipherable grafitti from 1783 is pretty exciting. I mean that boat-load of petty thieves that I claim as my forebears, hadn't even landed in Sydney Cove at that time. I know that Europeans don't even bat an eyelid - they've been graffitti'ing for centuries. But think about it. 226 years ago, Joseph was standing up here in the cave looking out over the valley just like me. Was he a tourist? Or was he sheltering here against the weather or enemies? Or perhaps he was here to watch a hot-air balloon flight? Apparantly 1783 is the year that the Montgolfiere brothers first publicly demonstrated use of the hot-air balloon.
After successfully managing to dissuade Graeme from any ideas about crawling further into the hole, we climbed back down and strolled back to the car along the forest trail. The earth is well and truly coming back to life after being asleep under its winter blanket of snow. Shining bright green in the sunshine, the vegetation is so different from the dark green shades of NZ and the grey green and brown palette of Australia's forests.
