French Revolutions

Birna, following my finger up the map: the day before she
had happily undertaken a 120k detour to avoid driving over the Madeleine. It was
arranged that our two rather different itineraries should converge after 100k
at the ritzy-sounding ski resort of la Clusaz.
    You might arrive in Albertville not
knowing that the town hosted the 1992 Winter Olympics, but there is not the
tiniest chance of leaving with this ignorance intact. Its slightly Communist
ambience of broad avenues and low-rise tower blocks is only enhanced by the
number of enormous commemorative murals — peeling skiers slaloming down the
side of a warehouse, a faded luge speeding along concrete embankments. Distant
association with winter sports was no barrier: there was an Olympique tennis
club and cycling centre, and even a hairdresser’s. I bought three pains au
chocolat and a litre of Yoplait in a boulangerie with five linked pastry rings
in the window, and click-clicking down, down, deeper and down, began the slow
haul up to the col des Saisies.
    You could tell they didn’t get many
cyclists round here. Car passengers were now looking curiously round at me as
they passed, only partly because of the black-and-white-minstrel Yoplait mouth
ring I discovered during my next confrontation with a mirror. And I’d become so
accustomed to restaurant staff blithely pulling out a chair to accommodate my
Savlon-steaming behind that it was a shock to be accorded the lunchtime
reception my appearance deserved. Asking the waitress where the loo was, I saw
the backs of a dozen grey heads quiver in sour disgust: ‘Typical! Flies in his
hair, yoghurt round his mouth... and he’s got a bladder.’ It wouldn’t
have been so bad — not quite — if the loo in question had not been one of those
porcelain footprint jobs, the kind of sanitary fitting that makes it easier to
understand why so many Frenchmen prefer the lay-by option. And when bladder-boy
made the mistake of asking where the mustard was... well, you should have heard
the roof-raising merriment as the waitress approached with a finger
outstretched and slowly lowered this squat digit to the cruet set. Because...
yes! The mustard was already on the table ! Do you see?
    Still, it was nice to bring some
laughter into their lives. Though not as nice as it was to take seventy-one
complimentary mints out of them.
    The col des Saisies sported the most
grandiose hairpins yet, huge lazy sweeps up a smooth bank of green dotted with
immaculate chalets. Six-foot thistles and wild strawberries lined the road, but
bad stuff was happening above: peaks disappearing into beige clouds; thunder
rumbling off the opposite mountain sides. In the valley those big stacks of
neady hewn firewood by every garage were employed as faux-rural decorative
features, but when the rain finally got me I’d reached the peasant zone where
such things were very much for real.
    When the storm caught up I sheltered
in the porch of an ancient-planked barn, watching the cows graze on a 60-degree
slope to my left, and looking down at the rainbow bridging the valley to my
right. The road I’d turned off at the bottom was the back way to Mont Blanc, and in the humid mist the silhouetted mountains were lined up on all sides like
ranks of stage scenery. The cars below were tiny mobile specks, and for the
first time I was able to think: yes, I have just ascended an enormous vertical
distance under my own steam without even trying. Viewed in this heroic light,
it didn’t seem appropriate to be cowering under a hovel, so out I went to be
pebble-dashed and shot at by the elements, wondering if my tyres would save me
from electrocution.
    The road was steaming and so, quite
literally, were my limbs, and through squinted eyes I entered a steep land
where cows drank from old baths and proper milk churns were lined up by
wood-shingled farmhouses. It felt like a different world, and the inhabitants
clearly felt it deserved partial recognition as such. Tattered Savoy flags — they really should make them look less like the Swiss one — hung wetly by
every barn, and savoie libre was
daubed on bus shelters. And frankly, they can have it. If it was like this in
June, I thought, what happens up here in bloody winter?
    It stopped raining at la Saisie, and
as the road broadened and levelled I rolled into a moribund concrete ski town —
summer, Monday, 3 p.m.: dead to the power of three. Mankind’s contribution to
the beauty of this place was not altogether