day 3: saugues to les faux

I left Saugues as soon as the sun was up on day three, as it was one of the longer stretches at 29 km (18 miles). The day’s hike included all of segment three of the chemin, from Saugues to Le Sauvage (19 km/12 miles) and into segment four, plus a 1.6 km (1 mile) detour off the trail to my B&B in Les Faux.

The trail starts mostly as quiet roads or gravel, and passes through several small farming communities on the way. There are sometimes stops for toilets or potable water, but often these smaller communities don’t have other amenities. There are rarely stores, though occasionally an auberge will have coffee and sandwiches, or there will be a creamery.

Sidebar: almost all the toilets on the trail – which have been plentiful, I haven’t yet had to resort to the pee funnel – have been composting toilets, rather than outhouses. I found this illustrative diagram hilarious.

I was spoiled with the weather the first two days. This day was cooler, but there was a biting wind for much of the first part as the trail wound along the side of a ridge. After several miles (uphill, again, but a mostly comfortable grade) the trail led into a beautiful forest – which is a new terrain for this hike – and out of the wind.

The trail emerges from the forest into a valley, from which you can see Le Sauvage (also shown in the featured image for this post) Le Sauvage is not, as I’d thought, a community, but rather an old farm that has been turned into a beautiful historic site with an auberge that requires booking well in advance.

And, thank goodness, it had a restaurant, which was full of hikers and pilgrims. I sat at a communal table with a hiker who had passed me earlier in the day. He didn’t speak much English, but we managed to establish where each of us was from, what we did for work, and how long we would be on the trail (he only had a week‘s vacation). My French is definitely getting better each day, though I understand more than I can speak. The hiker was finished before I was, and left to continue his hike. And when I finished my lunch and went to pay, I learned that he’d paid for mine. That made my day!

After that it was only another hour and a half or so to Les Faux, where once again I passed out early. (It sounds like I’m getting plenty of sleep – but often I fall asleep at a reasonable hour and then wake up at midnight, or 2 am, or 5am. At Les Faux I slept 10 hours!)