Island hopping

And hopping was about all I could do after a humongous amount of walking on a tour of the Gulf of Morbihan.

Now when embarking on this I thought it would be nice and restful to do a boat trip around the Gulf. Lovely day. So we picked a trip that consisted of a boat circling around the 40 odd islands and then landing on the only two that are public. The rest are privately owned with the going rate around 2 million euros, which for your own well-wooded island, mooring and a decent house in the middle doesn't sound too bad to me compared to a Central London flat. One hell of a commute though.

The two properly inhabited islands are the Ile d'Arz and the Ile aux Moines. To give you a sense of the character of the places, the population of the latter in winter is 600: in August its 10,000.

The Ile d'Arz is the smaller of the two. We had 3 hours to use up so thought we would follow the coastal path round and then have lunch in the main/only town/settlement. Nice walk past the salt marshes - regretted not bringing my binoculars for a bit of bird identification. Luckily we were first off the boat and rather younger than most of the rest of the trippers so we strode off purposefully and burned off the others, gaining the feeling of isolation even though threre was a gggle of elderly Frenchmen only a hundred yards or so behind us. But then, peckish we hit the town and the first little restaurant we came to, now half full of either those staying on the island, or those who had just gone straight up the main road. So lunch took quite a while. Leaving us with just a short while to potter round the metropolis with its pretty little church and cottages.

Then but a short boat trip to the cross shaped Ile aux Moines. Bit more touristy, but here the main town just rises from the port. So most people stay within it. We being intrepid took the coastal path again. But this proved to be a much loger trip than anticipaated. The island is laced with houses with nice views. And the coastal path has to accomodate this, usually with dog-legs back into the centre and then round the offending edifice. When added to the stretch shut off for being unsafe our coastal path didn't exactly hug the coast, which is all the more surprising given much of the island is only a few hundred metres wide. But it does have some very beautiful views, as well as those obscured by over head height bramble hedges on both sides. But as I say, some lovely parts with views over secluded bays. One had a beautiful sandy beach populated by just the one family, kids playing in the white sand. Really idyllic.

But given the island is 6 kilometres long in a straight line and we had been doing lots of bends, as well as ups and downs, it was all taking a toll on my wonky leg. So we were most relieved to reach our target - a prehistoric dolmen (stone-slab tomb). To be fair not that exciting and hardly stonehenge, but it was something to take a photo of (while trying to crop out the telegraph poles). But boy was I limping by the time we got back to port. Ouch

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