Ici! Ici! C’est Mont-fer-rand!

Last week I had the opportunity to go back to Clermont-Ferrand in France, the place I was for about a month late last summer, to do some research for the thesis I’m going to work on next year in Michigan. While it’s a relatively simple six or seven hour trip by car, it’s quite a bit more complicated by public transportation, requiring a bus to Lyon and then a combination of trains and buses the rest of the way. All told, I left my house at 6am on Friday and didn’t arrive until 9:30pm. Luckily, the route through the Alps was incredibly scenic.

My first day in CF was what is apparently called a “field jolly day”. Basically, it means you go out in the field and hike around but just to look around for fun—you don’t do any actual work. In the morning I met Ben, my sort-of-adviser, at least for the French part of my work, as well as two guys from New Mexico Highlands University who would be working with us for the week, a professor, Mike, and a master’s student, Adam. We visited the three sites we’d be working at during the week, Lemptegy (the site for my thesis research; first 3), Puy de Dome (next 3), and Puy de Gravenoire (last 2), all volcanoes in the Chaine de Puys.

After all the hard work, I had Sunday off, so I spent the day with some of my friends (who I met last time I was in CF). We drove a ways outside of Clermont to Lac Chambon, near Saint Nectaire (where we did in fact stop for cheese). We had set out with thoughts of beaches and swimming, but when we arrived, it was freezing, windy, and raining. We decided to hike around the lake first and put off the difficult decisions till later.

When we made it all the way around the lake, the weather had improved slightly, though it was still pretty cold. After a tiny bit of discussion, we all agreed that it was time for a swim. It turned out the water wasn’t nearly as deep as we thought it was, and also pretty freaking cold! Nonetheless, a good time was had by all.

 

But then it was Monday and time for “work” to begin. We spent the first day and a half working at my area, Lemptegy. You may look at my pictures from the site and think, “that doesn’t look very much like a volcano. It looks more like a mine or a quarry!” And you’d be forgiven for that thought, because Lemptegy was turned into a quarry, which was active until just a few years ago. The result is that when you walk around the site, you can actually see everything that was on the inside of the volcano, which is pretty rare. It makes it much easier to understand what went on under the surface, and much easier to study both the rocks that cooled underground and the ones that were erupted.

For my research, we basically needed to collect samples of both lava flows (erupted igneous rocks) and dikes (igneous rocks that didn’t reach the surface). We did this for some of the flows by just breaking off large pieces, but mostly we drilled a whole bunch of cylindrical cores in the rock, and (after taking some measurements) collected them in little fabric sample bags.

Granted, this being France, every day was sort of a field jolly day! For example, one day we took a particularly long lunch break to search for a mysterious lava lake and “ice holes” Ben had heard rumors about. We hiked around in the woods for a while until we found them. The ice holes didn’t have any ice in them, but they were still pretty cool lava tubes.

We also bought our lunch every day from what Ben hyped as the “best bakery in Clermont-Ferrand”, and I’m willing to hype as “the best bakery ever.” Generally, I’d say I prefer the food in Italy, but when it comes to bread, the French are the masters.  We Americans like to think of ourselves as the kings of bacon and similar meats, but do we bake lardons and chorizo into our loaves of bread? I don’t think so! I think it’s high time we started!

From there, it was time to work on the Puy de Gravenoire, another volcano with a particularly awesome dike that interested us.

Our final working site was the Puy de Dome, a large lava dome right near CF, for which this entire region of Auvergne is named. The weather wasn’t very cooperative here, with a mix of cold, rain, and even hail making our work more difficult. But we persevered and got everything done.

 

With all our work done, I had my final day in Clermont free to do whatever I wanted. And, as it happened, that Saturday was the day of the Heineken Cup, the European rugby final, in which the local team, ASM, was playing. While the match was played in Dublin, the city set up a huge screen in Centre Jaude and (supposedly) 40,000 people gathered there to watch. It was a lot of fun, even though it ended in disappointment when Toulon staged a second-half comeback and ASM couldn’t capitalize on a last-minute scoring opportunity.

 

And that was it! I was surprised at how productive my trip was despite not working particularly hard, but I was able to collect all the samples I needed and now have a much better understanding of my project. I should be in good shape to start the lab work in the fall at MTU.

As of yesterday, I’ve officially reached the two-month mark in terms of time left in Italy. It’s amazing that things have gone so fast, but I’m not done doing things by a long shot! I’ve got a lot of stuff to do before I come home, including finishing classes, exams, my class trip to Etna volcano, and hopefully a trip or two to other places I haven’t been. Time to redouble my stuff-doing efforts!

Stairways to Heaven

As I get closer to the end of my time in Europe, I’ve noticed that a great deal of my free time the rest of the way is going to be occupied by France, Etna, and exams. This adds a little bit of a sense of urgency to my attempts to travel, as I’d like to get to a few more places while I can. Luckily, a rare day of nice weather coincided with Labor Day (at least, the labor day that basically the whole world celebrates except the US.), so I took advantage, got up nice and early and caught a train to Cinque Terre, an area of Liguria famous for its hiking paths and seaside villages.

Cinque Terre is really a series of five seaside villages on the western coast of Italy that are connected by numerous scenic footpaths. Ideally, you could hike south along the sea through all five villages in one day (well, ideally you’d have more than one day), but unfortunately due to a series of major landslides in 2011, many of the footpaths are still closed. Luckily, the national park pass included a train pass that let me take a five minute train ride between any of the villages whenever I wanted.

Monterosso al Mare

I arrived in Monterosso a little before lunch. After buying my park pass, I looked around the town for just a few minutes and then set off on the path to the next town along the line, Vernazza. Structurally, Monterosso is the most normal town of the five, built on flat ground with nice beaches running along the coast and with a more modern section. At this point in my travels, I basically take it for granted that even in the smallest of towns there will be a nice church, and none of the towns in Cinque Terre disappointed.

Path to Vernazza

The path to Vernazza, the only one open, luckily was the longest of the trails between the town, a fairly strenuous 1.5-2 hour hike high up along the rocky coast. Most of the time traveling with friends is more fun, however, on this particular trip I didn’t mind being on my own because it allowed me to move very fast and never stop for breaks. I can’t say most people enjoy the rapid pace at which I do my tourism. Still, the path was narrow and I spent a lot of time stuck behind tours of old people and German students. But the views were really incredible.

Vernazza

Vernazza was my favorite of the five towns. Built on a tiny peninsula sticking out into the sea, it had a pretty harbor and cozy, narrow streets. There’s also a castle I was able to go to the top of to get a look out in both directions along the coast.

  

Corniglia

At this point, I could no longer take the footpaths between the towns (at least, not the quicker seaside ones), so I grabbed a train to the third town Corniglia. I feel kind of cheated in this regard, because looking at pictures of the town on google I see that the view hiking into town from the north is pretty spectacular. The town is perched high on a cliff, but isn’t so visible from a distance from the south, so I found this town the least impressive of the five. There really wasn’t anything to see, so I didn’t stick around long before I caught another train.

Manarola

Manarola was probably the second nicest town in terms of the views I got and had a really nice harbor. After walking through town, I found a path that I thought led to an overlook, but was actually the start of one of the higher-elevation trails that led back around to Corniglia. I didn’t realize this for quite a while, and the path just kept going, but finally the law of diminishing returns started to apply to the increase in view quality relative to amount of elevation I was gaining, so I decided to turn around and go back into town.

Riomaggiore

The southernmost town in Cinque Terre was the last one I visited, and I was greeted by a mural that was pretty appropriate for Labor Day. I was pretty tired by this point. I know the one hike I did itself wasn’t too long, but I had to cover quite a bit of vertical ground in every town, especially on the long climb I did in Manerola, and all those staircases really start to get to you after a while. Riomaggiore was no different, and I climbed the road and stairs all the way to the top to get a view before coming down to check out the harbor, where I climbed out on the jetty to get a good shot of the town.

Back to Monterosso

With that, all that was left to do was head home. To do this, I had to stop in Monterosso to switch from the local to the regional train to get back to Milan. I had a tiny bit of downtime to head to the beach and walk around a little more.

All told, it was a really fun trip, and if you only have a day, you can definitely do it the way I did and have a great time. Ideally, though, I would love to spend two or three (or even four) days in Cinque Terre. In the end, I did about 7 hours of traveling for 6 hours actually doing stuff, and it was a little stressful to worry about getting it all done in time to catch a train home. I imagine many of the towns look beautiful in the fading light, and it smelled like delicious fresh seafood everywhere, so I’m sure it would be great to have dinner on the water. There are also quite a few of the trails above the towns that I would have enjoyed hiking if I had time (plus the seaside trails if and when they reopen them).