Verdon Gorge After the tour we headed to the Verdon Gorge the largest gorge in the whole of Europe. The roads were very narrow, dropping off a couple of hundred meter on one side without and protective barriers preventing you from going over the edge. We camped for our final night in a small town at the bottom of the valley called Castellane The next morning we were up early so we could walked the Sentier Blanc Martel hiking trail which is a 14km hike through the Verdon Gorge. We parked the car at the finishing point and caught a local bus for 30min to our starting point. The hike was very hard, always going up and down the side of the Gorge in the direct sunlight for most of the time. Got some great images of the turquoise blue water that was cold and fresh as we later found out because we didn’t get violently ill from drinking it. We walked through some massive tunnels that were dug as short cuts for what was going to be a hydro system being put in. After 10 years they ended up canning the decision of completing the system. One of the tunnels was 1km (absolutely pitch black). The hike started to wind up after around 3-4 hours walking but that’s when all the drama started!. About 10min form the end of the hike the heavens opened. The raindrops were massive and we were stuck in the middle of the gorge. Then the thunder and lighting show started, echoing of the walls for kms. Once the lightening started we knew we had to take refuge, so we found a cave overhang with a Dutch family and camped it out for about half an hour with the rain, thunder and lightening showing little sign of dissipating. We had a bolt of lightening crack above our heads couldn’t have been any further than 20m away because the area around us lit up scaring the shit out of everyone. El and I decided we had waited long enough and decided to make a run for the car about 1km away. We left the safety of the overhang and made a break for it uphill along a narrow steep track. Well this narrow steep track had now transformed into a gushing river of water which was actually quite scary because we couldn’t see where our footing as we ran up. Adrenalin kicked in a few more lighting bolts cracked so we just bolted through the water till we reached the road. The road had a film of water flowing across it with cars pulled over on the side of the road with their hazards on. We eventually made it to the car soaked to the bone along with our backpacks. The drive out of the gorge was just as fun, dodging rocks and boulders the size of motorbikes that had fallen off the cliff race onto the roads during the storm. We eventually made it to Nice where we dropped the car off. Milano: From Nice we caught a train to Milan for the night. We hopped on a train what we thought was just a metro train which would take us to the border of France and Italy but when we hopped off at our station to catch the fast train we were already in Italy, which was a bit of a shame because I wanted a stamp in the passport! We boarded the high-speed train, which got up to around 250-260km.h and before we knew it we were in Milan. We stayed in one of the best hostels in the world called Ostello Bello, which has won many awards and had only been ope for 2 years. On arrival around 6pm they took our bags and gave us each a free drink telling us to help ourselves to the buffet of pastas, salads, dips etc. This was the first European city where there wasn’t a lot of Aussies and even the locals came to the hostels for after work drinks because they got the buffet as well if they bought a drink. We made some friends with a few Irish girls from Cork then called it a night as we were training it to Florence the next day.
