Bovines on the Bovine Route

Our leaders chose the wild camp with the biggest shelter. We suspect they'd seen the weather forecast, since, as soon as the camp was in sight, the rain started again. However, with a shelter as big as this ...

... which was all ours to use, the rain wasn't too much of a problem. There was plenty of space for cooking, eating, relaxing and we could have cleared a dance floor, if our legs had felt up to it. We had a delicious spaghetti carbonara that night, but it was our team's turn to wash up and, believe us, trying to wash a pan coated with cream sauce, with cold water only, was quite a challenge.  

The next day dawned fine and dry. That morning we were following the bovine route, and before we'd even started that path, we had a bovine warm up, with Swiss cows lining the approach road ...

... they weren't the traditional brown Swiss cow, but they did have big bells and they sounded great.

As we plodded up the long uphill of the route proper, we encouraged ourselves with the thought of the refreshment buvette that would be close to the top. We'd come across enough by now to know they could be relied upon. Guess who arrived first to get to the head of the queue? - none other than our piranha friend Yorkie ...

We knew we were on the right path, as the buvette name was the Bovine, with rather scary pictures of cows locking horns. 

We tucked in to chocolate squared (hot drink and cake) while keeping an eye out for any aggressive cows. There weren't any, but a rather well laden mule did arrive with another trekking group. We were pleased when his load was taken off him so he could have a proper rest, but we were rather surprised to observe that most of the bags he was carrying seemed to contain his clients' lunches, rather than their overnight gear. Talk about big lunch boxes - they definitely weren't Brits.

We just felt a bit sorry for the buvette owners as they weren't getting much custom from that group. 

After the buvette stop, was a lovely flat path on the edge of some very steeply shelving pastures full of wild flowers including arnica. Any cows grazing those fields would have needed legs of different lengths. 

When this path ended, it was quite a steep downhill with some muddy sections and some rocky sections. We had to watch where we put our paws and take it slowly, but when we did that we were fine, and guess what there was another buvette at the end. 

Lots of love George, Yorkie and Gio xxx