In front of me, I have a map. Now I’ve always been fascinated by cartography in the same way that grot mags would capture my attention when I was a teenager*. The symmetry holds; I would peer at the pictures, get quite excited without really knowing why, and have absolutely no clue about what the hell would happen next.

Cracking it open shows vertical delights, hidden clefts, unconquerable summits and sun warmed valleys. I’m back to the map, what the hell are you lot thinking? The area 40ks north of Perpignan is known as Le Ganigou which sounds both medical and painful – it was nearly both. 12 routes radiate out from Vernet-les-baines – a rural town where ‘Allo ‘Allo must have been staged – increasing in severity from greens to clean, blues to cruise, reds to roost** and blacks to crack.

As ever, we chose the hardest route intending to dispatch 6000 feet of climbing over 40ks wth nothing more than a pack of sandwiches and an Olympic class hangover. And, again in the long tradition of giving up, a mile later – all of which was pitched nearly to the vertical – we ran away scared.

“Red route then lads eh? Best get ourselves warmed up first eh? We’ll crack that bastard tomorrow? Right?” Yeah, right. The next four hours were spent mostly getting lost, getting sun burned, getting backdraft hangovers***, getting laughed at by the French and pushing. The downhill sections swung between steep, loose and wide and steep, narrow and rocky. At no point did steep ever leave this holy trinity of going downhill fast. And a bit frightened.

Uphill was – as I may have mentioned – pushing, sweating, grunting and lying supine on the saddle waiting for double digit heart rates and single digit vision. Still, the final singletrack back to Vernet was the dusty jewel in this twisted crown. An initial run in was a steep hairpin immediately switching to baby-head rocks which needed speed and balls to surf like a wheeled jetboat.

Just when you were getting all cocky with rocky, the next challenge were alternating, blind and steep, root-strewn hairpins. Bleeding speed in the manner of “don’t make me lock up and bleed“, I faultlessly dispatched them in a new school manner of “spanners: bag of”. The reward for staying upright was a kilometre of insane trail which took hold of your adrenal gland and squeezed it unmercifully for the next three minutes.

Dave has better lines that me, because he is a shitload younger, a sight braver and *curses* noticeably more skilled. He’s also currently dependentless****, so his dust became my track. Hardtails rule here, so fast to change lines, so easy to manual over portentous rocks, so laugh out load carvey in corners. Drop your elbows, swap stiff muscles for leggy suspension, don’t even flick the brakes and have summer riding hammered into your brain by every bump in the trail.

It doesn’t happen often enough but when it does, riding like this is better than almost anything else. There are no limits, there is no fear, nothing is difficult, fast is easy, everything is possible, timeshare skills come on line for 60 seconds and now you can manual, bunnyhop and – even for the briefest moment – hip jump in SPD’s.

We rode it twice more over the next days and never made the black. But we’ll be back, no wiser, probably no more sober but with better excuses. I have so many long memories from this shortest of trips; nailing the steepest trails, drinking beer in out of season rural villages, Simon coming back from the dead on the first day, falling off, pointing and laughing at others doing the same, taking the piss, laughing till it hurt, long days, big nights, great friends.

Our friends Si and Sarah, who have swapped a somewhat hedonistic London lifestyle for rural bliss in a place perfectly sandwiched between the sea and the mountains, are very lucky people indeed.

More so, because we’ve left 😉

* For my younger readers, this was the like the Internet in paper form. Sticky paper, if I remember rightly.

** Forgive me the freeride lingocrap(tm) on the grounds of exceptional alliteration

*** The best way I can think of describing “the second chewing” of food and water.

**** Probably. We’ll leave it there should we Dave?

A brace of mid leg articulators are essential working body parts for a long weekend of dusty riding in the Southest of France. Useful also for getting around once walking becomes stumbling becomes resting, face down, on the sun warmed ground. Alcohol may have been involved, it generally is.

You see there is an grooved narrative causality governing trips away with bicycles and good friends. Firstly a key component of my MTB will explode somewhere betwixt careful packing and despondent rebuilding. Following closely on is a twist in the story that ends up in a glass and then a full on monstering of the liver. And while the two may be only loosely related, I am powerless to resist the grip of the tale.

On the way to a hangover, which rates somewhere high in my top ten “never another drop, not ever, don’t even mention the word” thumping morning afters, we discovered from our recently domiciled host that “France is run by middle age women” and “there is no point trying to charm them, they get that 24/7 from the indigenous population” and “Driving while drunk in rural France is as simple as sticking your head out of the window and feeling the hedge“.

All you need to know in three simple sentences spread over an evening of ever increasing wine fueled stupidity. Which ended in us incautiously cracking open a further bottle back at Si and Sarah’s house before grabbing a bike each for a spot of “Derbying in the Dark“. Less Bruce Springsteen, more loose springs ream as a collection of expensive bicycles were thrown roughly to the floor, occasionally striking a drunken bystander.

Once Si unleashed his BMX (if not his BMX skills), four men who should really know better spent much time giggling, searching for lost bikes in the darkness and attaining verticallity for the single purpose of securing another drink. Did it end well? Two guesses and you’ll not be needing the second one.

The next morning started slowly because the previous evening had finished not too much earlier. Head clutching shades stalked darkened corridors, moving slowly but easily identified by their cries and moans. Stairs were difficult, cutlery a mystery too far and the prospect of attempting to control a motor vehicle nothing more than legally sanctioned murder.

We did eventually go riding which went about as well as you could expect from a quartet of men sweating red wine and chewing back last night’s dinner. Still hell of a night, not such a fantastic morning.

I’ll get round to cataloging our mastery of both bikes and stomachs when I get a minute not earmarked for some serious study of the inside of my eyelids. But I’m fairly sure the world oil crisis may be over considering the volume of the stuff leaking from my (air!) fork over the weekend. I’m in touch with BP regarding some exploratory drilling of this apparently bottomless reserve.

Something is broken. Thankfully not me although Saturday morning, I’d have paid good money for a mercy killing 😉