19 - 26 June Friends Leaving and a Walk in the Hills

This week has been nice and quiet. The temperatures are now much hotter so the earlier start on our morning walks means we get back to the apartment around 9-9:30am. Breakfast, perhaps some weights/exercises and then on to enjoy a coffee and a lovely lazy hour reading a book and watching the world go by at Bar Le Pablo. 

Our expat friends are heading home, due to return to Ceret in late August/September. Hence we are having coffee, wine, apero and dinner gatherings at various location before they depart. Next week we will be virtually the only ones left here of our group.

Locals enjoying the Saturday morning market.
It is as much a time to sit down and have a chat with friends as it is to buy produce.

Thursday was the France-wide celebration of music. Every village, town and city puts on events to celebrate music, in whatever genre(s) it wishes. Ceret was no exception. We had a band playing outside every bar, Catalan choirs singing on the boulevards and a roving drumming group. Sitting outside and absorbing the atmosphere made us realise (just in case we had forgotten) how different it is living in Europe. 

Locals listening to a Catalan choir on one of the main streets in town

Some of the kites put up to by the council to celebrate the music festival

Yesterday one of the bars put on a Celebration of Mojito evening, complete with Brazilian dancers whirling around the outside tables. Living in the historic centre of Ceret means living in quite a small community. On our daily circuits around the main street, e.g. to buy bread from the boulangerie, we see the same faces every day and in turn are well recognised. Hence, we feel a part of this place.

A petanque tournament we came across one afternoon.

Monday was the last chance for a long walk around Céret's old quarries before a nephew and his partner arrive to stay with us for a week. We set off a little before 9am, collecting some pastries for nourishment on the track. It was a 2km trek uphill until we got to the start of the track John had made up on his track app. The route was to take us past at least five sites associated with talc and other mineral excavation in the hills in days gone by. Though we couldn't see all of them, we did come across old mines, buildings and an aerial cableway, complete with rusting buckets. It was a long hard walk up steep tracks for the first couple of hours, then it eased a little, and we trekked through some interesting country and vegetation. It was basically a huge circuit of the Pyrenean foothills behind a neighbouring town. We climbed to over 800m, and were rewarded with some spectacular views up and across the valley, and also down to Ceret and the Mediterranean beyond. With the air temperature probably around 30 degrees we were fortunate that a fair amount of the trek was in bush.

We were also fortunate to see a couple of vultures, with 2m wingspans. We hoped they were not waiting for us to break down. The hills used to be full of lovely mas - farm homesteads. Not many are still farms - they have been bought as done up as holiday homes.

Bridge along the track

One of the vultures

Aerial cableway for the old talc mining

Just one of the many gorgeous mas that snuggle into the Pyrenees

We're up pretty high - looking northeast towards Mt Canigou.

The views were fabulous. We could see right across to Batere where we have a walk we enjoy below Canigou. The hills here are pretty brutal - there's no way you want to lose your way, and we could not have done this walk without constant use of the GPS app on my phone and smartwatch.

In amongst pretty rough country

View down the valley with Ceret mid-photo, the Med in the distance.

Zoomed in on the historic centre of Ceret

The view near the end of the walk downwards into our little town of Ceret was the best we've seen. It showed clearly both how spread Ceret is overall (8000 population) and how tight the historic centre is.  The reasonable-sized population means we have a good number of shops, bakers and supermarkets, while the centre where we spend most of our time is still only village-sized. Ceret is really a Goldilocks town, not too big and not too small. We could also quite clearly see the circle of 200-year-old plane trees lining what was once a moat protecting the town from the frequent invaders.

When we finally chugged home after some 18 kilometres, fairly foot weary, first stop was a shower. The second was a short walk to our local superette to buy a box of six pistachio chocolate trumpets for NZ$3. They hit the spot!