...And Then I Fell Into an Alternate Dimension

The long-awaited (?) tale of my further adventures in the mountains. 

Last Sunday, the twelfth (still behind on the blogging, sorry, guys), I took the train to Montpellier from Marseille to meet up with my relatives. My Aunt Linda, Uncle Ed, cousin Chris, and his girlfriend Stephanie have all been visiting my cousin Nick, who lives in Montpellier. The five of them have been traveling around France but were making a stop in the city for about three days, and I had arranged to meet up with them there.

We were all sitting at dinner when Chris asked me what my weirdest experience so far had been. After thinking about it for a few minutes, I realized I had a truly bizarre backpacking story; I was only surprised that I hadn't thought of it right away.

Things had started innocently enough. I'd been sitting in Sospel after my hike up Mount Agaisen. It was around two o'clock, I think, and the next train back to Nice would not arrive for nearly two hours.

I did, however, have a train schedule in my bag, and some investigating revealed that there was a train going in the opposite direction that would be by in about forty-five minutes. "Hmmm," I thought. "Now that's a possibility."

The truth is, I felt like I was not being nearly impulsive enough on this trip. Planning was, of course, necessary in order to see everything I wanted to see on a reasonable budget, but I felt like my tight schedule was keeping me from the quintessential backpacking experience of just hopping a train a going somewhere, anywhere. So I decided to be impulsive and hop a train. It wouldn't cost me anything extra, since the day's travel had already been covered by my rail pass.

I checked the guidebook pages I had stored on my ipad for some guidance as to where I should get off. The only relevant town mentioned was Saorge. "Saorge is the prettiest spot in the Roya Valley," the guidebook gushed. "Set in a natural amphitheater high over the river, its slate-roofed houses are tiered between narrow alleys in the style of a typical stacked village."

Sounds cute, I thought, and one of the train stops on the schedule was Fontan-Saorge. Awesome!

If only I'd thought! If only I'd known!

I took the train to Fontan-Saorge, looking forward to checking out some slate-roofed houses in a natural amphitheater. What I got was a barren wasteland...in a natural amphitheater.

Things seemed okay when I first stepped off the train. I mean, the conductor didn't do anything like ask, "Really? Are you SURE?" when I got off, and there were a bunch of other people disembarking as well, which would seem to imply that Fontan-Saorge was, at the very least, not an undesirable location. But once the train had pulled out of the station, things got REALLY different REALLY fast.

First of all, all the other passengers hightailed it to the parking lot, got into waiting cars, and cleared out of there as quickly as humanely possible, leaving me standing in the middle of the cracked, empty pavement all by myself. If we'd been in a cartoon there would have been a giant dust cloud that cleared to reveal me standing alone in the parking lot as some stray tumbleweeds drifted by.

Second, the train station was locked and empty. It looked as if no one had been inside in quite awhile. Weird, but not SO weird, since a lot of the smaller train stations are locked up most of the time.

But things got weirder. Now that I was by myself, could take full stock of the situation. The train station, unlike most French train stations, was not located in the middle of town or even on the outskirts of it. It was unceremoniously plunked down between two towns, and my only guidance was a signpost with two arrows, one pointing to Soarge, one pointing to Fontan. There was no mention of the distance to either.

I walked to the sign and looked around to get my bearings. To the left, the road went through an underpass built to accommodate the train tracks and then swerved around a corner, so I couldn't see anything beyond it. To the left, the road to Saorge entered what appeared to be a fairly long tunnel dug into the mountainside. I had no desire to be hit by a car while walking through a dark tunnel, so that narrowed down my options considerably.

And then: oh happy day! There was a hiking trail going up the mountain, away from the road. This seemed like a godsend, since I was starting to feel sort of uneasy and exposed standing alone on the road next to what appeared to be an abandoned train station. I set off up the path.

It was immediately clear that this trail was not nearly as well-traveled or maintained as the GR 52 in Sospel. It looked less like a hiking trail and more like a path that animals or errant hikers had created accidentally. Branches and thorns crisscrossed the pathway, which was overgrown with grass and weeds. I soldiered on anyway, despite my realization that this steep, pretty exposed path would be difficult to hike back down without falling on my butt.

Adding to the general Twilight Zone atmosphere was the natural amphitheater aspect of things. While it was kind of cool in theory, in practice the amphitheater meant that all the sounds from miles around felt like they were being bombarded straight at me. I kept thinking I was coming upon a waterfall or something, but it was really the sound of the river far below being projected into the mountains. The distant highway made it sound and feel like I was going to be run down by an eighteen-wheeler at any second.

I kept climbing until the path simultaneously entered a patch of woods and turned a corner. Suddenly, I was overwhelmed by a totally illogical, primal fear, like when you turn off the lights and you suddenly think, "What if there's someone lurking in here with me?!" Obviously, it's crazy and unfounded, but it's one of those feelings that's hard to ignore.

"What if there's a crazed mountain man behind that corner?!" I thought, freaking myself out even more than I already had. "What if there's a yeti (or whatever the Alpine equivalent of a yeti is), but instead of being shy and gentle it has an insatiable hunger for human flesh?!"

"That's stupid," said the logical, adult part of my brain. "There is no yeti or mountain man back there...but if it's all the same to you maybe just go with your gut and turn around anyway."

Even the LOGICAL, ADULT part of my brain was freaked out. This is what Fontan-Saorge has done to me!

I got back down the mountain more quickly than expected with the aid of a branch that I used as an impromptu walking stick, but when I got to the bottom I still had forty minutes before the train to Nice came to return me to civilization, where people hardly ever have to worry about yetis or mountain men.

So I walked up the road toward Saorge, past an abandoned basketball court and a deserted tennis court. A car stopped and the driver asked if I wanted a ride. "Non, merci," I said, heart hammering, before turning around and walking in the opposite direction, looking more and more like a mentally confused vagrant with every passing moment.

I walked through the underpass and around the corner and was treated to view of a town I assumed to be Fontan, which was just far enough down the road to make walking there pointless given how much longer I had before my train arrived. So I decided to just walk back to the train station and hope for the best. When I got there I saw three teenage girls sitting on the platform waiting as well, which made me feel ever-so-slightly more secure. I sat down on the next bench over. We waited.

Just when the feeling of having been dropped into some Twilight Zone-y parallel universe was beginning to abate, two skinny, mangy dogs came trotting up the train tracks, looking for food. They had collars with string leashes dangling off of them--but there was no sign of their owner. At all.

The scaredy-cat part of my brain and the logical adult part of my brain, for once in perfect agreement, clutched each other for dear life and cried, "Dear God, we're going to die in a post-apocalyptic wasteland surrounded by scavenging dogs and snotty French teenagers and probably a mountain man and a yeti! WHYYYYYYYY?!"

This anecdote has been pretty amusing when I re-tell it over dinner with my family or via Skype to my best friend, but let me assure you that it was pretty darn unsettling at the time. I mean, I could recognize the humor as I was experiencing it--the dog thing: really?! I couldn't have planned a better capper to the whole experience if I'd tried--but it's harder to appreciate the humor when every instinct in you is going, "Nope. Nope. Nuh-uh. I DO NOT LIKE THIS ONE BIT."

When I look back at the whole thing, it almost feels like a dream I had. You know what I mean, the sort of dream where everything sort of makes sense but seems really...off, and then once you wake up, you feel very strange and on edge?

Yeah, it felt like that. Thank God I woke up.