I spent the last few days in a french city named Clermont-Ferrand. Never heard of it?… neither had I. It is not exactly one of the better known french cities like Paris, Lyon, or Nice. However it is quite a large city in the middle/southern part of the country and the capital of the Auvergne region. To be quite honest I chose it because I needed a place to hang out for a few days before joining my host family in Montpellier and of all the cities on my way down from paris it had the cheapest hostels. My research looked a lot like this…. cheap hostels ok, where is this place – on the way – DONE. So I really didn’t have too high expectations.
It was an interesting city but it was definitely a bigger city. You had to really find the city center to find the typical touristy streets and attractions and even then there were lots of blah blocks. I also could not seem to navigate the city for the life of me which usually I am pretty good at. I am going to blame that on jet lag but I definitely walked 20 minutes in the completely wrong direction at one point before realizing it. However the church was really cool. It was the centerpiece of the town as is the case for most European cities I think. What made this church interesting and different than most of the ones I’ve seen in France and other countries was that it was made out of volcanic rock so it was very dark and ominous but beautiful none the less.
What I really enjoyed was hiking the Puy de Dome. It is the largest volcanic mountain (1415 meters) in a range of impressive volcanoes that surround the nearby cities. I took a shuttle to the base and got my bearings with the map – seemed simple enough as there were only two routes to the top. I decided to play it safe and stalled until I saw two ladies go up the path so i could follow them. It ended up being a good decision as the trail was very poorly marked and the one time I tried to walk ahead when they stopped to “aller au pee pee” as they put it in dumb tourist french, I turned the wrong way and totally would have gotten lost. They had to be at least late 60’s maybe early 70’s but looked like they frequently rocked this hike with their walking poles. I had some serious flash backs to getting passed by little old ladies on the grouse grind. However I hope I was more appropriately dressed than the tourists who try to take on that climb with short jean shorts and flip flops. After about 2 hours we made it to the top and the gorgeous views of the surrounding areas and the volcanoes were well worth the hike. Plus afterwards I stopped and relaxed for a couple hours in some geothermal spas so can’t complain.
The top of the Puy de Dome - to the right the Ruins of the Roman Temple for the God Mercury
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