The VF track in Switzerland has an awesome reputation as both beautiful and challenging, particularly once it starts climbing into the mountains towards the pass that for millenia has taken travellers into Italy.

But the tiny 14 kilometres between Martigny and Sembrancher has a more wicked reputation, as the scariest section of the entire 2000 km road from Canterbury to Rome.

Even the elevation profile on the official VF app looks wicked, as if it were giving you the finger! For the record, that finger turned out to be about 125 metres up and 100 down all in the space of less than a kilometre! Imagine climbing on step ladders angled up the face of a 28 storey building and down the other side the same way but the ladders are all rickety and higgledy-piggledy! Get the picture?

Some experienced long-distance walkers will even advise that, if in a hurry, you should opt for a quick and safe train trip into Sembrancher, before continuing the walk further up-hill to Orsieres and beyond. (In my vew it is never good to be in a hurry on a walk.)

The Swiss Alps do look a bit edgy from most angles, whether it is the serrated peaks in the distance or closer at hand when they rise like something Obelix might have hurled at Roman soldiers. (If you do not know who Obelix is, drop everything and find some Asterix comics)

So somewhere on a walk that crosses the Alps you would expect something a little edgy, a little sharp – right? On the other hand, WB really does not like heights, so I have been quiet on the matter and he, shall we say, is facing his fears bravely.

Not that you have many options once you have set off on this section.

Most of the track is a narrow escarpment, so slanted that your two feet are almost never on the same plain. The gradient is such that your ankle is always at some weird angle and more often than not, the top-soil moves with your feet. So you slither and slide rather than stride. This is not so much a constructed track as a path yielded by the mountain in response to the footfall of humans (and animals), perhaps over a very long time.

But just when you think this really is a bit dangerous two young trail runners ‘bonne journee’ past at a speed that would put a mountain goat to shame. Reassuring, really.

There are signs of rock falls, recent and old, all along the way. About 5 kilometres before Sembrancher, we seem to lose the track completely – it simply runs into a pile of rubble and disappears! And all day the VF apps have been undependable as connectivity is minimal in the crags of the hills where we are walking.

Having nowhere else to go, we crawl slowly up the rubble. About 30 metres up, phew…WB spots a small cairn – something which walkers around the world read as a trail marker. A hiker (or hikers) ahead left a mark for us to follow. We add a couple of stones to the pile making it a little more visible to those who might come later, then tumble gratefully back onto the trail.

An hour earlier, when the track had (yet again) ducked out of sight and I was shaking my futile fists at the app, a Spanish man came down the hill. He stopped to chat a bit about doing the Camino, and confidently pointed to the correct path. Then overtook me rapidly and disappeared.

Really, track angels seemed to be everywhere, whenever a little help was needed. Where the usual Swiss yellow marker was a bit thin on the ground, someone had thoughtfully scribbled an additional ‘GR145’, the sign we followed all the way through France.

In Bouvernier (a village in between two forest tracks) the bar proprietor insisted on giving us free drinks because she thought we were pilgrims and all my attempts to explain that we were just walkers failed to sway her. Minutes later, we were wondering how to get around a road-block when a young man emerged to provide clear directions in perfect English!

So, does the Martigny-Sembrancher trail deserve its scary reputation? Perhaps it does. But it also takes you through the most beautiful surroundings you can imagine. River Dranse plays hide-and-seek all day – sometimes just a soothing sound, sometimes a visible torrent. Tiny caves and hollows blow cool breath over your legs – like the air-conditioned cool that spills out of big shopping arcades.

Any time the impish trail allows you to take your eyes off your feet, the view near and far is magical, wowing all your senses.

Perhaps you wouldn’t want to walk this trail in rain and snow, or on a bad-knee day. But we set out on a mild summer dawn. Most of the walk was under a canopy of trees. You don’t feel the danger as the adrenalin carries you along the slippery or rocky or gravelly patches along a path that is a crazy erratic roller-coaster, soaring and and diving, tumbling and rising with a wicked glee.

You are on alert – because you have to be. And all your senses are engaged right here, right now, both because the surroundings are enchanting and, yes, also because walking on the edge of a hill on unstable ground, is just a tiny little bit risky. Enchantment and danger: surely, that is the very definition of a good time😉

From Mouthier Haute Pierre to Pontarlier, 23.75 kms. The first six kms of track is closed due to land-slides last year. It is the stretch of path that takes the walker to the source of La Loue river. Our Alpinist host in Mamirolle could not be more emphatic about the ‘must do’ magical nature of just this bit of the road. Closed? How can it be closed?

The day before, you have met La Loue in her full glory in Ornans. On this sunny day the water is a mirror and the pretty little houses on the river bank can’t stop basking in their own reflected glory. All the eateries sell trout from the river – fish fresh enough to warm any Bengali heart.

A brief and charming walk through tangled woods and manicured parklands along the river gets you to Mouthier Haute Pierre.

Looking down from Mouthier, a tiny village clinging to one side of the natural amphitheatre of the surrounding Jura range, the Loue below is a naughty ripple at the stony pit of the mountains.

In the background the argument with my law-abiding Walking Buddy persists – to take the closed track or not to take it. He has this entirely inconvenient trust in bureaucracies: ‘there must be a reason why the path is still closed’; ‘rules are there to protect us’; etc etc.

Evening in Mouthier, the Track Angel intervenes in the form of a young walker a day ahead. She has just walked through the closed path. Nothing more dangerous here than a few fallen trees, says the angel in her Facebook post. At breakfast next morning another walker says that she is going the closed route. Decision made: we are going to the source of the Loue after all.

Down from Mouthier, past the hydro-electric plant which diverts 10% of the river’s flow to support the needs of the nearby populations, the path curls up past the closure and route diversion signs. And almost immediately it is too beautiful for words – my words that is, but there are always poets you can turn to.

‘I came to far for beauty/ I left so much behind’, sings Leonard Cohen. He was chasing an elusive woman. But it works for the long road (almost 900 kms) we have walked to get here.

‘Nyamperin matahari dari satu sisi/ Memandang wajahmu dari segenap jurusan’, says Rendra. He was talking about an elusive woman too. But that is just right for the mountains, all around us and impossible to photograph from the narrow foothold taking us up the river to where it all begins, and begins again and again, all the time, constantly, incessantly…the mouth of a river.

‘ব্যক্ত হোক জীবনের জয়
ব্যক্ত হোক তোমামাঝে
অসীমের চিরবিস্ময়’ says Tagore. He was writing birthdays, his own in particular. But it works most perfectly at the birth of the river. Where better to ‘hail the victory of life…the constant wonder of eternity’?

Afterwards, there are the creature comforts of crepes and coffee at the cafe a few hundred metres up towards a carpark. Then a long climb through the pine forrest on the way to our night’s stop in Pontarlier is pleasant enough. Though it all seems a bit pedestrian after a morning’s exhilarating encounter with a river. Just a morning – gone so soon – but what a morning! You have to be grateful for legs, language and life.

For all the track angels.

Having farewelled my Drinking Buddy, Jacques (DB), in the picture-postcard town of Ornas, and having posted nothing (except for the gush over River Loue) for over two weeks, I confess that this is more a retrospective than a current story. We are now well into the Swiss part of VF, looking back on the final and most beautiful section in France, which passes through the two north-eastern departments (Haute-Saone and Doubs) of Franche-Comte, better known as Bourgogne (Burgundy).

DB (not to be confused with the non-drinking WB) regards tasting local wines and cheeses a national duty. He believes that right across France ‘young people are acquiring global bad taste from bad American television’ giving up fine local wines and setting off a vicious cycle: closure of village bars and shops, further reducing the attraction of rural living, leading to further falls in rural populations, reduction in demand for bars and so more closures, all in a downward spiral.

It seems the French government shares DB’s concerns and has announced special funding to attract tabacs and bars back to rural areas. In these circumstances, it would have been utterly rude as a pilgrim in this land not to help raise consumption of local produce.

If you are used to Australian distances, France is not a vast country. About 800 kms of hiking has taken us right across its north eastern border – from the ocean in Calais and Wissant, to the Jura Mountains in Bourgogne.

For a while the dead-flat windy plains with more giant windmills than trees seem unending.

It’s quite a relief for the leg and the soul to get to the rolling pastures and vineyards of Champagne and finally to the mountains of the Jurassic age in Bourgogne. Closer to the Swiss border the Alps will get higher, craggier. For now the mountain is modest, its peaks comfortably rounded.

The architecture of Bourgogne too, has a distinctive feel, with the shiny tiled church spires and the timber framed houses.

In Champagne as in Bourgogne, bars and cafes (when open, that is) seem always to include local wines and cheeses though much to WB’s consternation the ‘salon de the’ often serve no tea at all. In Bourgogne, washed by great river systems created by the Saone and the Doubs pouring in from the Jura mountains, you can dine on local trout. ‘Caught 7 kms down river,’ one proud proprietor tells us.

Because we live in a time when visual reproduction is literally child’s play, we tend to capture our experience in pictures. But a long walk engages all your senses.

Almost always you hear the river before you see it. On forest tracks, you hear the birds constantly, though they are visible only rarely and fleetingly. It is your ears that first pick up the buzz of the bee surrendering to a poppy, the first whisper of the breeze on a still morning, and the engine noise to alert you to the tractor approaching on a lonely farm track.

And then there are the things that the adverts about walking holidays and hiking blogs (including this one😊) rarely mention: smell of cow-dung which your nostrils have grown used to before you see a single cow on the paddock! Worse (or perhaps better this way) the unavoidable stench of a dead animal from which you hope to avert your eyes if at all possible.

But we are walking in spring and mostly the forests are fragrant with flowers. In Bourgogne, on the first day of summer we walked through our first old growth pine forest. It smells – well, shall we say piney? Part lime, part oil, a bit grassy and just very, very clean.

And what of touch, you ask? The splatter of mud on your calves is sticky, wet boots wrinkle your feet, stingy grasses irritate the skin as do the ticks, mosquito-bites, the tiny bugs that fly over head and assault your face…

But then, on a day when the heat has sucked up all your senses and drained your spirits, a sudden up-rush of breeze from the valley splashes your skin with the coolness of the stream you crossed hours ago. Ah… you had almost forgotten there is that lovely river way down in the valley below! In your tiredness you don’t recall its name, but you can still hear its murmur if you stop moving and listen.

Two hours of walking in the sun ahead of you: the cool breeze comes for just a minute and is swamped quickly by the surrounding heat. It feels like a fleeting memory – of the cool dawn earlier today, the spray of the water-fall days ago, and behind concrete memory of real things, the shadowy textures of whatever spells comfort for you.

These long walks, part urban, part historic, part wild, are nothing like a perfect tourist experience – some of it is not even pleasant! But they provide a sensory intensity not captured in pretty pictures. And even words are on shaky ground here!