Too much champagne is conducive to all sorts of good things: colour, beauty, fascination…. But not to the kind of clarity that is required for reporting correctly and sequentially about a walk.. So herewith just some images to bring you up-to-date in a summary manner, since that rainy post, which is now nearly ten days and 200 kilometres ago.

Since that rain, we have walked in perfect weather – and how can weather be anything but perfect when it leads to a glass of champagne most afternoons? It is possible that the light takes on a special gentle glow after a half carafe of champagne (which I am forced to drink by myself in Chalon-en-Champagne as WB is a teetotaller) and there is a pot of gold at the end of the half-rainbow.

You have worked out by now that we are in, what most of us think of as, the Champagne Region. Officially, since 2016, it is part of the newly formed region of Grand Est, The average walker (and yours truly, Hurry Krishna, is so called, because she is definitely on the slow side) will probably spend 2 to 3 weeks in this region. At the point of writing this post, we are about two-thirds of our way through the Grand Est.

Some paths do leave you wondering whether long-distance hiking is a symptom of mental illness. But not here where Aisne, Marne and Aube rivers and their canals criss-cross your way. If you are like me, you will ignore the official route and spend three days walking along the tow-path of canals, some of it beautifully surfaced to serve as bicycle routes.

At times you are caught between the canal on one side and the river shimmering through the trees on the other, and there is no way an i-phone camera (or even the best wide angle lense, if I had one or knew how to use it) will capture the whole perfect picture that your eyes can see in just that moment and then slide to the ghostly grey buildings on the other bank, without loosing the bigger picture painted in every shade of green, blue and white.

Metres down the road, or may be the next day or the day after, or was it days in a row… white blossoms tumbled like cascades into the water below.

A single tiny bunch on a slender creeper climbing a tree provided a moment’s enchantment.

The canals behind us, and just past the lovely town of Outines with its rather unique church, we are back amongst farms: lentils and barley mostly.

The high winds are turning the sheaves of barley into a green and gold waves.

Just as you are getting a little bored with the swaying barley, an elegant shape dances into view, skimming over the feathery plants. The silhouette of a leaping deer in the early afternoon sun disappears before I can get my camera. It rises again – closer now but faster, surfs across our line of vision and is gone.

It is perfect. But ‘picture perfect’ is such a lie. The moment of fascinaton necessarily escapes reproduction.

NB: For any fellow Bengali reading this: of course, the trope of the running deer as figure of enchantment, to be chased but never contained, is so well-known to us from the Sonar Horin song, as to be almost a cliche. And perhaps the song made that kind of deer sighting especially exciting. But for the record, I did not conjure it out of the song in a champagne fuelled haze. I know this, because Walking Buddy saw it too!

This post is out of kilter for all sorts of reasons. I have failed to report on the whole business of moving from Hauts-de-France to the Champagne region. And there are relatively few photos to illustrate my rain-fed musings here as rain is not conducive to photo-taking.

No doubt any mention of Champagne raises expectations of a good life and favourite quotes like ‘Too much of anything is bad, but too much champagne is just right.’ (Variously attributed to Mark Twain and Scott Fitzgerald by Google – hope someone will tell me who, if any famous writer, did really say that or has it been manufactured by some Ad agency?)

But all that will have to wait. Because I suddenly find myself with a possible answer to THE question, the one that every long distance walker is asked by friends, family and well-wishers: WHY? Why do you do this?

9 May was wet – seriously wet in the Marne department of North-Eastern France. A small group of walkers, six to be precise, found shelter for the night in the one gite in Conde-sur-Marne. Others (at least two) walked nearly 40 kms to the bigger town Chalon en Champagne, and at least one resorted to wild camping in wild weather.

I staggered into our gite at 3 pm, with what seemed to be half the soil of the district clinging to my boots. Then gratefully collapsed in front of a wood-fire heater with a huge warm cup of coffee. Everyone had sodden boots. Some had achy knees. But every one of the six people would be out on the road again the next day, walking 20 kilometres or more. It was just the kind of night to pop the question: why?

I remember asking the same question at the end of a long and sweltering day on another long walk in France. The question always elicits interesting, and perhaps seasonally variable answers.

Some walkers currently hiking the VF have a clear purpose: a life-long unionist is walking to raise awareness about Palestine; two life-long friends are walking to raise funds for ovarian cancer care – both their mothers (and mine, too) died of the disease. Fantastic projects.

But there is something wider, bigger, less tangible, in all these contemporary footfalls along old routes – perhaps something poetic which may be gleaned without necessarily being entirely comprehensible, understood in the ordinary sense.

In the first ever published essay dedicated explicitly and entirely to ‘Walking’ (The Atlantic, 1862), the naturalist philosopher, Henry David Thoreau associated the pleasure of walking with the love of nature and explicitly eschewed ‘roads’, writing ‘I do not travel in them (roads) much, … , because I am not in a hurry to get to any tavern or grocery or livery-stable or depot to which they lead.’

For those of us walking the Via Francigena, there is no real distinction between walking in woods and walking to get somewhere – indeed we are in a sense always walking to the next tavern and grocery – along the way we might just get hours in the forests, or on river banks, or on roads of the kind that Thoreau dismissed as being designed for horses! And we are, of course, going vastly longer distances than those Thoreau saw rushing down the street for a beer, indeed mostly quite a bit longer than Thoreau’s own four-hour daily walk in the woods. I wonder too if this Grand Old Man of Walking ever walked in pouring rain and then got up in the morning and slipped his feet into soggy boots to set off again.

I have, doubtless, said in earlier posts, when things confound, Bengalis turn to Tagore. And this rainy day on which I am bogged down to a slow crawl just happens to be Tagore’s birthday, the 25th day of Baishakh on the Bengali calendar, which this year falls on 9 May. Tagore’s birthday is an occasion for mass cultural festivities and a public holiday, in both Indian West Bengal and Bangladesh.

Bengalis expect rain in the month of Baishakh – it is monsoon now all over Bengal and the time of the deadly ‘baishakh storms’, কাল বৈশাখী.

Long walks are often introspective. Lots of rainy days and drizzly songs play on my mind as I trudge, eyes strained on slippery ground. Somewhere along the way, a gust of wind fetches up these song lines of childhood.

আমাদের খেপিয়ে বেড়ায় যে কোথায় লুকিয়ে থাকে রে?।
ছুটল বেগে ফাগুন হাওয়া কোন্‌ খ্যাপামির নেশায় পাওয়া,
ঘূর্ণা হাওয়ায় ঘুরিয়ে দিল সূর্যতারাকে ॥
কোন্‌ খ্যাপামির তালে নাচে পাগল সাগর-নীর।
সেই তালে যে পা ফেলে যাই, রইতে নারি স্থির।
চল্‌ রে সোজা, ফেল্‌ রে বোঝা, রেখে দে তোর রাস্তা-খোঁজা,
চলার বেগে পায়ের তলায় রাস্তা জেগেছে ॥

In my inadequate English, it might go something like this:

Who goads us this way, hiding away?
Like the wind that blows where madness grows,
A whirlwind sends the sun and stars astray. Crazed rhythms set oceans dancing.
Our steps match the beat, we cannot stay still. Walk on ahead, let go the burden, forget about finding the street, Our strides awaken the way beneath the feet.

Of course, this is neither a logical nor a full explanation of why so many of us, from so many different places on earth are walking a thousand miles or more through inclement weather and variable terrain. And I am pretty sure that Tagore did not intend to explain long-distance hiking! But as I am sloshing through the mud, rain obscuring my view, I can sense the mad magic that is made by footfall on the path, any path, almost regardless of place and surroundings. And magic can’t be explained, it can only be felt.

‘But many men are falling / where you promised to stand guard’ Leonard Cohen.

As someone who came to adulthood in post-colonial India, I have never quite understood what ANZAC Day is all about. Those unfamiliar with things Australian might want to think of it as a national day, its origins embedded in the disastrous defeat of the allied forces, including a large Australian contingent, at the hands of the Ottoman army during the First World War (you can google for more – lots more, including recipes for lamb and biscuits and, no, I am not kidding.)

They say the ‘Camino provides’ – the path you walk gives you what you need, or perhaps what you deserve?

Unlike many Australians visiting France at this time, we did not consider the 25th of April in any special way in our planning. Quite unbidden, however, our path brings us to the edge of the largest French military cemetery, Notre Dame de Lorette, two days before ANZAC Day. This place holds the remains of tens of thousands of French soldiers.

From the Necropole Notre Dame de Lorette, a boulevard runs two kilometres, to our night’s destination in Souchez. Its wide footpath is posted with images of devastation wrought in this region by the First World War. On the way in and again on the way out of Souchez heading towards Arras, you can see allied flags fluttering on the horizon, including Australian and New Zealand ones marking the graveyards that dot the area through which we re walking.

On ANZAC eve, about half-way along our way to Arras, at Mont St. Elloi, we ran into Australians for the first time in 200 kms. They are driving around, and on their way to the ANZAC Day celebrations at Villers-Bretonneux – another place where young Australians fought and died a long way from their island home. In Arras, the very next day, we meet our second Aussie, sitting on a bench along the path that leads the walkers out of the city. He tells us he has just been to the ceremony at Villers-Bretonneux.

Far away from the battle fields, way down under in Australia, the war has always felt to me more like a tall tale: at best a myth to manufacture nationalism for a colony of white settlers, on an island, whose security is never seriously threatened by foreign powers scrapping over Europe.

But all across the north of France, the land is pock-marked with war. Some days we have counted more war memorials than people in the tiny settlements between farms.

In Arras, a historic town with its roots going back to the Iron Age, every significant building has been re-built after either the first or the second World War or both. Around its over-large cathedral, severely damaged in 1917 there are memorials to the many distant nations who sent men (yes, mostly men) to die for and rebuild France – even the Chinese.

I don’t know enough history to comprehend this. The Indian soldiers, I guess, were dragooned here by their British colonial masters, but what were the Chinese doing here so far from home? (Though not quite as far as the Australians!)

On our way from Arras to Bapaume, where a tiny shelter measures the distance to ‘Cant orbery’ we met Dominic, the volunteer whose job it is to maintain this part of the track. Through his broken English and my Walking Buddy’s fractured French, Dominic none-the-less worked out that we have come from Australia and insisted on showing us the ‘Australian trench’. To the untrained eye, the trench looks just like a hole in the bush. And in a sense, it really does not matter whether or not it really ever was a trench – it’s a story that connects, allows for a moment’s camaraderie, even where language has mostly failed.

In Bapaume, a minute’s walk from the VF stands a beautifully maintained Australian cemetery.

On ANZAC DAY, a fellow Aussie had left a message for his grandfather who died in the war.

India’s English rulers thankfully did not regard Bengalis as a martial race. So I have no direct experience of loosing someone important in a war. The ANZAC mythology continues to be no more meaningful to me than any other story of poor judgement and foreign military adventurism. But the common human condition of futile loss to wars is made concrete here in the acres of graves we have walked past and will continue to walk past in the next week or two.

If the Camino provides – perhaps in this instance, it provides me the opportunity to feel empathy, even if the meaning of it all still eludes my grasp.

For hiker, pilgrim, blogger Joanne who is on a ‘Bloody Long Walk’ through the war graves with her own questions.

In response to my last post, a wise reader suggested that one ought not to compare lovers. VF is your new companion, she said, ‘give it time, let it grow on you’ – something like that.

Armed with good advice and back on track in Wisques, we have averaged about 20 kms a day over the last 3 days to Bruay-la-Buissiere. No one claims that these sections of the VF in Northern France are especially handsome. But we met some wonderful fellow-walkers in Wisques and somehow time and season have fallen into place, making the days pleasant.

The path here passes through suburbs, manicured parklands, farms and patches of woodland. Spring has started garlanding the ground with sprays of yellow and white and sprinkles of blue and pink (too tiny for my camera) so that even the grey tarmac roads which are hard on your feet, are gentle on the eye. In the new holiday suburbs, it is the upstart tulips and trees grafted by human hands that demand attention.

My sharp-eyed companion has spied several rabbits, one hare and even I could see the three deers darting along a ridge above our path. A big bird, something like a pheasant, clattered right into us, surprising all involved,

For days now, the clouds have held sway over the sky. The sun is soft when it winks out for brief intervals. The wind is silent one day and playful the next. Dire predictions of rain and storm from my pessimistic weather app have not come to pass.

But it is not always pretty – what relationship is? Northern France was devastated by two world wars. Already I have seen more grave yards and war memorials than I can remember anywhere else.

In an area where coal was key to post-war recovery, the detritus of mining, closed down late last century, is part of the landscape. The tyre-churned boggy paths in the woodlands are tedious to walk through. And we have days, perhaps two weeks ahead of us, of walking on sealed roads, designed for cars, not foot-fall.

So yes, I am still apprehensive. But in the parks and the less curated woods, spring is in the air and bird-calls compete with, and occasionally drown out the sound of electric saws on one side and cars on the other.

With a little help from good weather, the VF has been a considerate companion, showing us bits of modern rural France, that are rarely captured through car windows, and never found on must-do tourist lists.

So for the moment we are staying the course with all the hopes and fears of travellers on a road less travelled.

If this was an academic essay, I would start thus: there is so much inefficiency in the bipedal mode of transport in the modern era, that the author now believes walking to be a fool’s errand! But doubts are part of the course on any long journey, so let me start at the start.

In France the Via Francigena starts at Notre Dame in the centre of the port city of Calais. From here you walk towards the coast, across the canal, then ramble through a bit of suburbia to a concrete promenade which hovers over the beach following the coast line pretty much all the way to Wissant.

The coastal route GR 120, with its startling views of the ‘white cliffs of Dover’ across the channel on a clear day, is as comfortable as hiking gets – flat and with photo opportunities galore.

GR 145, which cuts back from the coast line, before re-joining it at the Dover Patrol Monument, is slightly longer and a tad uphill. So I grumble when my meticulous Walking Buddy insists on taking the official VF. Doesn’t he know all roads lead to Rome? On the other hand, this venture is all about the road, and not at all about Rome, I am eventually forced to concede.

Despite that small Hill Difficulty (which I mention only to show off my familiarity with the English classic Pilgrim’s Progress and not to impugn my Walking Buddy, who happens to belong to a certain Hill clan), the day is as good as walking gets, easy and beautiful.

Wissant is a lovely little sea-side resort, with a Friday night market in the village square, selling local produce. Someone has decked out the church with the little white blossoms we have been admiring along the way.

The walk into Wissant, and even more the way out of it to Guines, is marked with remnants of war, both medieval and modern, some memorialised officially and others turned into sites for protest.

Day 2, the walk to Guines, starts with the anticipation of meeting Micheline at Mont du Couple, making real a Facebook virtual friendship. The track is uninspiring, but not unpleasant.

At Landrethun-le-Nord, after farewelling Micheline, we go against her advice and the official VF to follow an alternative map which seems to be more direct, though with some sections on a D road. Our final 4 kms into Guines, turn out to be on the edges of a highway with cars screaming past every minute.

Perhaps there is a benefit in the getting of self-knowledge: I HATE walking where cars abound but I never again wish to pay with my fragile sanity for confirmation of this knowledge😑

Information from other pilgrims that the official VF path into Guines is uninspiring only adds to my anxiety. Just four days into the walk, the VF is wearying, different, alien. It’s not like the South West Coast Path in UK, which I remember as exciting and challenging. Unlike the Camino, the folks in track towns don’t cheer the walkers on. So what will keep me walking this road, I wonder.

We decide to go off the track for a couple of days to Saint-Omer, to see one of Europe’s oldest libraries. A free bus takes us back to Calais in 35 minutes – the distance that we covered on foot in two days, and which cost us two nights of accommodation and food. Then a half hour in the train and we are in Saint-Omer.

Walking seems completely illogical in a place where transport is easy, cheap and even from an environmental point of view, the marginal cost in greenhouse gas-generating fuel per passenger, is negligible.

Saint-Omer is a sweet old town, with gourmet eateries and historic monuments. It would be so easy to stay for a bit, then move to some place where curated tourist fodder is more readily at hand.

But for now, we are committed to getting back on track tomorrow, a very short walk into Wisques will bring us back to the Via Francigena.

When in doubt the Believers turn to God. For Bengalis there is always রবি ঠাকুর (Tagore to the rest of the world, but almost a deity to us).

“ওগো পায়ে চলার পথ, অনেক কালের অনেক কথাকে তোমার ধূলিবন্ধনে বেঁধে নীরব করে রেখো না। আমি তোমার ধুলোয় কান পেতে আছি, আমাকে কানে কানে বলো।” ‘Dear walking path, all the stories you have gathered through the ages, don’t keep them quietly secured in your dust cover. I have my ears pressed to your dust, whisper them to me.’

Let’s start with weather: in a word… English…

No. Let us start by counting our blessings. First, conveniently for those hikers who are built for comfort rather than speed, the walk from Canterbury to the coast is easily broken into two bite-sized pieces, about 17 kilometres to Shepherdswell, and a similar distance into Dover. And my prescient Walking Buddy had booked us into the only available accommodation in Shepherdswell.

Secondly, almost miraculously, we had barely taken two hesitant steps into our first day’s walk when we ran into four other walkers, two of them headed, like us, as far as they can get, in the time permitted on their visas!

So, for most of Day 1, we walked as a group of seven, including three doctors – very reassuring in case one slipped in the despondent slough and broke a leg or something! By the end of the first hour we had forgotten the rain and were chatting like old friends, finding common ground and even common friends in unexpected places.

The world is getting smaller, and perhaps the VF is no longer such a lonely walk as most of the books and blogs of yesteryears suggest.

From Canterbury, the VF is well sign-posted, if you can ignore the persistent indeterminacy of the road’s length. St.Augustine’s Abbey, just a few hundred meters from Canterbury Cathedral calculates the distance as 1800 kilometres.

A kilometre or so further along the road at St. Martin’s church, the distance has increased by a whole 100 kilometres!

Mileposts on the walk from Shepherdswell to Dover are also anarchic, showing ‘3 miles to Dover’ at three successive cross-roads a kilometre or two apart. An American day-walker overtaking us at the third 3-mile post, caught the dismay on my face and helpfully suggestd: ‘Three miles thrice? Oh, that just means not-long-to-go-now.’

Outside of the towns the path winds through farms and forests, sodden, squelchy and muddy, sometimes completely obscured, except for a distant fence that somehow manages to guide your steps to the next turn.

The weather made me think about difference between day walks and long distance hiking. Had I been planning for a little day ramble on Easter Monday, I would have consulted my weather app, stayed home and eaten the remaining Easter eggs.

It rained pretty much non-stop for the first three hours of our first day’s walk while gusty winds played havoc with ponchos and hats. But when you walk day after day, week after week, and indeed on the VF, month after month, you can’t really expect sunshine and clear skies and temperature regulated precisely to your walking preferences, every day. In the time it takes to walk 2000 kms, the seasons turn over, you move from the coast to the snowy mountains. Once the course is set, you walk whatever the season or the terrain. And if you have good company to distract you with lively conversation, that is what you remember rather than the muddy boots and dung-splattered pants.

Just for the record: the sun was shining on Day 2, making for a pleasant, mostly uneventful walk into Dover, made memorable by the company of fellow-travellers.

Canterbury has been a premier tourist destination since the middle ages: at its heart one of the most ancient and venerated cathedrals bearing witness to 1500 years of history and mythology of spectacular crimes and redemptions, miracles, arsons, blazes and international diplomacy. (But you have read Murder in the Cathedral, and seen Peter O’Toole and Richard Burton play out the drama between King Henry II and Archbishop Thomas Becket on the big screen). The surrounding town still hosts medieval inns where Chaucer’s somewhat unholy pilgrims would have been entirely at home!

In a place screaming with religious and literary allusions, the official trailhead to Via Francigena (VF) is a modest concrete tablet – located beside the path between the two main entrances to the cathedral.

Nor is it easy to find Sigeric the Serious (my first pilgrim vow is to eschew bad jokes about His Seriousness) whose itinerary from Rome back to Canterbury in 990, forms the basis of the contemporary Via Francigena. Eventually my sharp-eyed Walking Buddy finds him on a wall, amongst the complete list of Canterbury Archbishops – along with 104 others, from the year 594 to the current Primate. (It is hard to get attention when you are competing with successors like Becket, who got his head bashed in by knights, and Cranmer who was burnt at the stake.)

Apparently, travelling to Rome from England was not unusual in Sigeric’s time. Roads to Rome, it seems, were full of English pilgrims and those who robbed them. Four decades earlier, Archbishop Aelfsige (he is also on the list above) had set off to collect his pallium from the Pope and quite literally came to a dead end in the icy Alps in the winter of the year 959.

Sigeric, by contrast, travelled in mid-summer – and with luck and weather on his side, lived to tell the tale. He (or a minion) wrote down his itinerary: a list of the places he passed and possibly stopped for the night. By a further stroke of good luck, the record, which to the untrained eye looks like two pages of scribbles, survived, so that a thousand years later, historians, scientists and tourism promoters were able to re-imagine a 2000 kilometre path, and re-make the Via Francigena, the road through France, into something of an emerging ‘destination’, modelled on Camino Santiago.

But on contemporary maps, at any rate, VF is not so much one road as a general direction heading from Canterbury to Rome, more or less in a straight line. Not only can you connect the sections of Sigeric’s diary via several different paths, there are options to take off on other ancient roads, perhaps not taken by Sigeric, but frequented by other pilgrims, past and present.

Facebook (now the source of all knowledge, of course) tells me that over this Easter weekend, there are pilgrims, tourists and philanthropists starting their VF walk not only from Canterbury, but also from Winchester (further to the north), and Calais (across the water in France). And one could easily set off from some seedy old pub near London Bridge, following in the footsteps of Chaucer’s pilgrims. All of these, and many more villages and towns are equally valid trailheads for this road to Rome.

Despite the straight and narrow Roman roads and Sigeric’s notes and all the hundreds of books and charts and maps that have been laid upon each other over many centuries, there seems still to be a kind of fluidity to this path: there are no precise answers to the question ‘how long is the Via Francigena’ – 1700 kilometres? May be even 2300 kilometres. Somewhere along that long and shifting line you can make your own beginning and end and determine the turns you make.

For those like me, brought up within a Bengali Hindu sensibility, this malleability of the path gives comfort. The most quoted line from our most famous mystic Ramakrishna Paramahamsa is this: যত মত ততো পথ – there are but as many roads as you can see.

We have located our trailhead. And we have set an end point – the Great St. Bernard’s Pass. In between, we have the footfalls of those who have gone before to guide us. As in life, so on this long walk, even with digital maps and GPS guidance and all the other technological determinations, there will be choices to make and mistakes and missed steps, the fear of getting lost and falling and the excitement of finding the road again. All that is still ahead of us!