Kayaking on the Gorge de Verdon

It was nearly 100 degrees Fahrenheit when we visited the Gorge de Verdon, so kayaking was on the agenda as one way to escape the heat.  We ended up kayaking twice, and also doing a hike down along the river.  Here's a preview for the benefit of certain social media sites that automatically grab the first picture in the post to show on their site.

We showed up around 10 AM one morning to rent a kayak at Lake Saint Croix, which is formed from a damn of the Verdon river coming out of the gorge.  When we got there, we found out that most everyone who goes to Verdon does the exact trip we wanted to do.  This was the line to rent any type of water conveyance.  After waiting in line for 45 minutes or so, the line stopped - there were no boats left!  So, then the line went really slowly because we had to wait for people to return boats.  Luckily, they have a two-hour maximum rental, so people started returning boats pretty soon after. The gorge starts just past the bridge seen at the left of the photo.

So, we had to wait.  The line was no shorter by the time we got our kayak.

This was the most crowded kayaking we've ever done.  It doesn't help that everyone is going up the same, narrow gorge together.  The walls of the gorge were leaning away from the river at this point, so the scenery was not that dramatic.  Here's what it looked like at the far end of the kayaking, where they had a rope across the river with signs saying go no further.

Since it was so hot, we really wanted to kayak another day.  Jennifer found us another place to go kayaking.  It was an hour drive from the popular part of the lake, but we both liked it a lot better.  One nice part about it is that there was no wait at all.  It wasn't much less crowded, and the scenery was not as good at the beginning of this trip.  But the scenery was a lot better at the far end of this trip.  For scale, notice the bright yellow kayak in the center bottom of this one.

This was cool.  There was water streaming down through these plants and moss and dripping into the river here. The moss was a lush deep green.  The sound of the dripping water was soothing. 

My favorite spot was a cave just big enough to kayak into, with water dripping from the outer rim down into the river.  It was a little like going behind a curtain of water.

We only had this spot to ourselves for a minute or so.  Lots of other kayakers had been there just before, and then more showed up.  But it was really cool for that brief moment to get to be there with no one else around.

We also did the Styx hike, which goes along the riverbanks for a long while.  It was cloudy that day, with a little soft rain every once in a while.  There weren't many people there, so we were alone on the trail most of the time, with others passing by every once in a while.  The riverbed was full of massive white boulders fringed with dark green moss and lichen.  The river water was just as aquamarine here as it was everywhere else.

We stopped to eat our lunch at this spot.  The water was really clear.  This was one of the larger, calmer pools along the way.  This fish, about a foot long, gray with dark spots, swam back and forth lazily in front of us as we ate our bread, cheese, and prosciutto lunch seated on a nearby rock.

This was taken from a footbridge, high over the river.  The bridge was pretty shaky.  Some people jumped around to make it sway when they walked on it. 

The gray and orange walls of the canyon, bright green trees, white rocks, and aquamarine river water made the whole hike really enjoyable, even if we did get a little rain.  

This was the second article on our hot August road trip across southern France and into the Pyrenees. The first article was on the famous 9.3-mile Martel hike.  The next article is about all the cool stuff we saw on the drive between Gorge de Verdon and the Cirque de Gavarnie, in the Pyrenees, on the border with Spain.