Tuesday 12/7/2011 44km dep. 11:45AM arr. 5:30PM
Our latest start yet, it was almost midday before we rolled out of camping. Disgraceful, I know! The fatigue is starting to set in.
Luckily for us we didn’t have far to go on this day. We couldn’t leave Lourdes without having a good look around, so we made a trip to the Grotto, as well as the more recently constructed cathedral, various crypts, chapel of reconciliation and font of holy water.
Lourdes is a very interesting place, at once a tourist destination and a spiritual sanctuary. Everywhere people are walking around taking pictures and generally behaving like tourists, but among them are also those who have come earnestly seeking deliverance or healing.
St. Bernadette’s Cathedral
It used to be an ordinary town in the Pyrenees until 1858, when a young girl named Bernadette received a visitation from the Virgin Mary while on a wood-collecting expedition. She went on to live a very pious life, making a pilgrimage of her own and dedicating all her time in service of the sick and the poor. She was later canonised as a saint, and is the namesake of little Catholic girls all over the world.
Since then Lourdes has exploded, with pilgrims pouring in from everywhere in search of spiritual fulfilment. There are sick people all over the place, and the town has a disproportionate number of hospitals for its size. An enormous cathedral, resplendent with gold-embellished mosaics, has been constructed alongside the original grotto that Bernadette herself worshipped at, and some of her remains (the rest lie in a convent elsewhere in France) have been consecrated for visitors to pay homage to. There is even a special prayer written to say over her remains.
20th Century Mosaics in St. Bernadette’s Cathedral
Of course, the tourist trade has increased along with the volume of pilgrims, and you can’t go anywhere in the town centre without tripping over a souvenir shop selling special rosary beads, photos of St Bernadette and small vessels to store your holy water in. Even the Swarovski outlet on the main street features crystal rosary beads.
Souvenirs for sale
I’m not sure what to make of it all myself. It seems like a bit of a circus, and being the location of a miracle must be the equivalent of getting tenure for a town. At the same time, it is such a special place for so many people and that’s important too.
And what about us? Well the entrance to the cathedral was free and the overall experience well worth some sort of contribution from a tourist perspective at the very least. So we shelled out a euro for a little glass vessel and obtained our own supply of holy water. It did seem to take the sting out of one of my march fly bites so who knows…
From Lourdes, it was just over 40km to where we camped for the night, as we decided to cut off a corner and not visit Tarbes. There were quite a few hills, but 300m doesn’t seem so high anymore for some reason. We rode through a little town called Campan, that recently held a festival. There were life-sized cloth dolls all over the town arranged in tableaus of everyday activities - sitting down having a coffee, waving from a window, working in the fields, etc. It was hard to know who was real and who wasn’t and the overall impression was a little creepy. I got the feeling that they were just biding their time and would wake to wreak some sort of havoc over the town, but that’s just my overactive imagination and the legacy of too many Goosebumps books as a child talking.
Mariolles
We stopped at a camping on the way up to Col du Tourmalet in preparation for the race to come through in two day’s time. We ate our tea in the tent as it had started to rain. An impressive thunderstorm ensued, there is nothing like the sound of a clap of thunder rolling around the valley. The lightning was also pretty spectacular, even inside our tent it lit up everything.
The rain continued unabated all night and the next morning, nixing our plans to ride up one of the nearby cols unloaded. We instead lazed around all morning before making a dash to the nearby town and holing up in the pub with our hot drinks catching up on blogs.