This time, I am going to have a bit of a rant about how good a smartphone can be when you are travelling. For some time I resisted buying a smartphone, thinking my lovely slim little Nokia (very small, but very good for playing music) was the bee's knees. Finally I succumbed and bought a smartphone, and have certainly not regretted it. This year I have a Samsung Galaxy S3, not the latest phone, but pretty good all the same.
This is the list of applications that we use frequently...
- Camera - a phone in your pocket means you still have a camera for those shots you didn't expect to take, and for quick copies of shop hours, or town maps, or a wine label you want to remember.
- Gmail - most towns have one café where you can get free wifi and catch up with what's what.
- Contacts - all the names, numbers and addresses we need, all on hand.
- Google Translate - offline translation to and from as many languages as you load, always useful.
- Phone and Messaging - yes, modern phones can still do this.
- Google's My Tracks - maps the walks you do, and better still, you can load into it walks you want to do. As we've said, French track marking is not up to DoC standards, and being able to compare your current position with a track you have loaded into the phone is vital at times. More below...
- Google Maps - load it with offline street and road maps for where you are going. Great when you are in a town and need to find your way about, - the little blue dot is you!
- TripAdvisor - where's a good place to eat or stay? TripAdvisor will tell you.
- Google Drive (or DropBox or others) - Load a folder of useful documents on your PC, and it magically appears in the web and on your phone - great for scans of tickets, passports and whatever.
- Google Keep - sticky notes. We have ones for our shopping list, shop hours (a big issue in France), and places people tell us about in passing.
- News apps - Stuff, NZ Herald, Engadget - for whiling away time when you have a few minutes to spare.
- Kayak - all our bookings automatically appear in Kayak, great for keeping track of when you are due where. And you can book using it.
We've spent quite a bit of time this week helping a Perth couple set up the apartment they bought some months ago. They arrived last Sunday, finalised their house purchase on Monday, but Marie-Louise then got a nasty bug which laid her low for the next 3 days. I spent most of Wednesday out and about with Richard helping him get things sorted while Marie-Louise recovered. Thankfully she's come right now, and they are rapidly filling up their new village house with all the myriad things you need. We remember doing the same, but we had the luxury of time on our side.
Back to smartphones, we've been wanting to expand our repertoire of walks beyond Les Hauts de Céret and l'Ermitage de San Ferreol. The biggest problem is with getting lost. We've had several abortive walks where we've got partway in only to find the trails seem to disappear and we have had to backtrack. I did a bit of searching on the internet, and there are myriad sites where people have done walks and saved the GPS tracks to the internet. The best I have found is WikiLoc, and I downloaded a few of the 100s of potential walks and rides that looked promising. Pop the track on your phone and you can see exactly where you are on the trail, even a few metres out shows up well. This means you can head out knowing you will be able to find and complete the walk, something that has eluded us all too often.
On Thursday we had a superb walk up in the hills above Maureillas. We had a couple of booklets that told us how to get to the Dolmens of Suireda, but the track was all too briefly described. Having the track on the phone was a good move! The track went up into the hills, quite well-marked compared with many and we found our way up quite easily. A bit short of 2 hours later, we reached the dolmens - Bronze Age tombs consisting of heavy stone slab walls, with another over the top as a roof. Really quite special.
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We picnicked at the dolmens, then headed back down. The normal route was a simple loop, but the one I had downloaded let us go back via a different loop, following the irrigation canal that we suspect must start way up our valley, flow through Céret, then keep heading down north to the plains.
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We would have had no hope of following the trail without the GPS-based map on the phone, which was so accurate you could walk 5 steps and see that you were on the track, or off it. Walking beside the canal was just brilliant, and knowing now how to use these downloaded tracks opens up a whole new world of walks and rides for us.
Having enjoyed this walk so much, we went on another on Saturday. We'd been to Cap Bear in 2009, but the wind was so strong we could only just stand up. Much more pleasant this year, and we were able to enjoy the walk properly.
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| Fortifications on the Cape |
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| Nice little stone-built shelter |
We were on a roll with walks now, so found another for Tuesday, this time up our valley. One of the enjoyable things about walking here is that you have the added dimension of history. Almost every walk goes to, or passes by, some old or ancient structure. It's a good feeling knowing you are walking in the footsteps of thousands of farmers or pilgrims or soldiers from the past. The walk took us up above Arles-sur-Tech to a Vauban battery from 1670, to a restored 9thC chapel.
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| Looking over Arles-sur-Tech to Canigou, the revered mountain of the Catalans |
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| Lovely tracks |
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| It's well and truly autumn here |
The track led up through lovely rocks, then countless chestnut trees, no doubt deliberately planted centuries ago for the food they provide.
Up at the top is a Vauban-built battery from 1670 which saw action in the French-Spanish war of that period. The 360° views were just outstanding, it being a perfect clear autumn day. Next stop was the perfect little chapel looking back over the Roussillon Plain.
It was our best walk yet, but rather sad, as I lost Karen. The chestnut leaves just got deeper...
and deeper....
and finally Karen disappeared completely...
Hopefully she will find her way home sometime.
