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France - Day 11 : Walking instead of cycling.

We slept pretty well. We bought some bread in the campsite store before going to the village. That was about a 15-minute walk. The entire town only had roads with a 15% incline. At the local market, we followed Bram's principle of only taking right turns, which he claimed made sure we saw everything. Afterward, we went searching for a supermarket. We were confused by the roads the entire time we stayed in Cassis. We again bought way too much food before walking to a bay that was depicted on all postcards. It turned out to be an hour away, but we didn't have much else to do. In the bay, we first ate a small mountain of chocolate buns and baguettes and then took a lot of pictures.

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The water was really clear here

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Does this look like the postcard?
 

After taking pictures we turned back to the campsite. As we didn't have a working stove we had to find some dinner that didn't require cooking. First we smelled the fuel in the local supermarket as discreetly as possible to figure out if it was the right fuel for Bram's stove. We ended up making a sandwich with cucumber, tomato, mead, lettuce, and mayonnaise. We sat in front of our tent to eat everything when we discovered there were many ants. There was a nest close by. There were tiny ants that just ran around, medium ones that carried small breadcrumbs, and big ones, about one centimeter long, that carried larger things. Bram tried to eat an entire baguette at once, which meant a lot of extra spillings for the ants. We fed them the last bit of meat so that we could monitor how fast they ate in the morning. It was around seven o'clock when we finished eating. We had nothing to do but had been looking out over a large mountain the entire day.

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This rock was visible from everywhere in Cassis
 

Of course, we had to reach the summit. We started walking. It would be dark around 22:00, so we hoped to be back by then. After an hour we had only reached the base of the hill. We saw a small track that seemed to go up and followed it until we reached a steep cliff. There were lots of thorny bushes. I was walking in my slippers because I didn't want to damage my cycling shoes again. After an hour of bushwhacking and climbing on all fours, we were only a bit closer to the top. At one moment I left behind a good dose of H2S which led to some muscle fatigue for Bram. After struggling through even worse bushes we arrived at the crest of the hill, but were not yet at the highest point.

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The protruding rock from a distance

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It turned out there was an actual trail, which would have been a lot easier to follow.

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There turned out to be an actual trail, but the view was better after our hard climb

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The sun was setting

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At least Bram was wearing shoes

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We quickly ran over the path to take photos from the top before the sun went down. 

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It was about 150 meters high straight down

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A nice sunset

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The sun was almost gone

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When the sun was nearly set we walked back to the campsite, there we saw how steep the road was, thirty percent!

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It was too windy to take a decent picture

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It was dark when we finally made it back to the campsite. We had bought a bottle of whisky, as Bram wanted to try it. Near the Ventoux they only sold big bottles, but here they also had small ones. It didn't taste good, but that might have been because I was drinking from my plastic mug, which hadn't been cleaned in four days. Bram couldn't get it down at all. For every sip of whisky, he drank three of water. Eventually, I drank two-thirds of the bottle. We calculated that was about as much as 1.3 liters of beer. It was really windy at night so we didn't sleep well.

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