I was told that the hiking routes there are not difficult. What I forgot was that I had asked a friend who does rock climbing regularly. I packed a few sandwiches, a lot of water (thank God!) and my point & shoot camera. There are multiple "entry" points to go the Calanques, Cassis and Marseilles being the most famous. Short history/ etymology trip: Calanque roughly translates to cove or creeks according to Google Translate. However, in the (original) local slang (or dialect, I'm not sure) it means death. Since the sea waves literally "die" when they hit against the mountain cliffs/walls, the word has come to mean what it does now.
For hiking, we were supposed to start from the point known as Devenson. The road from Cassis to Marseilles is called Route de la Gineste, and near the mountains, halfway between the cities, the pass is called Col de la Gineste. There is a big parking lot, so that hikers can park their cars before heading out. I was with some couchsurfers (CSers) and we joined a group of about 20 other CSers on this hike.
View Calanques De Marseille in a larger map
The group leader, Xavier, was also an experienced hiker, rock climber etc... you know, much better at the stuff than most of us. The area has many trails, and they are marked according to their difficulty. In increasing order of difficulty - green, yellow, red, black... black with two crosses & black with three crosses. To give you an idea (if you are from the Pune region of India), Sinhagad, Purandar, and those all hikes we go to are all Green.
We rarely stayed on the green.
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| The cliff we climbed down |
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| We came down the center |
What followed was an exciting, exhausting, terrifying, adrenaline filled hike. Quite a few times while climbing up, it was in your best interests to not look down. We climbed up a mountain, and then had to go down the almost-cliff-like face. There was a point where the trail vanished. It was a 2 feet wide trail, between the mountain face and the valley anyway. But what we saw was a chain bolted to the rock face. Also, there was a black coloured mark close by on the rocks - Three black crosses. Translated as: If you don't know why you are here, start praying to your favourite god. Atheists, good luck with that.
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| I was not on this leg of the hike, but I just wanted to set you up for the next few lines. (Photo taken from Delphine's camera) |
I chickened, I'm not rock climber and I had only expected green trails. I opted for the harness. It was scary, but I don't regret it. There are some unnerving pictures, if you go to the Picasa album from the links above. We had the sandwiches, sitting on the mountainside, looking at the sea. Most of the others went on the next leg of the hike, equally difficult and long. The few of us who decided to stay back fixed a location to meet with the rest. We rested for about an hour or so and then headed back.
We reached the meeting point (pic above) and waited for the others to come back. From here on, we took the easy green trails back. Everyone was exhausted. A short halt in Cassis to have some food & drink and then a two hour drive got us back.
About 30-40 minutes into the hike, I started this app on my phone (MyTracks) which recorded the GPS locations. The map above is a result of that. The app is really cool, it recorded the speed, distance, altitude and so on. We had an overall elevation change of 500 meters in the first half. I switched the thing off once we reached the lunch point.