We’ve continued travelling in a clockwise direction to the south of Grenoble as there’s a specific walk we read about on the blog of some full-time motorhomers who travel all over Europe and the world. Our destination was Treffort, a small village on the edge of the Lac de Monteynard-Avignonet, an artificial reservoir for the Électricité de France power station on the river Drac. It is a 10km long sinuous lake and considered to be one of the best places for windsurfing and kitesurfing in Europe. We’ve already seen some new (well to us anyway) water sports when we were on the coast at Hyères but we were amazed to see, as we pulled up at our overnight stop by the lake, what appeared to be two ‘other worldly’ people gliding along on the surface of the water, as if walking on water. We realised they were actually standing on surfboards with electric powered foils that lifted them just above the water. We later found out that this sport is e-foiling and that there was a place where you could get lessons nearby.
This is a boat-friendly lake so Joe quickly had his ready and launched so that we could explore further along the lake. The lake is fed by the Drac and Ebron rivers and in 2007, with the help of helicopters, two impressive suspension bridges were built across the rivers. The bridge design was based on suspension bridges used in the Andes and Himalayas and hence the bridges, apparently unique in Europe, are known locally as passerelles himalayennes or Himalayan footbridges. We were able to get a first glimpse of one of the bridges as we passed underneath it in the boat, but only experienced the real splendour the next day when we did the walk.
In order to do a circular walk across the two bridges you need to take a boat across the lake, either at the start or end of the walk. The boats only started running on 1st May when EDF guarantee there will be sufficient water to navigate and present there is only one boat trip each way in the morning and another in the late afternoon but we assume they must run more frequently in high season – or have bigger boats.
The weather forecast hadn’t been great but we awoke to sunshine and blue skies with some clouds over the mountains and walked to the jetty to get the boat from Treffort to Savel on the opposite side of the lake, a 20 minute journey. On arrival at the jetty the 4km walk to the first bridge – Passerelle du Drac – is well signposted and we caught glimpses of it through the trees as we approached. These are no flimsy rope bridges, but much sturdier, built from high-tensile wire and with strengthening cables underneath to prevent too much movement. You do still feel some undulation when there are other people on the bridge and being able to see down through the metal grid walkways is certainly unnerving. The first bridge was 220 metres long and at a height over the river varying between 45 and 85 metres depending on the level of the water.
The walk continued steeply uphill for some distance through the woods that cover the hillside until we reached the Passerelle de l’Ebron, 180 metres long and the bridge we had seen from below in Joe’s boat the day before. The final part of the walk took us back along the lakeside to our starting point, the van and a drink! A great experience and definitely worth the slight detour to spend two lovely days here.
