Creux du Van - September 2016

When I started this blog I promised myself to always keep up with my travels, write about all of them and not bring any of them forward. Well. Actually I'm quite far behind at the moment, but the next post in line is about a two weeks holiday and I'm just not done yet. So I decided to post about a little adventure here at home instead. Things I do around here are not really travels, right? So this exception is probably not too bad. Especially because this post is about a place I wanted to visit ever since I first heard of it: the Creux du Van.

Monsieur and me both love to go hiking in the mountains. Because I managed to damage my knee while swimming in the river this summer, we couldn't go for long hikes during the last few weeks, but my knee is fine again and the weather promised to be sunny and warm last weekend, so we decided to finally pack our rucksacks, put on our hiking boots and take a train to the beautiful Val de Travers. From where we live it's about 1.5h, so we took the chance to have breakfast on the train and be in Noiraigue, the starting point of our hike, at around 10:30 am.

There are several paths up to the top of the rock face, we took the "Sentier du Single" up and the "Sentier des quatorze contours" down. The path leads through a beautiful forest, 725 meters up. If you are absolutely not into hiking, you could actually drive your car up to the restaurant "Le Soliat", but it'd be a pity to miss the nice views through the trees. Hiking up and down again together takes about 4.5h - depends on how fit you are and also on the path itself, when we were there it was quite muddy and slippery in parts and you had to be very careful not to fall.

Technically, the Creux du Van is just a place where water and glacial erosion shaped the mountain for thousands of years. But they did a very good job. The result is a huge cirque, about 1400 m in diameter and 160 m deep. When I first saw it on photos, I didn't realize how big it really is. If you suffer from fear of heights, you should probably stay away from the edge, looking down gave me goosebumps even if I'm not in the least afraid of heights. Some people actually don't seem to feel unsafe crawling closer and closer to the edge and even climb down to small ledges just below it. I couldn't even watch them without shuddering. On a beautiful autumn saturday like this you probably shouldn't be surprised if you're not alone up there, but the Creux du Van seems to attract a lot of people who don't have much to do with hiking in the mountains on the other 364 days of the year.

When we were there, we saw two drones flying around the Creux du Van, filming. You can find several nice videos on YouTube, I think this one is especially impressive:

We enjoyed ourselves very much having lunch up on top and also liked the path back down to Noiraigue, although I still feel soreness in my calves today =) I'd love to go back to the Creux du Van one day and maybe see a sunset or sunrise...