Hello, I’m Freya. I am going into my second year of studying liberal arts with a major in French. This year I will be the Travel Editor for The Linguist, which I am super excited about.

I was lucky enough to travel for 6 months in South America before university, but I was with good friends the whole time. This summer, I decided to push myself and do some solo travelling in the Pyrenees and Basque region of France to improve my spoken French, meet interesting people, and have some new experiences.

For the first two weeks of this trip, I worked in a small hostel near Lourdes (a city in the foothills of the Hautes-Pyrénées). I was staying in a charming French village called Luz-Saint-Sauveur; full of mountain-lovers hiking the G-10, mountain biking, canyoning, river swimming, and exploring natural wonders like the Cirque de Gavarnie or the Pic du Midi.

I would work in the mornings and then, have the afternoons to hike, explore nearby villages, or go swimming in the river.

At the end of my first week, I, along with an American girl whom I met in the hostel, decided to do the Pic du Viscos hike, a 5-hour circuit with a 2100 metre summit giving panoramic views of the surrounding Hautes-Pyrenees.

We left around 3:00 pm in the afternoon and hitchhiked up to a ski station where the trail starts. The views from the station of the valley below were jaw-dropping, the villages of Grust, Viscos, and Sazos scattered below, paragliders hanging daintily over them like technicolour clouds.

The beginning of the hike was hard, winding up the mountain on a rocky track. It flattened out for a couple of miles and then got even steeper and rockier as the trail led up towards the Pic. After some very untechnical and sweaty scrambling, we made it to the top. From every direction, we were presented with truly breathtaking views. We sat in silence for around an hour, eating Lays crisps and taking it all in; a mistake because it had taken us 3 hours to hike up to the peak and so, by the time we had walked halfway back, sunset was fast approaching. We suddenly realised that the chance of getting a hitchhike from the ski station back down to the hostel was very unlikely (we hadn’t seen another soul in 5 hours and it would soon be completely dark).

We also had no signal, and the dreaded Hanger was really beginning to take hold of me. We needed to act. And act fast.

I decided that our best bet was to walk in the opposite direction towards a small shepherd’s hut (the only potential sign of life available to us).

Praying to the Pyrenees gods that a murdering shepherd didn’t live in it, I cautiously knocked on the door.

Relief flooded over a very sweaty, tired, and hungry Freya when the door squeaked open, revealing an old couple standing, holding hands, apparently more scared than I was, judging by the decision to come together to open the door.

After my rambling French description of our dire situation, the old gentleman kindly offered to drive us back down to Luz Saint Sauveur. He chatted non-stop to us in French the whole 30-minute journey down into the valley, telling us about his 10 grandchildren, his wife of 57 years, and his electric car (which, he felt important to add every few minutes, was French despite the SatNav originating from ‘le terre de Brexit’). So, we made it back to the hostel – ravenous and exhausted but giddy with excitement that everything had worked out.

The Pic du Viscos is an incredible hike and well worth the sweaty scramble up. There is a lot of beautiful nature to see along the way, and even blueberry bushes on the way down, which bear fruit in June. Plus, some really cute cows! But if you do happen to undertake this hike, I urge you to take lots of snacks (a family bag of Lays crisps may be an elite choice of scran but not the best for a 5-hour hike) and organise a lift back down to the town in advance!

Freya Coull