Tuesday, Lesperon-Dax
Although the hotel was not far from the main road, the room was on the other side, so was quiet with only birdsong to disturb the peace, so a good night.
I decided returning to the official route in the village was too much extra walking, so headed S along the tracks, rejoining the official route again past Taller - a very long short-cut. After leaving the main road, I saw no-one apart from one fellow in a lonely house who came out to see what his dog was barking at. Skies again cloudless, but route largely in shade of forest.
I had hoped there would be a bar or shop at the small village of Gourbera - there was a bar, but it was closed, in fact, looked the sort of place that only opened occasionally. After Gourbera, the route forks: I took the direct route rather than the longer one via St-Vincent-de-Paul. This continued through the forest, partly in sun, partly in shade, but by now the first slight inclines appear - can’t really call them hills, just slight humps, but no longer completely flat as in the real Landes. The Amis guide warns of a dog in one hamlet, but I had no problems with dogs.
The route into Dax is unfortunately cut off by the bypass and has to make a detour via the main road, which is pretty tedious, especially when the temperature is mounting to 30° as it was by now. The waymarking uses side streets to avoid the main road; unfortunately this does not pass any shops or bars until a small supermarket just before the church of St-Paul-les-Dax, so if you’re looking for this, as I was, sticking to the main road is probably the better bet. I raided the drinks cabinet in said supermarket and sat in the shade of the churchyard recovering my cool. While I was there, a cyclist, probably en route to Santiago, also arrived and left again, but he was a way from me and we did not speak.
The church has some fine romanesque carvings on the outside of the apse at the E end; it also has a massive tower at the W end, but the nave in the middle is a dull relatively modern construction. There is now a pilgrim refuge here, but I headed for the spa town of Dax on the other side of the river and took a hotel room there.
Dax is a hot-water spring developed since Roman times (Aquae Tarbellicae, from which the somewhat odd modern name comes), and is full of thermal hotels where people on cure lounge around in bathrobes. You can sample the water in the main fountain in the town centre, and it really is hot.
33km