Opening the door my nostrils are flooded with the warm sweet smell of the boulangerie, my stomach groans in anticipation. Content with a bag full of toasty pastries we pitch up on a bench outside and the pain au chocolats are swiftly devoured.
It’s late winter and a cosy sixteen degrees in the Côte d’Azur, the streets are empty and the promenade bare of tourists, almost eerie as we make our way past the closed shops and restaurants. After a short pedal out of town we are barely onto our first trail which before we are immediately rewarded with an incredible view from the cliff tops; we can’t help but stop and soak in the morning sun as the waves break on the beach below us and the Mediterranean stretches seemingly indefinitely over the horizon.
My two companions for the day were a couple of fruity Frenchies in Gaeten and Yannick. Gaeten or ‘baguette’ as I adopted him (thanks to his last name of Dupin) likes to think of himself as the next Sebastien Loeb, just in a Citroen van and not a rally car… I beg to differ! Yannick meanwhile, given a spare moment could mysteriously be seen swiping at his phone screen, he assured me it was candy crush but I wasn’t so sure.
With legs and lungs burning we climb surrounded by the yellow of the flowering mimosas until we are plunged into darkness briefly as we pass through a cold and damp tunnel, which is pleasantly refreshing for a Scotsman who has only seen the sun ten days in his life. Meanwhile Gaeten excitedly sprints ahead, wheeling and hopping randomly as he raves about the fresh cut downhill track he was taking us to.
Pulling up at a narrow break in the undergrowth I’m a little perplexed. “This is it?” I mutter… Laughing Gaeten shouts “oui!” catching us by surprise as he plunges into the trail. In a hurry to catch up I dive after him and quickly realise how wrong I was and how right he was! A steep roller-coaster of turns with the craziest dirt ever, it was like brown nectar and I couldn’t get enough. The stuff offered up bountiful buckets of grip and I was more than a little disappointed when we hurtled out of the dense shrubbery and onto the road where our vans were waiting.
After a game of tetris with bikes and surfboards we head to our next location of Gassin. which I was both excited and a little nervous about having seeing a ridiculously rapid head cam of Loic Bruni a few years ago. It’s fair to say I wouldn’t be troubling the same speeds as the world champ today. After passing the old Moulin de Paillas windmill, we arrive at the top of the Gassin track. I quickly discover my much beloved dirt from the morning had been replaced with rocks, and lots of them. We had barely driven twenty minutes and we were in a completely different setting and terrain, it’s not hard to see why the French dominate the results sheets.
Through loose turns, over jagged rocks and some sizeable jumps, we are not far from the bottom when there is the unmistakable sound of a rim and rock meeting and the subsequent hissing as air makes a break for freedom. Merde. We roll to the bottom, launch the bikes in the van, and head for the beach.
With the sun sinking lower into the sky we retrieve the boards from the back, pull on wet suits and march onto the golden sand. I am snatched from my daydream as the cool water of the Med surrounds my body and the sun sets over my shoulder.
Words & Photos: Ross Bell
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