Next our rental vehicle took us to the small town of Carhaix-Plouguer (Finistère), our home for the next three nights. We arrived early and had quite a long wait before we could check in at our Airbnb apartment. For some reason several hosts in this trip were quite inflexible with check-in times, so on several occasions we were forced to kill time until 4pm. or so with no plans what to do. Luckily this time we found a lovely vegetarian Korean restaurant where we had bibimbaps for lunch (more on that in a later post), and then the tourism office with a very helpful (and thorough) person.
Carhaix itself did not have much going on (except for a popular microbrewery, and nothing much there either, since we had to wait quite a while for someone willing to sell us beer to go — they did not have pub or tasting), but it was a convenient starting point to visit the Valley of the Saints, a curious historical site with sculptures representing monks that came from Ireland, Wales, and Cornwall to introduce Christianity to Bretagne. The project started 15 years ago, and currently there are 185 statues by different sculptors, sculpted from different varieties of local granite (I don’t remember how many colors or types there were, but it was many). Every year more standing rocks are sculpted into saints, so that in 50 years there will be 1000 of them! Here are pictures of some of statues we found the most interesting or just bizarre.
By the way, I don’t have a faintest idea why the place is called the VALLEY of the saints, since the statues are located on the slopes of a hill, or in the future will be dotting more widely the undulating landscape. One last thing: the air temperature was not cold, but the strong wind on the hill was brutal and made us freeze to the bone. Anyway, afterwards we had galettes — a forestier with mushrooms and saucisse with sausage — at a crêpe restaurant in the nearby town of Carnoët. That was the only galette or crêpe meal of the whole trip!
Back in Carhaix we found a brilliant exhibit about the amount — kilograms or pieces — of different categories of waste people generate either in the department (Finistère) or in the whole country in different functions or aspects of their daily lives, from toilet paper rolls to newspapers and magazines, food and drink packaging to shampoo and detergent bottles, from wine bottles and cigarette butts to general household waste. Fortunately in many communities now all or most packaging is recycled.
On our second day in Carhaix we visited the virtual archaeological interpretation center of Vorgium (a former Latin name of the town before it was named Carhaix). The center opened only in the afternoon, so we had a whole morning to idle at our apartment, and to pick up lunch from the nearby Vietnamese take-out place. At the center we could rent a tablet that we used to scan QR codes around the site (basically ruins or reconstructed ruins), point the tablet to them, and watch the virtual reality display of how the location looked like in the Roman times. Nice, small, and well implemented exhibit that did not exhaust us!
The next post (Part III) is about our hike in the mythical forest of Huelgoat.