|
Backpacking in France poses the nicest possible conundrum the backpacker will ever have: the decision where to go, along which trail and in which season, in a country that quite simply has it all. Get these questions right and your backpacking tour should look after itself, accommodation permitting. Get this wrong, and you'll be glad to get back home and feel reluctant to return in the future. Backpacking in France can be an all-year-round activity so long as you head south. So there's our first tip: head south and keep to the south of an imaginary line drawn east-west from just above Lyon - making sure not to exclude tha Alpine area around Chamonix. Having excluded the northern half of the Hexagon, we now need to focus in on precisely where to do our backpacking. This comes down to personal taste and, as the French say, "vous avez l'embarras du choix." Here are a few tips to guide you in the right direction:
Adventures in backpacking in France will be had by those who focus on enjoying what differenciates France from back home. You'll have to practise your French, however imperfect, but that's one of the key differentiators, isn't it? Such limited risk-taking is fun, along with the changes in culture and diet. So try searching for trails in these regions: Auvergne, Languedoc-Roussillon, LImousin, Midi-Pyrenees and Poitou-Charentes. Our final tip concerns when to do your France backpacking. For most of you that means during your holiday periods. These can be quite varied of course, involving the Christmas, Easter and Summer periods. If you backpack backhome in these periods, then you'll automatically benefit from Le Midi's better climate. However, if you do have the choice, think about it as if you were booking a table in your favourite restaurant for you and your partner: just as you would wish to avoid the weekend, you may also decide to steer clear of the High Season. This won't make youre backpacking any cheaper necessarily, because you are not interested in staying in chain hotels. However, it will make the places where you stay less crowded and thus more welcoming. 
Our backpacking tours in France engage you in full-day backpacking from hotel-to-hotel or inn-to-inn, along a mixture of long distance trails, regional tracks and local paths. We book your accommodation for you and include breakfast only, leaving you free to purchase your lunch and dinner according to your own budget and tastes. It's your choice whether you want us to include luggage transfers or not. Again it's a question of budget and personal choice, but it also depends on how much you can carry comfortably on your back and how light you can travel. Finally here, if you prefer camping, and plan to bring a tent, we can book you into relevant campsites along the way. Such information is not placed on the site here, so please ask us for details. The backpacking tours listed below have been selected to appeal to the backpacker who seeks the best of what makes France different. They are themed trails, and so provide added interest in the form of a contextualized learning experience that you bring to life en route with the assistance of our Walking Insight Notes™. All tours involve moderate [M] levels of physical exertion, with the exception of two: the Garrigues tour which we classify as being 'light' [L], and Walking Cèze Valley, whioch is moderately challenging [MC].
Whilst we have standardised our backpacking in France offers for presentational purposes, they are all tailorable to your needs and personal capacity. So do not hesitate to ask us about options for reducing or increasing the duration of these backpacking holidays to suit your own requirements. Our Backpacking France trips bring the following benefits…
 Return to our Home page. © Walking in Languedoc 2008 |