The beach is about 500 metres away, but a stiff climb over the dunes. From the top - westwards there is nothing but the emptiness of the ocean, pale grey today under a steely sky. Turn east and you find a sea of green, the vast pine forests of the Aquataine littoral spreading out as far as the eye can see.
How big is the forest, I wondered? Google came up with an area of 10,000 square kilometres. It's difficult to envisage this without resorting to spurious comparisons - slightly smaller than Yorkshire, half the size of Wales, four times the size of Luxembourg, so big you could fit six cities the size of London into it. On a world wide scale that's not enormous compared to the Amazon or central African rainforests, but what makes this forest so remarkable is it entirely the product of human intervention, there is nothing wild about it whatsoever. Created in the latter years of the nineteenth century it must count as one of humanities biggest feats of geo-engineering.
We are staying on Cap Ferret, the narrow Peninsula that separates the big Bassin d'Arcachon from the Atlantic. It's the only inlet on the ruler straight coastline between the mouth of the Gironde and Bayonne.
Cap Ferret is hardly undeveloped, but the tourism is low-rise and consists mainly of chalet style villas among the trees. One of the reasons we are here is that the forest has hundreds of kilometres of cycle trails most of them well surfaced and clearly signposted. We agreed that after the wet Spring in Derbyshire where we had not been on our bikes at all we would take it easy - some short gentle pedalling to get our cycling legs back.
The strategy failed completely. On the first morning we planned a trip of a couple of kilometres towards the Bassin's shoreline. It proved slightly difficult to get down to the waterside, the shore is often inaccessible, hidden behind private villas or lined by oyster beds that are fenced off.
So we decided to cycle along the tracks through the forest up to the lighthouse at the end of the promentary. It too was hidden behind locked gates.
There was a public beach nearby. From it you got a great view of the Dune de Pilat that rises up above
the south shore of the bassin. At 106m it is the tallest sand dune in Europe.
After lunch we explored the cycle tracks to the north of the campsite. You might think that a route through a giant pine forest might be monotonous. It's true, the tracks do wend their way through seemingly endless plantations of fir trees, but they cover old dunes so the ground undulates. Moreover, the pines are are not set in serried rows and have been under-planted with shiny leafed evergreen shrubs.
So it's peaceful and calming to cycle through the forest, occasionally glimpsing a sunlit glade, especially as there are so many tracks to choose from they're uncrowded. Solitude comes in short supply these days, it's easy to forget just how sustaining a simple bit of peace and quiet can be.
Next day, a repeat of yesterday, with the added pleasure of discovering a really good boulangerie about a kilometres away, again down a lovely track through the forest towards the bassin at Piraillian.
Another simple delight - Camping le Truc Vert was full of small birds sparrows, green finches and Chaffinches. They all had worked out that the humans camping in the forest provided a ready food supply. The sparrows and green finches arrived every time we ate outside, but they were wary kept their distance. Not so the chaffinches, they were fearless, hovering momentarily like hummingbirds beside our table seemingly signalling 'look at me, I need food!'
When this did not produce the desired result our new feathered friend simply landed on the table to help himself. There is a thin line between 'very cute' and 'bloody annoying'.
So, we will recall our few days camping here in the forest with fondness. It's pleasing when a place proves unexpectedly lovely. However, all this loveliness came at a cost. When Gill checked Google Fit it noted we had cycled 68km in the last two days. I ache more or less everywhere.
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