“Take off your shoes,” says Alexia. It has been raining and mud oozes across a forest floor paved in pine needles, beech leaves and rocks. It doesn’t look inviting, but we are here to swim in the icy river rushing through the valley base and presumably need to acquaint ourselves with nature and the cold. So we cautiously tread on springy carpets of semi-rotted leaves and needles with mud squelching up through our toes.
Alexia’s cold-water toumo yoga is designed to train your head and breath to do something most minds scream “no” to. I assume there will be a special trick or that we’ll do such heavy-duty yoga beside the river that our spiking body heat will cry out for the cooling waters. But no. Apart from some warrior and sun-saluting poses, Alexia’s cool-prep yoga involves enabling me and my co-dipper to embrace the chilling bath by altering our perception and finding a fire within.
“Don’t fight the river,” she says. Somehow we are to relax beneath the biting water. “Do not tense,” she says, adding the encouraging words: “I have never had anyone fail to get in.” I wonder if I will be her first.
The fourth member of our party elects to be our photographer: aka a flat refusal to even try any immersion. As my feet enter the numbing rapids I try to talk my mind and body out of their rejection of the water. The other two women swan right in, compelling me to follow by making it seem all right. Soon we are up to our necks beneath a small waterfall and it all feels incongruously bearable. Alexia is singing now and asks us to join her: “It will tune us into each other, help the breathing and take your mind off the river.” This is one of those times in life when you view yourself from the outside, imagining onlookers smirking at “la, la hippies”, but it’s brilliant to be out on the edge.
We stay in for three minutes, one for each degree of water temperature, and emerge into a sun-warmed field to drink tea from a flask: “It will warm your insides.” Just in case it doesn’t do a thorough job we head to The Shed cafe in nearby Le Grand-Bornand – rebranded Grand Bo by the tourist office.
This village – with its 2,000 cows and 2,000 people at a nigh-on 2,000m altitude – is full of artisans keeping on tradition and up with the times. They include Edith and Patrick Martin who perpetuate the heritage of Savoyard pottery in their barn workshop and master saddler Didier Perrillat who produces leatherwork from one of the oldest chalets in town. Those human-matching cows – from 40 farms in Grand Bo – produce a third of France’s Reblochon cheese, which was invented in the region.
This is a year-round village, hosting skiers in winter and artisanals continuously. We experience the short Alp-to-fork supply chain everywhere, including at Chalet de Paccaly cafe, a 20-minute walk into the mountains from the nearest car park. Here lunch is strewn with wild flowers and herbs, including oregano and thyme, picked from around the restaurant. Hikers of all ages and fitness levels walk on by us throughout the meal, cow bells serenade us and the sun-warmed mountain sends up top notes of sweet grass and a base of earth with a hint of cow dung. If you need the loo you have to head into the nearby woods.
Down in the town of La Clusaz – a favourite with French skiers escaping the more touristy resorts – we eat trout smoked in hay at La Clusaz at L’Ecuelle restaurant from the nearby Thônes lake following a starter of local sheep’s milk and courgette.
Distiller Romain Gauthier also sources his ingredients from the mountains. He plants and picks genepi for the Genepi Berger liquor that his Aravis Distillery has been making since 1876.
“The alcohol really takes on the saveurs,” says Gauthier as he swirls a chunky wooden pole through a vat of genepi shoots steeping in alcohol. The plants will soak here for two weeks handing their flavour over to the hooch.
High on the sweet and intense flavours, we waft into the St Alban hotel to be warned that they have no air conditioning. “Saving the world, good,” I say. “I’m glad you understand,” says the woman at reception, following the trend for keeping things green and local. “If you would like a fan,” she continues, pausing for effect, “open the window”.
Already relaxed I am further jellied in the hotel spa by being massaged with plant-scented oils.
On a mountainside above Lake Annecy, Alex Laetitia Hespel knows all about adding plants to cosmetics. She has a special licence to pick wild flowers from high meadows, for use in her own home-made soaps and for beauty company Clarins, whose new-generation owners want to keep their plant ingredients as local as possible.
After we walk through the garden above her home, with its rows of aromatic plants, from lush mint and floppy echinacea to strong sage leaves, she hands me thick rubber gloves, an apron and goggles. I pour volatile caustic soda into water and let it settle before mixing in cocoa butter, olive oil and hypericum oil. The resulting chemical process produces soap and glycerine. Many supermarket soaps, she explains, take out the glycerine and sell it for moisturisers, but she leaves it in her soap to stop skin feeling dry after washing.
We swirl natural colours into the mix, tip the liquid soap into a loaf tin and top it with dried flowers, ready for slicing into bars once it’s set.
Plants are so revered here that in the Bout du Lac nature reserve near Doussard on Lake Annecy’s southern shore many have been untouched since 1975. As we walk we become so immersed in lofty plants my companion cries: “Look, you can see no people except those in the sky,” referring to the flocks of paragliders floating towards us from a rocky peak to a waterside landing pad.
From here you can can kayak past the reeds that filter pollutants from water and across to La Cuillère à Omble restaurant that has such confidence in its brilliant food, mostly hauled from the lake (from faru fish to the eponymous omble) that it has a vibrant but relaxed vibe.
If you want a swisher trip to lunch you can take a water taxi, as we did from Annecy town – where we had climbed to its hilltop chateau to appreciate the landscape, ambled up heaving medieval streets and crossed bridges to see buildings plunging Venice-like into the water.
On our last evening we practically eat in the lake, with a table right on the water’s edge at the Guinguette des Cassines, close to ducks and swans which glide beside us in the vague hope of leftovers.
You are always hard on nature in the Alps and, just as they have for centuries, the locals are making it work and play, while chiming with the current climate for keeping things local and sustainable.
La Clusaz at L’Ecuelle: b73dc4fe.ft.restaurant
Chalet de Paccaly: +33 6 81 63 33 68
Kayaking: skiwake74.com
La Cuillère à Omble: lacuillereaomble.fr
Guinguette des Cassines: les-cassines.com
Mouton Bleu: hotelmoutonbleu.com
Blue Diamond water taxi: bluediamondtaxiboat.com
Soap making: cimesetracines.
