Exploring the Majestic Gorges du Verdun on Day 5 of the Route Napoleon Motorcycle Tour
- MotoTravelDude
- Jun 5
- 3 min read
Updated: Jul 24
369km
France and Italy.
RIDE SALLY, RIDE! Our stop in Sisteron was in the city centre. Lovely hotel with a locked garage but it was warm! Downside is it’s bin day today and I was rudely awoken by the bin men at 5am!
We continued South along the Route Napoleon and at Castellane after our obligatory elevenses break, turned west down the Verdun river.
At the top of the hill, I have to stop and take the obligatory Captain Morgan post photo of the mountains in the background. Same shot I’ve taken in Austria, Germany, and Spain. But this time amusingly with one of my colleagues relieving himself in the background.
This awesome twisty gentle road follows the river on a single track under a huge protruding cliff faces. Just when you think there’s no way a coach could come down here one would appear full of tourists taking up the entire road. It was spectacular but very challenging.
We did the Gorges du Verdun in an anticlockwise fashion on our motorcycles. Having such a spectacular high road with drops of over 1000 feet with very little barrier is you also get some idiot tourists doing the same route.
At each hairpin, there is a Belvedere. A small gravel car park with a few points to look down into the valley below. As I approach one of these steep hairpins, I was presented with a French car reversing back round the corner! I am a very cool rider but my road rage got the better of me as I hold abuse at the inconsiderate idiot at the top of my voice!
It’s a wonder that I didn’t drop the bike there and then. Appreciatively, all the other tourists, who watched the whole incident unfold, agreed with me could’ve been quite disastrous.
At the top of the gorge we stopped in La Palud-sur-Verdun for lunch at an authentic Italian pizzeria. Heading to Italy today Butt the pizza here in France was one of the best pizzas I’ve ever had!
From the north side of the valley you can see the balcony road hugging up the south side which we knew we would be returning along.
We continued West to the bottom of the gorge where it opens out to a busy tourist lake. The water is amazingly turquoise and the greenery verdant. Yes, georgeous gorge and verdant Verdun!
After crossing the river, we then headed east and did the slightly less touristy route back. After stopping for ice cream and some unknown bridge, it was time to get back on the route Napoleon as we had spent far too long stopping and taking photos.
We continued on parts of the route Napoleon down to Grasse. Someone had mentioned that Grasse is famous for its perfume factories, and I swear I could smell Chanel no. 5 on the way down.
Here and there you could spy the Mediterranean that’s strangely as we were coming down the hill the fog rolled in and it got decidedly chilly. Odd that the coldest it’s been was on the Côte d’Azur!
We collectively decided to jump on the toll motorway for our stretch to Italy, but getting to the motorway meant sitting in traffic through Grasse.
The motorway took us past Nice and Monaco, with intermittent gates with the odd euro or two.
And it came through the tunnel into Italy we saw the sign for Ventimilgia. Hilariously there is a tollgate to take a ticket here and you cross the bridge and going no more than 500 yards and there is another tall gate to charge you €2.80 for the privilege of entering Italy!
Ventimilgia is an Industrial port town at first glance, full of crazy scooter riders at Fiat 500s. But our Villa is 50m from the beach that has private secure parking.
The owner Antonio suggested a beach front restaurant owned by his friend Mario, so with many Nintendo jokes about Italian plumbers jumping on mushrooms, we had a fantastic meal of meat, crab and pizza.
Yes, two pizzas in one day and the French one was better than the Italian! Scusa!
Tomorrow we turn around and head north!
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