Welcome to 'Hear English', we provide English listening resources for free. You can see our blog at http://hearenglishhere.blogspot.com/. This is our first series of blogs and webcasts which provide an audio clip and a written script to go with it (these can all be found on our blog). They follow our adventures on a 3 week working holiday on a farm in France. This second episode for intermediate level listeners is about a mountain.
The Mountain
The Mountain
“So is it easy to walk up the mountain?”
“Yes, you will be able to see it from the holiday cottage.”
We had just arrived at our host family’s house and were sipping coffee whilst our hosts, and the other two guys who would be working with us on the farm, told us all about the things we could do during our stay, which included a hike up a nearby mountain.
“Do we need a map, in case we get lost?”
“No, it’s right there in front of you, you can’t get lost.”
“How do we get there, which footpaths should we take to get to the top?”
“Well, you just go, you know, up.”
It was frustrating that Vincent and the others wouldn’t give us a straight answer to any of our questions, but it was obvious that they had done the walk millions of times, that it was very easy, and that we were silly to be worrying about it.
“How long does the walk take?”
“As long as you want it to.”
“Well yes, of course, but…” The answers I had been getting weren’t particularly useful, so I phrased my next question more carefully: “…how long does it take to get to the top, and then back down, by the shortest path?”
“Erm…2 hours, a little bit more maybe. There are large metal crosses which mark the very top, you can get your photo taken with them.”
With all this information to hand we headed up the mountain the next morning, starting off quite late because we’d been told it wouldn’t take long.
We got back just before it got dark, in time for tea.
“How was the mountain?”
“There were wonderful views, and we saw a fawn. We got to the ridge, but not to the peak, we had to turn back because it was starting to get dark”
“You didn’t get to the crosses at the top?” Vincent sounded surprised. “Why not, did you get lost?”
“Not lost as such, we could always see the top of the mountain and could easily get home, we just kept going the wrong way. We couldn’t find a path at all at first, and the footpaths we eventually found weren’t well signposted or well marked.”
“Did you at least get to the shepherds’ cottages?”
“The stone buildings laid out in a circle? Yes, we found them eventually but after that we turned left along a footpath that took us a long way around the mountainside into the next valley, it was slow going too because it was poorly marked. When we eventually got to the final ascent to the peak it was getting late, so we came home.”
“Well maybe you’ll have more luck another day.”
It felt fairly humiliating that we hadn’t managed to get to the summit; everyone seemed genuinely amazed at how incompetent we were.
Later that week we tried again, setting off earlier and knowing our way better meant we got to the shepherds’ cottages much more quickly. From there we got to the ridge walking in the opposite direction around the mountain to the last time and after a few very steep climbs, we found a footpath along the ridge and from there it was reasonably easy to walk and scramble to the peak, where we took a photo of us standing next to the metal crosses. We carried on down the other side of the mountain and walked home along the paths we had come up last time.
We thought that we must have taken the wrong paths completely. The whole walk had taken 4 times as long as we had been told it would take and we knew it had been much harder than it should have been, because if it was meant to have been so hard, Vincent would have given us a map and directions.
“So did you get to the top this time?” Vincent asked over dinner.
“Eventually, yes.”
Everyone stopped eating and looked at us with surprise. “Wow, you actually got to the top? Did you see the crosses?“
“Yeah, we got a photo of them. We must have gone a really stupid way though because it took us over 8 hours. Is there a more direct route than going around the mountainside after you get to the shepherds’ cottages?”
I was expecting Vincent to laugh at the idea of us getting so lost but instead he just shrugged his shoulders. “I’ve no idea,” he said, shaking his head, “none of us has ever been.”
There was a silence as Sarah and I looked at each other in disbelief, and wondered why had they misled us about how easy the walk was if they had never done it themselves.
“How did you know about the crosses, if you’ve never been to the top?” Sarah asked.
“Oh, we can see them from here, with our binoculars. It’s good to know you can walk to them though, we weren’t even sure if it was possible to get to the top.”
I rolled my eyes, and Sarah slumped onto the table with her head in her hands. These people were, albeit incredibly friendly, absolutely mad. We still had over a fortnight left of our holiday and I wondered what exactly we had got ourselves in for.
Click above to listen. You can get the .mp4 here, and the .mp3 here (opens in new window).
Click above to listen. You can get the .mp4 here, and the .mp3 here (opens in new window).
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