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If wilderness is what you crave, it’s hard to beat France, says resident expert Nicola Williams

When my wanderlusty son hit the road last summer to drive the Route des Grandes Alpes in his girlfriend’s Berlingo MPV, emergency saucisson stashed under the seat, I wondered if lockdown where we live in France had turned him a tad bonkers. Like many university students, his original plans had been grand: climbing Kilimanjaro, trekking in Tanzania, and backpacking around temples and jungle in Cambodia and Vietnam.

A few days later, lapping up the euphoria fizzing off the screen during a FaceTime call with him, it was clear that the alternative – a classic road trip across the French Alps – was no letdown. The spectacular sweep of Isère’s vast turquoise Lac de Roselend, which I could see in the background, spoke volumes.

His 425-mile route, from the shores of Lake Geneva to the Mediterranean, crosses 21 vertiginous mountain passes, some snowed in for 10 months of the year. Rolling out of bed into a soulsoaring 360-degree canvas of raw alpine beauty, days punctuated by baguette-andcheese picnics picked up at village boulangeries and farms, are daily rituals. And the crowd one meets along the way? Like- minded wayfarers in search of pristine nature, fresh, clean air and mountains of space, all of which France has in spades.

Given the travel limitations and other frustrations heaped on us last year, desire to experience the wilderness snowballed among the French. Ski resorts in the Alps and Pyrenees enjoyed bumper summers. Ditto for bewitchingly empty chunks of the Massif Central, the Lot, Limousin, Languedoc’s Massif des Cévennes, and Haute-Provence – where wild boar and fragrant pine trees outnumber human inhabitants.

While my son was on tour, I summered en pleine nature. I walked for weeks in the Alps and Jura to research a new hiking guidebook, leaving no stone – or dinosaur footprint (fossilised 145 million years ago and opening this April at Dinoplagne in La Plagne) – unturned. I explored newly mapped trail-running paths in hills around the Basque village of

St-Étienne de Baïgorry, munching chocolate fired with Espelette chilli peppers by a local chocolatier.

In Auvergne, I learnt about future great escapes in treehouses on chateau grounds and eco-conscious micro-aventures ( miniadventures). Hoteliers and restaurateurs everywhere were working with rigorous new energy and creativity to keep their notoriously critical French clientele happy and – significantly – entice them back this year. That they are newly focused on a domestic market even harder to please than us France-adoring Britons surely bodes well for 2021.

Roselend Lake, in Isère, was a highlight for Nicola’s son on a road trip in the French Alps