Travel: Sweet shop reverie amid the wildflowers in the French Alps

View of the mountains from Les Deux Alpes.

Maybe it’s the heat, or the places the mind goes to when on a long, meditative walk in the hills. Whatever the reason, at 6,000ft up in the French Alps on a July day, I can’t stop thinking about summers of the 1980s and the ice cream van coming up the road back home.

Palombo Bros. Lara’s Theme from Dr Zhivago on the tinsel bells. Gerry the driver, sliding back the hatch. A 10p mix-up or a packet of sweetie cigarettes. The other scamps in the avenue, sharing our plunders together. He got Frazzles. She got a Lucky Bag.

On a good day, someone got Rainbow Drops . . . Hiking up the track en route to my location deep into the mountains, I’ve fallen down a rabbit hole of childhood sweet shop reverie. All around me, as far as the eye is able to discern colour, is what looks – and even smells – like millions upon millions of Rainbow Drops.

Those packets of dyed puffed rice, sugar coated, stuffed up the front of Gerry’s window, are all around me now, rolling gently in the wind. The journalist in me ponders asking our mountain guide to yank me back to reality, by telling me the real names of this rolling blanket of tiny colourful dots. But the kid in me wins. So. I’m hiking through a mountain of Rainbow Drops on La Meije mountain massif. Why not?

A small hut in the hills above Les Deux Alpes.

The reality is almost as fantastical. After three hours on foot, winding through a succession of gorgeous, tiny Alpine hamlets, I’m on the lookout for a refuge, literally, for the night. It’s my first experience of the French hut in the hills, where the adventurous come to immerse themselves in nature and reset. Walk, talk, arrive, eat, sleep, wash, repeat.

Serious snow sports enthusiasts come here in winter, snowshoeing or skiing in for a majestic wilderness experience, where the whole thing is heated by two wood burning stoves. But the road in is much less punishing in summer and there’s no need for a fire tonight. Ten minutes in the tiny sauna round the back is heat enough.

After three hours hiking from Les Deux Alpes, we reach our destination, Pic Du Mas de la Grave, a former sheep byre, beautifully renovated in 2014 with shared berths for 34. There are rules to be observed: no talking late at night or early in the morning. People are here to relax.

Dinner and breakfast are cooked and served by the refuge staff, who live in this perfect isolation for months at a time. Options are limited, and the food is basic but super tasty. Nobody’s hiking this far for cordon bleu. Homemade soup and vegetable pasta bake taste as good as the hills look after thousands of steps to get here.

After dinner, I sit outside in my Crocs – mandatory refuge footwear, provided for all residents – and watch the sun slip behind the vast jaggy crags, while doodling with one of the acoustic guitars left out for guests to footer with.

There’s no Netflix here. Books, a piano, board games and a view that doesn’t get any more believable the longer it’s looked at are the entertainment. As the stars come up, the magic of the place is complete, and the spell is cast in just a few short hours – it is one of those that serves as a reminder that nature easily wins the battle over the compulsive pull of smartphone technology, if only we let it.

My bed is on a ledge high up in a dorm room, with two bunks. There are digs for six of us here, and one of them is at the other end of the ledge I’m perched on. You can get to know each other’s sleeping quirks pretty quickly at Refuge Du Pic du Mas de La Grave. Remember your earplugs.

The next day, it’s back down to the valley to the altogether different digs of four-star Châlet Mounier. We’re still in the mountains, but this is a summer playground, where a super-fast gondola – Jandri Express – has just opened, with Alpine mini rollercoasters caressing the mountainside, biking trails, morning yoga on la terrasse and hundreds of paragliders dotting the sky like multi-coloured craneflies.

Paul English on the Alpine rollercoaster.

I strap on for the ride. The last time I did this, over Lake Annecy a 150 miles to the north, I landed with an almighty whoop, riffing on a major buzz with my tandem guide, only to discover my partner in thermal riding had touched down covered in the contents of his stomach. It’s not uncommon.

Soaring on nothing but the warm air of the Alps is not for everyone, but it’s evidently for very many. Seeing the valley and the turquoise Vénéon river, and the ribbon waterfalls that feed it from summer snowmelt while gliding around the lower peaks strapped to a pilot with thousands of flights on his counter, is the absolute apex of alpine exhilaration. A truly otherworldly sensation.

The Rainbow Drops are hard to spot at 6,000 feet, though. Nor can they be as easily spotted from the road. As I head for the airport, Helena, the local tourism expert, tells me names of some of the beauties I’d waded through.

Gentian. Alpine Forget Me Not. Thyrse. Arnica Montana. Marsh orchid. Soldanelle. Snowbell. And, Edelweiss, of course. A wildflower trail leading into the mountains and all the way back to Lara’s Theme on the ice cream van’s bells and all the colours of the rainbow.

P.S. The new Jandri Express is a gondola lift in two sections providing access to 3,200m at the foot of the glacier in 40 minutes. This installation transports skiers and pedestrians up to the high- altitude area to join the funicular and access 3,400m and the high-altitude restaurant, Le Refuge des Glaciers.