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I am in Dijon. Dijon is, or at any rate used to be (because reputations always last longer than reality) the mustard capital of France. There is a neatness to this in that I used to live near Norwich, which was the mustard capital of England.

I haven't seen a single reference to mustard in the brief time that I've been here, although this could be because my eyes are still swivelling independently. The last two days have been strikingly three-dimensional. Coming across the Loire valley, my only problems were the wind and, now and again, the cold. The countryside was consistently appealing, if sometimes exposed, all full of calm fields and slumbering trees that leaned over wire fences to see who was passing, and now and then a magnificent château somewhat spoiled by parked touring buses and the long lines of improbably well-behaved schoolchildren.

The big trade in the Loire is visiting the vineyards and logging yet another château. I can't say either appeals to me. I find vineyards a horribly industrial agriculture, all unnatural straight lines of twisted, agonised, burnt-looking stumps that resemble nothing so much as what happened to magnificent forests after a week of shelling in the first world war.

The châteaux are more attractive but the outsides are hard to appreciate, and certainly to take a photo of, because they're walled in or surrounded by other buildings. And a visit to Fontainebleau in the winter convinced me that nothing for another year was likely to be as gorgeous.

But the Loire valley is flat. The river meanders, it yawns as it gets on with its business, but that slow, flatness hides danger: the Loire holds the French record for the number of deaths each year from drowning. I followed it as far as Tours - a city I urge you to avoid if you want to keep your sanity, temper and your will to live on the narrow and furiously busy roads that extend from it - and the countryside started to take on a mood. After a while it got nothing short of bad-tempered, hurling one climb after another like a child flinging away his toys.

But am I complaining? No, I am not! I rate a day in which I climb more than one per cent - 1,000m in 100km - as hard. I have just had two days in which I got to 1,000m in little more than half that distance, which was tougher than the toughest days in the Appalachians this time last year. But you don't get views without viewpoints and you don't get those without working. I worked and I was rewarded, more than rewarded, by eye-boggling countryside of valleys and hills and sun and shadows and fields and hedgerows of this colour and that, and old stone villages where cats dozed on steps and scented blue smoke from the cottages betrayed the wood fires that burned within.

France for me will always be the most beautiful country in the world and between around Vézelay and Dijon is some of the best, rightly classed as a national park. It is Bourgogne, or Burgundy if your map is in English. It is saved from being the tourist honeytrap that the Loire and Dordogne valleys have become by being not Disney countryside easily digested through a car window but countryside best appreciated at the speed of a laden touring bike. It is only cyclists and walkers who have the time to find the half-forgotten lanes and only they who are moving slowly enough for their not to be a nuisance.

Coming around Avallon, for instance, I followed the deliciously narrow lane beside a tumbling stream of little waterfalls and tumbled trees as it slowly climbed the valley of the Cousin. I wasn't the first to go that way, naturally, but at 8.30 on an April morning I had it to myself. My progress wasn't marked in speed or distance but the number of times I pulled open my handlebar bag to get out my camera.

And then, coming the other way, I saw a man of about 60 or 70, tall, lean, dressed in cords and with a woollen hat that had a small shell sewn to it. The look in his eyes showed that he, too, longed to stop and share the experience with someone. And so, sharing this (for us) secret road, we each came to a halt to marvel with the other.

"You're walking the Compostelle," I said, pointing at the shell on his hat. The shell is the badge of Compostelle pilgrims. You see them all the time because there appear to be innumerable ways of getting to Santiago. A day earlier I had met two elderly Germans doing the route on department-store bikes. They had ridden from Germany and my new acquaintance had done it from Holland.

"In fact I am doing it twice," he said, "me and my walking stick." He tapped the ground with a cleft stick more than half his own height. "I have already walked all the way there and now I am walking all the way back."

I couldn't say anything but "Wow!"

"It will take a year, I guess," he said, "but it's not important. But right now I am tired because I have 'hard gewandeld'".

I love the sound of Dutch. "Hard gewandeld" sounds so much better than "walked fast". In fact, he said, he had so much 'hard gewandeld' that he had walked 1,000km in 17 days. That's going some.

Maybe I should send him some mustard for his feet.