Driving in France

We didn’t really think a great deal about it, but given that we had leased a Peugeot for the duration, we would be in for quite a few kilometres during our 4 plus weeks in France.  Given my experience with driving on the right, quite early in the journey I became the designated driver.  Here are a few of my observations over the past few weeks in regard to driving in France.
The auto-routes are nowhere near as scary as I was led to believe:  people speak of the high speed limits and crazy driving.  Forget it.  The maximum speed on the very best of roads is 130 kms.  I must admit  to reaching such speed on a few occasions.  However, trucks are limited to 90 kms/hr. which is a godsend.  Overtaking them is not the arduous task that it is on the Hume Highway I experience when  returning from Wangaratta Choristers rehearsals late on a Wednesday evening.  Signage is fantastic.  Lots of warning for decisions to be made.
The reputation that French drivers are impatient and rude proved to be unfounded for me.  Provided you adhered to the rules and drove at a reasonable speed there was no problem.  I was honked at only once, and I must admit that it was well-deserved.  I experienced much greater patience on the part of French drivers.  AND they certainly give way to cyclists.  Australians have a great deal to learn about sharing the road with cyclists and pedestrians.  I found it much easier in France dealing with cyclists as the other motorists showed the same respect for those on a bike that I did.
Round-abouts abound.  I thought Australia had a great many, but France has got them beat.  They offer choice, which is a good thing if you’re not able to read all the signs (and there are many).  Just keep going around and around until a reasonable choice appears.  Believe me, I did it many a time.
Now, I was blessed with a navigator of the first class in the front seat, with two additional in back-up in the back seat.  Given that you know which city you are headed for, navigating is reasonably logical.  With the Michelin overall France map as well as the detailed map, Judith was able to get me just about anywhere.  We quickly learned that when all else fails, go for ‘centre-ville’ as there always are signs of how to get out once you are in.  The only place which defeated all 4 of us was Avignon.  Perhaps we never went ‘centre-ville’.  Should we ever decide to return to France, we will concede that Avignon is one of those places best left alone.  I do wonder how the GPS would cope with Avignon. 
Roads do not take pride of place in France.  BeautifuI buildings  are not knocked down for the sake of a road.  In the ‘centre-ville’ the roads  are narrow.  Not just narrow, but very narrow.   Australians, let alone Americans, do not know what narrow is.  I learned and quickly, too.  However, I thought I knew what narrow was in Ribeauville.   I didn’t have a clue until meeting the teeny, tiny roads of Dordogne.  I am happily driving along at 50 kms. per hour when all of a sudden  walls close in and if unlucky a semi-trailer delivery truck comes along as well.  Patience, and a dead stop deals with the situation, as the truck driver can be assured to be a better judge of distance than yours truly.
Our Peugeot was a dream to drive.  Yes, I never did learn how to run the cruise control.  However, I sat high in the drivers’ seat, and had as good a look as any at the road ahead.  It virtually did everything for me.  Lights were automatically controlled whether I had them on auto or not.  Even the hand break was automatic and I think the windscreen wipers worked themselves, but I’m not quite sure.  Give me another few weeks and I might work through that as well.  On the last day I found the seat- warmer. I wonder how much they cost in Australia…
Our car came equipped with a GPS, and in English, too.  However, no GPS could compete with the competence of my navigator and back-up.  Thus it was shut down quick-smart.  The team effort made life easy – even on the 700 plus km. days.
My advice for driving in France, from a 64 yr. old American/Australian, is to 1)  get a top human navigator or two 2) Get a good car, and 3) Get good map and you can’t go wrong.  Oh, and above all, keep your sense of humour.  It certainly was required when we were given a police escort to the Peugeot depot at Charles de Gaulle Airport with full flashing blue lights for the last 200 metres of a 5000 km journey around France.
LouAnne

Bonjour Brittany

 

After taking the scenic route from Provence to the Dordogne, and arriving in a hillside village in the dark, and having to drive up impossibly narrow roads to drop off our suitcases, we decided on the more sensible approach of leaving just before dawn, and driving straight to our destination on motorways.  Hence we arrived in la Moinerie in Brittany late in the afternoon.

We are staying in a converted pair of fisherman’s cottages on the banks of the River Rance. The two original cottages, the middle two in the main building above with white dormer windows, would have been mirror images of each other originally. A doorway has been opened between them.  The top floor has two bedrooms with en suite bathrooms, the middle floor a kitchen/living area and a lounge-room, and the bottom floor two more bedrooms. There are two wonderful spiral wooden staircases between the different levels. We are about 10 km north of the historic town of Dinan, and 10 km south of another historic town, Dinand. The difference in the French pronunciation of the two is very subtle.

It is quite easy to tell the difference between an original building and a modern copy.  The modern is all beautifully square and level, and the original never is. In the cottages we have stayed in the walls often bowed a little in all directions, the rooms were best described as quadrilateralish rather than rectangular, and for obvious reasons none of the furniture has coasters on legs. No-one is silly enough to use lovely rectangular tiles in bathrooms and laundries.

There is a nice garden area between our cottage and the old fishing harbour wall.  There is a pontoon beside the slipway into the river, and a few yachts moored beside that. In the morning the sun rises so woderfully in the east over the river. The nights have been almost totally still, and the water of the river so smooth that you can clearly see the reflections of the rigging of the yachts. It is all so truly beautiful.

One of the first things we always do after unpacking in a new cottage is read through comments book for thoughts and hints from earlier visitors. A lot of the previous visitors to la Moinerie had been back a number of times, and a common theme in the book were along the lines “Met Flo Rance on the pontoon again. She is looking great”, or “Heard that Flo had been back, but sadly missed her this time”. Or “Mary saw Flo Rance near the bridge. We all hope to see her again next year”.  Well I must confess that all this stirred my interest, and I looked for Flo everywhere.  I imagined her to be an elegant French lady, probably an artist or poet. I saw her looking a bit like Margaret Olley, a famous Australian artist who died recently, wandering down to the shore, and gazing wistfully over the river. I saw her dressed in a broad-brimmed straw had, and long floral skirt flecked with paint from her last master work, gracefully gliding along the bank. She had just recovered from a harrowing illness, or loss of love. I was falling in love with Flo.

Then on Friday Ted told me that the three of them had seen Flo frolicking down near the pontoon.  What? My Flo frolic? She is much too elegant and sensitive to frolic. Then they told me all. Flo Rance is a great big seal. Somehow she has become stranded above the hydroelectric tidal dam over the River Rance , and spends all her days eating fish, and sunbathing on the various jetties and piers along the river.

We all met Flo again later on Friday. She was moonbathing on the wharf at Mordreuc when we all went out for a meal.  She just rolled over and scratched her ear, and went back to sleep.

Chris

Café Olé

If you can read this we are still alive. But we have given up on McDonalds coffee. Their free WIFI wouldn’t work with our notebook computer. When we tried to log on there was a strong local signal, but we were asked for a password. None of the kids behind the counter knew a password, saying that it was just automatic log on. In Paris, and joyful reconnection, I searched on some chat-lines, and found that the request for a password can occasionally happen, and the solution is “to ask one of the kids behind the counter”.
Oh well, it was no great tragedy. Their coffee was awful anyway. In Australia all the larger McDonalds have a McCafe, where one really can get a half-decent expresso-made latte and muffin. These don’t seem to exist in France. All their coffee comes out of a black box, where dozens of mystery chemical compounds seem to mix, and dribble into a paper cup. After millennia of work one would have hoped that Alchemists could come up with something better than this.
The search for a decent coffee has been long and painful. The French cappuccini just don’t seem to work. Ted has been mightily disappointed. Trying to explore further territory Judith asked for a café Chantilly. It was just black coffee with an anti-iceberg of a white material that came out of a spray can drifting sullenly across the surface, with about one seventh below the waterline.
Café au lait can be probably be deleted from all the French textbooks that school students use. Very few French people seem to drink it. Most people seem to drink expresso coffee is tiny cups. We would commonly call them short blacks in Australia. They really are the best way to go. In most local bars they cost 1.00 – 1.20 Euro ($1.70 - $2.00) each, in tourist towns 2.00 Euro, and super-tourist towns 3.00 Euro. In some cases it is cheaper to buy a glass of wine than a coffee.
It is still daylight saving in France. It is really super daylight saving, as sunrise is about 08:30 AM, and sunset about 07:30 PM. On my Friday walks I have been leaving at 07:00 AM in the dark. Passing through some smaller villages the only places open have been the boulangerie, where there is a steady stream of locals picking up their bagettes for the day, and the bar-tabac, where there are always a few small huddles of Frenchmen, and occasionally a woman, quietly chatting and having an expresso to start the day. These bar-tabacs, with their wonderful smells of expresso coffee, low murmur of conversation, a promise of warmth, and colourful lights spilling out onto the footpaths are real oases in the cold dark mornings, and the only way I could get past without yielding to temptation was by crossing the road and giving them a wide berth.
Chris

Adieu Dordogne

If you can read this blog it means that we are still alive, but have been forced to go to McDonalds for a cup of coffee and free internet access, as our latest cottage has no connection.
Yesterday, being Friday again, was declared another R&R opportunity. Judith, Ted and LouAnne had a leisurely start to the day.  Mid-morning they started off on a slow drive around some of the small villages near Domme. They had a very pleasant lunch on the terrace in a village called Castlenaud.  In the afternoon they went on a boat trip up and down the Dordogne, seeing from river level all the sights they have seen from
ahigh on walks over the earlier part of the week. I, of course, not being as smart, and went on another 40 km walk.

In France, like England, most farmhouses and hamlets are situated half way up hillsides.  All of them are linked to their neighbours and local villages by old donkey and cart paths, often going up and over the hills. They would also have tracks going down to main roads in the valleys that would link them to bigger towns.  With the coming of motorized transport in the early 20^th Century the major roads and roads linking farms to them were widened, and sealed for faster and heavier traffic.  The paths over the hills were gradually abandoned for transport, but still exist as public rights of way.

Some of these paths would have been major routes in their time. They are two to three metres wide, enough for a donkey or ox and cart to use.  They have straight dry-stone walls perhaps a metre high on both sides.  In steeper sections they were paved with large rounded flat stones laid upright across the slope to give pedestrians and animals traction. In sections where the paths crossed limestone bedrock you can still clearly see the two deep grooves cut by the iron-clad wheels of carts.

Just after the Second World War a group of European walkers, or ramblers, or randonneurs began a movement to link these unused rights of way into continuous paths linking the major historical and scenic points of interest, sometimes thousands of kilometres long and crossing several countries.  These Sentiers de Grande Randonnee, or GR routes, are world famous among long distance walkers. In 1982 I walked 1200 km along the GR3 from Nice to Dijon.

These GR routes were all way-marked by volunteers painting markers on rocks, trees, lamp-posts, fence posts or anywhere handy that did not move.  They used a consistent system of red and white stripes, with right-angles to indicate direction change, and crosses to show that you had gone the wrong way.  These paint stripes are still there, sixty years later.

Over the years local groups made up smaller circuits, called boucles, in their areas, and painted way-markers with yellow painted symbols.  There might be more than a hundred splashes as they are called on a 10 km walk. They are still there after years of good work.

In France one of the biggest contributors to the national and local economies is tourism. Local administrations are encouraging all forms of tourism – there are all sorts of value-added activities, such as ballooning, rafting, quad-bike riding, boat-tours, chateaux openings … They also recognize the need for self-directed activities, such as walking and cycling.

Domme-Perigord canton, which covers an area of about 400 km², has decided to encourage walking by designing and marking some routes.  Looking at the result one can only conclude that this was done by an Appointed Committee. They have marked about 30 loops, on average 10 km long each. They are all marked in yellow, and there are so many that they run often run through and parallel to each other, and you are never quite sure which one you are on.  Instead of sending out some real walkers with a paint pot they have decided to send teams of workers with power augers, 1.8 m treated pine posts, and a bag full of plastic strips, and hammers and nails.  Every post has a cute little yellow plastic cap with “Domme Perigord Randonnee” embossed in capital letters, and Braille. Beneath this is a nailed a yellow plastic strip indicating straight ahead, or tune L or R. Being put in by a work crew they are usually put where it is easiest, and not necessarily best, to do so. Because they are expensive each boucle has about thirty posts, sometimes 500 m apart, so when you are walking on a route with tracks coming and going from left and right you just keep going and hoping.  The yellow plastic strips are quite brittle, and have either broken off in the sunlight, or provided sport for the local ne’erdowells, because one walk I went on had almost half the strips missing. I had to go up to the post and look at the remaining nail pattern to guess the direction of the path. I reckon that it could be time to buy a tin of yellow paint and a couple of brushes.

Chris

Dordogne River

We have just completed a week in the region of Dordogne, but it was only on the last day that it all fell into place for me as Judith, Ted and I embarked on a cruise down the river on a gabarre. The gabarres are replicas of the boats which were the transport of the day many years ago. The river Dordogne was and indeed is, the lifeblood of the area. The Dordogne begins way up in the highlands of the Massif Central with the join of the Dore and the Dogne. By the time it reaches the valley where we were staying for the week, it has become a stream of substance and was an integral part of the commerce and life of the communities along its banks. As in most places, those who controlled the transport, in this case the river, were the most powerful. The banks are littered with castles bringing to mind the many forces vying for power in a time of particularly friendly co-existence. For many years the river was indeed the boundary between lands held by English and those by French, so it was a real frontier. The barons waged taxes on those using the river, thus becoming wealthy and wielding considerable power. To protect their power, formidable castles were built into the limestone cliffs, and the four of us enjoyed exploring one or two of these, trying to imagine just what life might have been like way back in the 10th century and onwards from which several of the castles date. Of course, there are those built in the early 20th century. Perhaps a rich river baron wanted a castle and none was available, so they built their own. Wealth certainly creates option.
Back a few years, though, the river was the highway of the area. It was said that barge/boat builders built boats high in the Dordogne, transported the produce of the region downstream to Bordeaux and then sold their boats for timber, and returning to the highlands to repeat the cycle. Wine was produced in the Domme region, which caused the winemakers of Bordeaux considerable concern resulting in a boycott. Thus the wine of the Dordogne became well known to the palates of Holland and further afield and virtually unknown to the rest of France. With the coming of the railroad transport the boat traffic on the Dordogne became less and less viable. Hence, nowdays, as in so many places, the boat traffic serves as a legacy to those gone before and is enjoyed by the likes of us, the tourists. Fly fishing is common along its banks and the waters are just perfect for a lazy autumn afternoon of canoeing downstream. Entrepreneurs are making the best of it, as they do everywhere. We were reminded, though, that the river exerts its own influence over the landscape with a flood every few years. With the risk of limestone cliffs collapsing from above and rising waters from below, the residents of places such as La Roque Gageac are in what I’d call a rather precarious position. The river still lets the rest of us know who’s boss, and isn’t that grand.
LouAnne

The Real Thing

All that I have known in the past about Troggs is that they were a British rock band of the sixties who made their name with the song “Wild Thing”- number 257 in Rolling Stones list of Greatest Rock Songs of All Times. Other than that “Troglodyte” has been occasionally been a handy word to have up your sleeve for crosswords: A person who lives in a cave, or a person whose ideas are so out of touch that they are prehistoric. In the Dordogne troglodytes are and have been the Real Thing.
On Tuesday we went for a nice 9 km walk around the town of La Roque-Gageac, on the banks of the Dordogne River, and into the hills behind. La Roque-Gageac is another of those “Most-Visited” towns of France. It is built into the limestone cliff that towers above the river. The limestone in this part of France is in huge horizontal strata that the river has cut deeply down into. Because there are slight differences in the hardness of the different layers some have eroded more than others, forming long chambers 5 to 10 meters deep and tens to hundreds of metres long.
These are known to have provided shelter for humans for at least 55,000 years. Modern houses in La Roque-Gageac, and Rocamadour as well, and many other villages are built right into these overhangs. The limestone provides the back wall and floor to the houses, and sometimes the roof. If you can imagine a sideways photograph of a row of terrace houses, then tear it roughly down the centre, it is what you have here. La Roque-Gageac is, however, a bit of a real-estate risk. Over the last hundred years there have been major collapses that have carried away houses, and killed a number of people.
A more spectacular example is the now deserted Roque St Christophe. It once had five layers of housing, with one of the overhangs a kilometre long, and is thought to have accommodated up to 1500 people in the Middle Ages. The village was easily defended, with a single fort at the end of each level able to defend the whole community. Roque St Christophe held out against the Vikings who sailed up the Dordogne, when a lot of larger towns couldn’t.
It took the English army to finally break through the defences in the Hundred Years War. This, and the later Religious Wars, finally destroyed the community, and it was eventually abandoned. The site is eerie. The whole cliff face is covered with rectangular holes where beams were inserted to hold up floors and rooves. You can see where rooms were carved back into the limestone, and steps carved into the stone linking different levels.
Wild Thing just isn’t the same any more.
Chris

Surprised Again

For LouAnne and Ted everything they see is a surprise as they are not experienced European travellers. However, they read the guide books in preparation and thought they had learned quite a bit about LaRoque-Gageac. Today the four of us went on a walk originating there but what we found was not just the cliffside villages, chateau and tourist attractions mentioned in the books. Thanks to Chris’s walking maps we were fortunate enough to come across a range of agricultural pursuits. Earlier in the day we had visited our local market at Cenac St. Julien, where much of the local produce was on offer. Among such was an interesting chestnut honey, which of course we bought to enhance our morning cereals and toast. On our walk we found chestnuts underfoot for most of the day. However, we also came across walnut orchards and did a bit of gleaning of our own and will perhaps make use of them for a meal later in the week.

The farming here, from LouAnne’s Minnesotan perspective, is relatively marginal, with those keen to maintaining the industry having to work very hard to make a living from the relatively poor quality soil. We came across one quite interesting working farm which included a walnut grove and we believe force-fed goose production. We think now was the time for the geese to be inside eating furiously, as just one goose was out meandering with a collection of hens. No matter what your opinion may be of fois gras, it is the major production industry in this part of France and cannot be ignored. A small herd of beef cattle, too, were in evidence, though definitely not herefords. The current times, though, were reflected in an abandoned farm which showed many signs of past prosperity, but that in recent times it became just too hard.
The forester, Ted, and the forester’s daughter, Judith, let alone the forester’s wife, LouAnne, just could not ignore the relatively small scale forestry operation which we came across. A giant, at least to us, John Deere forwarder with grapple loader was encountered loading cut sections of relatively small oak timbers from a small section of forest. Once again, from the Minnesotan’s perspective, it seemed that the land is being used in a way over countless generations that we Australians and Mid-west Americans can hardly comprehend, maintains the traditions yet struggles with the demands of the modern. It is not easy at all.

Gold Medal

I should have listened more in Year 10 when Miss Russell, our English teacher gave her lesson on comparatives and superlatives. Good, better, best.

I always thought that, like in the Olympics, Gold meant the best in the world, Silver the second best, Bronze the third best, and the rest also ran. But I was once invited out to dinner by someone I wanted to impress, so bought along a bottle of wine awarded a Bronze Medal at the Royal Melbourne Show.  I thought that the Gold or Silver medals might show me as being too eager, and third best was just right. But she explained that a Gold Medal meant that the judges had awarded it 18.5 – 20 points, a Silver that it was awarded 17 – 18.4, and a Bronze was considered just all right with 15.5 – 16.9. So in one year there might be 125 wines awarded Gold Medals at the show.

I always thought that "New York Times Best Seller" meant that a book was top of the best-selling list in the NYT.  But it just means that it was somewhere on the list of the 20 best-selling books for a week or so.

So when Rocamadour is described in advertising brochures in terms of “Most Visited Historic Site” in France, we should have been a bit more openminded.

Yesterday we decided to go on nice walk that started at L’Hospitalet above Rocamadour, wound 16.6 km through the forest, down along the Alzou Gorge, and into sacred site, and then back up to the car.  The walk through the oak and chestnut forests was a delight. The trees had beautiful Autumn shades of red and orange which gave a coloured soft carpet to walk along. We were following a route in the Cicerone Guide Book “Walking the Dordogne”.  The route mostly followed old mule and cart tracks between mossy stone walls.  Along the Alzou Gorge were the remains of half a dozen old water-driven mills. Some of these were really substantial structures. We ate our packed lunch beside the remains of the Moulin de Tournefuille, which ceased operation in 1933. Amazingly the stream that provided the water for the mills was completely dry, which may have been a cause of the abandoning of the mills according to one gulde book.  Limestone country is notorious for streams suddenly disappearing underground.

Rocamadour was one of the greatest pilgrimage destinations of the 12^th and 13^th Centuries.  It was famed for its statue of the Black Virgin, a dark carved wooden statue of the Virgin Mary, believed to perform miracles when prayed to. Kings and Queens of France made the pilgrimage to the Black Virgin, and crowds of up to 30,000 are reported to be there on special Saint’s days. The churches of Rocamadour, and the town itself became very wealthy.  Of course this lead to a number of conquests and lootings.  During the religious wars it was repeatedly taken and retaken by opposing sides.  During the French Revolution when the Church was seen as siding with the Monarchy it was trashed again.  By the middle of the 19^th Century the town and churches were almost deserted.  But by the end of the 19^th Century the Church once again became interested in Rocamadour, and the new railway line started bring in tourists, and the town and Church’s fortunes picked up.

The setting of the upper town and churches certainly is spectacular, with everythig clinging to a high near-vertical cliff like swallows nests on a cave wall.

The Chapel de Notre Dame with the Black Madonna is truly beautiful, but so are a lot of other churches in France.  To me a lot of the buildings were fine examples of 19^th Century restoration. The whole of the upper town and approaches to the churches were non-stop gourmet shops and trinket tourism. Perhaps this is what pilgrimage sites always have been like.

But looking at the day as a whole, giving points for interest, scenery, variety, historic association and pure enjoyment, we all decided that the yesterday was worth a Gold Medal.

Chris

A Real Bastide

The trip from Uzes to Domme in the Dordogne was our shortest transfer, so we decided to go via the scenic route.  We drove down the Tarn Gorge.  It was an absolutely stunning drive down a very narrow winding road above a deep gorge between huge limestone cliffs.  Every ten or so kilometres there is a small village built into the hillside beside the river Tarn.  The buildings are all made of the local stone, many with stone rooves, and blended completely into their settings. There are limestone stacks on the hillsides, and every now and then you say to yourself “Hang on.  Is that another stack, or is it a castle? Yes, it’s a castle”.  The Tarn Gorge has some of the most beautiful scenery I have ever seen in Europe.

Our cottage is a restored old stone cottage, half way up a very steep one-way lane that is barely wide enough for one car. After unloading LouAnne had to drive to the top of the lane and try to turn around. The three-point turns we all learned in suburban streets for our driving tests were nothing compared to the twenty-point turn LouAnne needed to turn the Peugeot around. It didn’t help that a tipsy Frenchman with a stroppy poodle in the car wanted to drive down at the same time.

The village is called Cenac et St Julien, and is the 16^th Century overflow of Domme below its ramparts. We are middle left, rendered wall.

I thought that I was well-prepared for the French language this time.  I had bought an expensive electronic Franklins French-English/English-French dictionary, and left my old Collins Pocket dictionary at home.  The trouble is that the electronic dictionary makes the Pocket Collins look like the Encyclopaedia Britannica. If you enter the French word corniche, the English translation is … corniche. If you enter belvedere you get … belvedere.  A bastide is ... a bastide. But after seeing a few of them, and looking for the common features, you realise that a belvedere is a … panoramic viewpoint, and a bastide is … a medieval fortified village, with ramparts, gates etc.

Domme, in all guide books, is described as “The best-preserved bastide in France, with some of the greatest belvederes in the Dordogne”. After doing some local shopping on the Sunday morning we all climbed the hill into Domme. The town has a magnificent setting on the top of a bluff. There is a steep cliff above the Dordogne River on one side, and almost intact ramparts on the other three.  There are three gates with guard towers on these three sides. We walked in along a sentier that came into the town along the cliff side.  The views across the valley to hills studded with chateaux really is stunning.

But from there something is missing. One of the guide books describes Domme as “enthusiastically restored”.  Well it is. The buildings, all original, are perfect. The gardens too, are perfect. The old shops are all now … restaurants, sellers of fois gras and other local produce, or souvenir shops now.  I could see no butchers or bakers or candlestick makers.  Then you realise that almost all the immaculate houses are shuttered because October is out of season.  There is hardly anyone, apart from a few toursists. Domme reminded me of the lovely old towns in the Cotswolds in England where rich Londoners had bought up all the pretty cottages and renovated them and turned them into holiday homes that were only used “in season”. As the locals moved out the local shops could no longer survive on a few months of frantic trade, and were replaced by tourist shops that opened for summer, then closed for the rest of the year. After a short time in Domme I was longing for the living towns of Ribeauville and Uzes, with their all their people, and everyday shops, and kids in the streets, and dogs at your feet.

Chris

Provence, Adieu

Our last Friday in Provence was declared another day of R&R.  Judith and LouAnne caught up on some postcards in the morning as Ted strolled around the old Centre Ville of Uzes taking photographs.  They all went over to the Place aux Herbes, the central market square in the old town, for a nice lunch and glass of wine at tables under the huge plane trees.  I, of course, am not as smart as they are, so went on another 40 km walk, this time along the Gardon Gorge. I did, however, plan things a bit better – I left at 06:45, which only gave me an hour’s walk in the dark, and I had bought a torch in the supermarket to help me read the map.

The limestone country has very shallow soil on the hillsides, and irregular low annual rainfall. The slanting early-morning sun rays beautifully showed up the ancient terraces around the villages. The early farmers, faced with poor rocky soil would pick up stones and build them into fences.  This would give them deeper and deeper soil that would build up on the uphill side of the fences, eventually forming flat terraces on which they would plant olives, almonds and grapes. A family might also have some chickens, some pigs that they would run in the communal forest, and perhaps a son tending goats on the hillsides.  They would sell their excess at weekly markets, and with the proceeds buy things that they could not grow or make themselves. Some of their children might show some artisan’s skill, and specialize in a trade, and become comparatively wealthy

This lifestyle would have gone on generation after generation. But in the late 19^th and early 20^th Centuries things changed.  Modern forms of transport allowed people to move around the country more readily.  Electricity and water supply were extended further throughout the country, and people wanted a radio and a washing machine. The terraces alone could not provide the income for these additions, so the family would need to work for other people more and more off the terraces. Eventually the terraces would take too much time out of the working week to be worth the effort, and they and the smaller farm houses would be abandoned as families moved into towns where there was reliable work. The terraces are still there with their stunted trees, and derelict houses nearby. Eventually even the larger farms would not be viable, to be bought up by wealthy English ex-financiers and the Parisian riche, and people with a love of the country. But they are being maintained and restored and extended, and almost always with real acknowledgment of their history and setting.  And rural France is very much the better for it.

The Gardon Gorge is truly beautiful. The river has cut a deep canyon down into a limestone plateau.  The high points are only about 130 m above river level, but the limestone cliffs are a brilliant white in the sunshine.  The horizontal strata contain huge caves, some hundreds of metres long.  These caves have been used for hundreds of thousands of years for shelter by humans from Neolithic to modern times. Many of them have had religious significance from the earliest times.  I walked down a steep path to an old settlement called la Baume. According to tradition one of the caves here was the hermitage of a Greek named Veredemus, who later Bishop of Avignon in 700 AD, and later still was sanctified as St Veredeme. A chapel was built on the site in the 8^th Century which became a pilgrimage destination. It is said to be the oldest surviving Christian structure in the region. I walked up a steep narrow path to the chapel.  The original may have been 8^th Century, but the present looks very much a 19^th Century restoration.

The present occupants of Veredemes Grotto, or cave, are four endangered species of chauve-souris (tr bald mouse) or bat. I walked about 50 m into the cave with my torch, but no-one seemed to be home.

It seems that Blogspot comments are temperamental, and only work occasionally. You can always email Judith and me, or LoaAnne and Ted to say Hi!

Chris

In The Wash

I think that the best structure in all Menerbes is the old wash house, which still works. In the days before electricity was connected to towns, and every house had its own Kelvinator churning and sudsing away, most towns built a communal wash house. Most of these had three separate concrete troughs. There would be a constant stream of water flowing into the first trough, then the overflow from that flowing into a lower trough, and the overflow from that flowing into a lowest trough. Women would suds up and wash their clothes in the lowest trough, then move up the next trough for a first rinse, then up to the top trough for a last rinse. These wash houses made it easier for families to have clean clothes, so had real health and convenience benefits. They also had real social benefits in that they allowed women to socialize, gossip, and pass on important news.
When I was walking around the French countryside thirty years ago and passed through towns I would still occasionally see a couple of old women, usually dressed in black, standing beside the wash house and chatting away. The saddest sight I saw was in one town where a bent old widow in black was just standing silently and alone waiting for friends who could never come again.
Most of the washouses have now disappeared from towns. Some have been turned into display beds for red geraniums, but most have been turned off, or contains green water and rubbish. Sad.
Chris

Allez Allez Allez

On Thursday we decided to go on a driving tour of villages in the Luberon region of Provence.
When I rode up Mt Ventoux in 2003 it was just after the mountain top had been used for a stage on theTour de France. The road was painted everywhere with exhortations – Allez Allez Allez Lance, Jan, Vino, Viranque…and all the names we know so well. The road near the summit had been resurfaced since then, and all the paint was gone. But when we stopped on the side of the road for a photo of the hills we did see a painted sign on the surface: Allez Allez Allez Cyril. None of us could think of a Cyril in the Pro Tour, so he may well be a name to look out for in future.
Ventoux itself (in French the name means Windy Mountain) is a magic place. As watchers of le Tour will know, the upper slopes are bald, and just scree slopes of almost pure white limestone. There is a large communications tower at the summit, and a café where the four of us stopped for a coffee. As we drank there was a steady stream of weary cyclists coming in from both sides making their personal pilgrimage to the top. The view across to the French Alps is absolutely stunning.
We passed through some lovely hilltop villages on our drive, and the cliffs of the Luberon Gorge were magnificent. Of course we had to drive up to Menerbes, the town discovered by Picasso and other artists 70 years ago, and made famous and expensive by Peter Mayles 20 years ago.
Menerbes really is two-faced. The main street is now very swish. All the buildings have been renovated, with the epicerie looking more like an upmarket deli than a small-town grocer. There was a lovely small café which we sat outside and had each had a refreshing ice-cream. Rather incongruously there is a very fashionable dress shop, but also tellingly two very swank immobiliers, or real-estate agents. The main street had been surfaced with large neat rectangular pavers. But when Ted and I walked down into the winding roads off the main street there were the small irregular houses typical of hill towns, a good number of them clearly “renovator’s opportunities”. The roads were still surfaced with thousands of rounded stones the size of your hand set vertically and across the slope, so that horses and people could gain traction on the roads a hundred years ago.
As we sat eating our ice-creams there was a steady stream of tourists walking by. Many of them would have been Peter Mayles fans. There was one young couple, who may have been Japanese, walking past. He, striding along in front and looking at everything with the eye of a believer, and she, dressed like a real fashion plate, walking along behind looking at the ground, and clearly wishing she was somewhere else.
Chris

The Rest of the Pont du Gard

I think that everyone in the Whole Wide World has seen photographs of the Pont du Gard.  It is that awe-inspiring triple-layered arched Roman aqueduct spanning the Gard River in Provence. Nimes was one of the most important cities outside Italy that was part of the Roman Empire.  As it expanded its water supply became inadequate, so in the first century AD a 50 km long aqueduct was built form a spring near Uzes to Nimes. It is thought that the whole system took up to 15 years to complete, and was used continuously for around 400 years till it fell into disrepair, and was abandoned.

Well we all wanted to see the Pont du Gard, but didn’t just want to drive over to the car park to join the busloads of tourists, then drive back to Uzes.  So we worked out a route which would allow us to park the car in Vers, a village four kilometres from the Pont, and use the wonderful French sentiers, of footpaths, to walk over to the Point and back.  Vers is a delightful village, with every building made out of the local limestone, and just perfectly blending into the landscape.

On the way over to the Pont we saw a lot of dogs running around with their noses to the ground, and tails in the air, followed by Frenchmen with big guns.  There were signs up stating that there was a wild boar hunt on.  Ted thought that it might be smart to stay out of the scrub and stick to the bitumen bike path to the Pont. So being a committed vegetarian I called out “Run little Piggies, Run”, and we walked quickly on.

The Pont itself, of course, was spectacular. It is a UNESCO World Heritage site, and was unbelievably free of the tack surrounding, say, the Colosseum.  But just as interesting the Pont itself was the large sections of the aqueduct that were almost intact that marched across the countryside back to Uzes through ancient olive groves.  We walked along a sentier beside the “vestiges d’aqueduct” all the way back to Vers, where we ate our sandwiches in a lovely little park.

A really great day.

Chris

Gladiator

Cirius: Hey Spartacus. Did you hear that your old girlfriend sneaked down to the Arena last night to see that new Retiarius from Thrace? She went in the wrong door and the new lion got her.

Spartacus: Are you serious? I can take it. I’m Gladiator.

Well, feeling in need of some Roman ruins we decided to rendezvous to Nimes, about 25 km from Uzes. Driving to, and parking in large French cities is not a lot of fun, so we all took the bus from Uzes to Rimes. Only 3 Euros return, centre ville to centre ville.
The Arena in Nimes is the best preserved of all 400 known Roman arenas, along with the Colluseum. It was built in the first century AD, and used for gladiatorial and other exhibitions for about 400 years. It is now used for bull fights.
The Romans of course were brilliant engineers. They moved and placed exactly huge quarried blocks of limestone to make supporting arches that held up tiered galleries and seats. In Britain, after the great land grab by Henry VIII and the Nobles that is commonly referred to as the Dissolution, the great abbeys were used as quarries for stone to build new manor houses and farm houses. But in the four hundred years that followed the erection of the great Roman structures, coinciding with the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, engineering skills were lost. It wasn’t that the Visigoths didn’t need the stone – they just didn’t know how to pull the buildings down and move the stone.
But the Arena wasn’t just abandoned. During the Renaissance it was actually a teeming city, with hundreds of houses jammed into the flat surface and into the galleries – the first high-rise accommodation if you like. It wasn’t till the French monarchy gained real power and with it the need to establish a national identity that buildings such as the Arena were cleared and restored.
The building is indeed remarkable. The galleries, entrances and seating are exactly the same as one sees at the MCG or any other modern stadium. And the shouting one hears in echoes is not for Spartacus, but for Collingwood or the Red Sox.
My favourite line from Red Dwarf comes when Rimmer starts musing on the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. How could mankind build such huge structures – was it Divine intervention, was it extra-terrestrials, was it some secret power? No, says Lister, They had whips. They had great big whips.
Chris

Mediterranean Afternoon

Way back in 2008 LouAnne joined a motley collection of American Lutheran choristers to embark on a very short concert tour of France with a particular emphasis on Provence and Marseilles. While there she was billeted by a lovely couple in Luynes, a small village just on the edge of Aix-en-Provence. So, upon return, it was only natural that she would like to revisit them and introduce Ted to them . And so it was that on Sunday morning, the two of them set off for Aix and met up with the Ariasis for a day or two of catching up. They were feted with a typical Provencal lunch of salad followed by lamb kebab (barbecue for these Aussies), a selection of local cheeses and sweets of fruits and almond biscuits. Tres magnifique! A walk along the Meditereanee followed. Not quite Bells’ Beach, but a bit more like Port Melbourne, but with rock, concrete etc. for the beach. The water was quite pleasant, especially as it was early October and unseasonably warm weather. It was evident that the local families were enjoying a final, leisurely Sunday at the beach before the colder weather sets in. On Monday Ted and LouAnne explored on foot much of old Aix. Aix is a city that began in Roman times but then stagnated until about the 1700s. There are many Roman fountains which were crucial to the water supply. However, it became very wealthy in the early 17th century and many of the buildings date from then. Perhaps Ted and LouAnne should have stayed ‘a pied’ as the car journey on the way home to Uzes included a few deviations, but in the end they and Peugeot arrived safely in Uzes where Chris and Judith had prepared a lovely meal of squid a la tomat avec vin, of which LouAnne was in great need of, given the interesting route to Uzes travelled. All of us love France and are revelling in it and all the new and challenging experiences. Viva la France.

A Week in Provence

   Well our first glorious week in Alsace is over. With around 650 km to drive between Ribeauville and Uzes in Provence we packed and left by 08:00 AM on Saturday. There were 10km of minor roads to drive on before joining the freeway system for almost 500 km and the turnoff for Uzes.  LouAnne drove the first 250 and last 150 km, and I drove the middle 250 km. 

The freeways are well used by cars, but given the population and industry of Europe there seemed to me to be far less heavy trucking on the road than we have Australia.  There are none of the huge double-B trucks that we have.  France has a very extensive and modern rail and river barge system that seems to be used more to move things around the continent.  Diesel fuel costs about $AU2.40 a litre, and all freeways are tolled. One generally picks ups a ticket entering the system, then pays at exits depending on the distance travelled.  Our tolls for the 600 km we travelled came to about $AU80.  The maximum speed limit in France of freeways is 130 km/hr.  Although one could avoid freeways there are so many small towns and large roundabouts that it would take twice as long to get anywhere.

We have a quaint two-floored apartment in the old centre of Uzes - our door first left in the photograph. All the streets in the old quarter are narrow and winding, and no on-street parking is allowed anywhere, so we are almost car free. Most residents have lock-up parking outside the old city that they walk to to get their car.  We are on the tourist discovery route, so all day there are chattering groups off tourists walking by the front door.  I am thinking of buying a striped blue tee shirt, putting on my beret, and rolling an imitation Gaulloise to stick in my lips, to see how many times I am photographed by tourists.

There are stands of postcards outside some of the shops in town.  Most are of the historic buildings of the town, or historic re-enactments. There are also lots of sepia reproductions of photographs of days of old – shepherds on stilts, blokes leading overladen asses, or peasant girls carrying bundles of sticks on their heads.  But the most interesting photographs that I have seen are in some of the historic buildings of the before and after of the restorations.  The before shots are not posed, or artistic, but real life, similar to photographs I have seen of the working ports of England, or industrial Manchester.  Life and the town are not pretty.  The buildings are crumbling, and some derelict, and the people are not smiling.  They remind me of photographs I have seen of the poor areas of Edinburgh at the end of the nineteenth century.  Many of these smaller towns faded from an earlier affluence when they were rich on the back of the textile industry, or the silk industry in Uzes before it failed when the Mulberry trees started dying from disease.  There was no commercial imperative for these towns to modernise when the large industrial cities of Nimes and Arles were thriving.  So these towns just lingered on, and faded.  In the 1960s the French government, wanting to stimulate these moribund towns, and realizing the benefits of tourism to the economy, spent a lot of money restoring key buildings and precincts in the towns. The towns themselves applied strict controls on any rebuilding.  The towns then seemed to reach a critical point where their restoration became self-generating.  The modern word for this phenomenon is “gentrification”.  It can be seen in the number of high-end European cars in off-street parking, fashion clothes people wear, and the ads in the windows of real estate shops advertising tiny apartments for sale for around $800,000.  Yet if it weren’t for this gentrification Uzes and places like it would just be towns with some wonderful buildings, rather than the really wonderful towns they are.

Anyway, like in a great relay team, I now pass the baton on to LouAnne, Ted and Judith for our wee blog.

Chris

Rest Day

Our last Friday in Ribeauville was declared a day of R & R.
Ted chose to walk up to St Ulrich’s Castle again and indulge his love of photography. There are three crumbling castles close together. They are in the Communal Forest of Ribeauville, so are maintained by the town, and access is unrestricted. One of the castles, Haut Ribeaupierre, is crumbling more than the other two, and has lots of signs in French saying access interdit. If this were in Australia or America there would be ten foot cyclone fence topped with razor wire to keep out the public. But Ted had the perfect excuse – he could not understand the French – so went in anyway and took lots of great shots.
LouAnne and Judith spent the morning catching up on emails and postcards, and in the afternoon went up to the factory shop at the Beauvillee. This factory is famed for its exquisite printed fabrics used in top level interior designing. The fabrics used to be hand-printed and dyed, and modern designs in curtain material sell for around $150 per metre. LouAnne bought a lovely runner that she plans to use as part of her Christmas setting.
I, however, was not as smart as the others. I fancied a walk along some of the footpaths, or sentiers, in the area. In Europe many of these have been linked into long-distance walking paths, or Sentiers de Grande Randonnee, that can stretch for hundreds, or thousands of kilometres through several countries. The GR5 passes through Ribeauville and its castles, and it seemed like a good idea at the time.
I rose early, and left the house at 6 AM to walk up to the castles. It is still daylight savings time in France, and sunrise isn’t till about 7:45, and I had no torch, so I had to walk up in the dark to the castles. I remembered the route from the earlier climb, so it wasn’t too hard to walk by starlight. I reached the castles by 6:30, and it was too dark to read the sign markers, so I sat in St Ulrichs castle looking down on the fairy lights of Ribeauville and the surrounding wine towns till first light and I could see to continue my walk.
The GR5 crosses the foothills of the Vosges mountains, and I had read in a guidebook the higher up Massif du Taennchel had some of the best walking in Alsace. So I left the GR5, and climbed up to the highpoint of the Vosges mountains in the area. It is only 1000 m above sea level, but has some of the most magnificent walking I have ever done. The soil is quite rich, and rainfall fairly high, so the moist forests have been spared the ravages of the wildfires that have devastated the drier southern parts of Europe. There are beautiful stands of mixed forest with huge oaks, pines, and deciduous trees.
After an exhilarating two hours I dropped back to the GR5 and continued past Haute-Koenigsbourg Castle to a small village Chatenois, then returned to Ribeauvile through non-stop vineyards and post-card villages. The Club Vosgien has marked all the sentiers with metallic markers. Sometimes four or five sentiers loop through each other, so there can be several markers on each corner. Walking back to base I passed a post to which someone had nailed two scallop shells. Litterbugs! I thought. A little further on there was a lovely stone fountain in the middle of a vineyard with a stream of cool water, and a clam shell carved into the stonework. A little further on there was a sentier marker with signs “Ribeauville 7.5 km, St Hippolyte 2.5 km, Campostela 2236 km”. I hadn’t realised that I had walked 14 km along the Campostela de Santiago, or Pilgrims Path that leads from Germany through France to Spain and St James, or Ste Jaques, or St Iagos shrine near Finisterre.
I got back to our cottage near 6 PM. I was pretty tired. I can’t understand why, as I had only walked about 40 km in the day.

Sitting Pretty

Question 3, 2003 Statistics 101 Exam
“In areas of Western Europe, such as Germany, France and Switzerland, the population of nesting storks is decreasing, and so is the human baby birth-rate. In areas of Eastern Europe, such as Poland, the population of nesting storks is still very strong, and there is a much higher human baby birth-rate. Hence storks bring babies. Discuss” etc, etc, etc….
Storks are a very elegant large white wading bird that thrive in wetlands and pasture where they live on insects, amphibians, mice, snakes and small mammals and birds. They have no fear of humans, and have long nested in towns. They are considered to bring luck to a household should they nest on buildings, and for centuries people have tried to encourage them to nest on their chimneys by putting up platforms and other inviting structures.
Storks became extinct in North Eastern France late last century, and a very committed group of naturalists is working at their reintroduction. Some towns in Alsace, including Ribeauville, have been selected for this program. A number of buildings have structures like bicycle wheels placed on chimneys in the hope that storks will nest there. Storks are like salmon, which always return to their birth place to breed, and by rearing chicks in a town, then letting them fly south on their winter migration to sub-Saharan Africa the naturalists have been able to re-establish breeding colonies. At last count there were 230 nesting pairs in Alsace.
Of course Ribeauville is now on The Stork Trail. There are maps, busloads of twitchers, memorial cups, fridge magnets and tea towels. But we saw them for free.
Chris