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