Les Pissoirs de Paris

When I was first in Paris, in the early eighties, these wonderful pissoirs still existed. Some were real design wonders in Art Nouvais style cast iron, and some were quite simple. The ones I used only had an outer shell which held a trough that men would urinate into. The outer covering started at knee height, so people walking by would see the shins and shoes of men relieving themselves.
The British and Australians of course were much more reserved than the French. When a student at Melbourne University I used to pass a wonderful green cast iron pissoir in Lonsdale Street. It was off course full-length to hide what was happening inside.
Now of course, things have changed. I am not sure if we now want to hide anything to do with bodily functions, or whether governments no longer think it their responsibility to cater for them. The pissoirs have gone, and not been replaced.
So now, in large cities, when one is in need of a natural break, it is quite an ordeal to find an appropriate place. The old versions of Lonely Planet would suggest that one just nick into nearby bar to use the toilet. But the bar owners are sick of this freeloading, so now many of them have an electronic lock that is operated from the counter. So you have to buy a coffee, and ask for the door to be unlocked. The trouble is that coffee is a diuretic, so you soon have to find another bar...
The old versions of Lonely Palnet would also suggest that one nick into McDonalds. But McDonalds are wise to this, so toilet doors now have a code lock. The daily code is at the bottom of the receipt for the Big Mac or coffee you have just had to buy.
There are pay toilets in all the large public parks and museums.
Off course some people can't, and some won't pay to go to the toilet. The unfortunate consequence of this is that when one gets off the fancy boulevards and streets, and into the back alleys and shaded corners, there is the horrible reek of urine. A romantic stroll along the quais on the banks of the Seine, and under the wonderful bridges is beset by the unmistakable stench of urine.
Bring back les pissoirs de Paris !!

Chris

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