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