High Life and Low, at Laon and Arques

We just got on the ferry home. It’s warm, mildly sunny. We have driven 2,500 miles. Naturally we have been thinking about our grand tour, summing things up: what was best, what was worst, what we’d do again, etc.

One heart-stopping moment was as we drove away from the quaint hotel in Troyes yesterday morning. In a split second, we had a flat tyre, on the front nearside wheel. Of course the spare was stashed deep, deep in the boot, under all the stuff – tent, clothes, picnic kit, bags, boxes of this and that. But my dh, aka the concierge sorted it in about 20 minutes, though I noticed he did blush, or flush red, just for a short while. This was in the very heart of the town, on cobbles with narrow enfilades for the traffic, and lots of cautious drivers edging past – thankfully not offering to stop and help. My part was to find and erect the legally-required red danger triangle and place it some yards behind the car. I felt that was a truly important contribution to the exercise. Kept us safe, etc. I also helped unpack and then repack the boot with all that stuff. One day, I will really trust my experience and stop taking so much with us. Trouble is, you never know in advance what you are going to want, and sometimes, having ‘just the right thing’ saves the day. Sigh.

We had taken an hour or so after breakfast to saunter back into the town to see the cathedral which was shut the night before. We called into the might church built by Pope Urban IV right on the spot where he grew up in his father’s cobblers shop. So, dad had a smelly old leather workshop, and Urban had a colossal, stunning, huge church, right there, on the very same place. What do you think?

The church is remarkable (has a lot of really beautiful old statues, which are well labelled), but the cathedral which is a few hundred yards away is just amazing. It is HUGE. They only managed to build one of the two planned towers, and the columns which support this gleaming and highly decorated edifice are, at the base, more than 15’ across. Of course it’s been enlarged and beautified at various stages over the centuries but most of it is pre-16^th century and with its masses of stained glass and quiet aisles, it is one of the most beautiful places I can remember ever having been in. Superb.

You may wonder why a low atheist like me finds churches so interesting. First of all they are major artistic and cultural artifacts which have survived from way back in our history. Real people made them. Real people defaced them from time to time, too. They have a secret language too, can be compared to the inner space of the female body, or expressed in musical similes. It’s interesting to go and look at neolithic tombs with their dark portals, and then stand looking east inside churches. They are enclosed, they are aristocratic, or even royal, spaces which offer a springboard into eternity and the mysteries of ‘god’ and the universe. You really don’t have to be a religious person to learn from them, and like them. I am very proud of many old English churches, love them even, but it’s salutory to go and see what was happening in Europe while our own religious houses were being built. However glorious our churches are, they do (sometimes) pale into insignificance next to what the great orders were arranging in France, or Spain, or Italy, or Germany…..

Anyway, I need to report that we fitted two splendid excursions into the last few hours. One was a trip into the citadel at Laon, and the other was to see the most important bit of industrial archaeology in northern France.

At Laon, we checked into the Hotel des Arts which is near the railway station and probably not one we’d recommend to friends. It was built in the early 50s, and the service is very friendly but it’s all too flimsy and in need of an overhaul, and there is not much to stop you hearing what people are saying in the adjoining rooms and balconies (till 1.30am!).

The town has spread out on the plain around the massive rock which has attracted the attention of the high and mighty for centuries, arguably millennia. That is where all the ancient and rich buildings are, with the rif-raf spread out on the low ground all round it. We went up into the citadel, where we had been before a few years ago, and it has been improved a lot. There are a goodly selection of cafes and restaurants and useful information panels….and the abbey is just jaw-dropping to look at. But there are loads and loads of empty shops, to let or for sale, and they have just – just a month ago! - closed down the funicular railway which for a few short years carried tourists (or commuters? or shoppers?) up from the lower regions into the historic centre. All very sad. A wonderfully dikey and grumpy woman served me a glass of delicious wine while I sat and tried to draw the front of the abbey… Later she melted and showed me the label, saying lots of people ask what it is: Colombelle, l’original 2015, from Gascony.

And this is just part of it... the towers at the east end are equally amazing

Sometimes the lowly lot got the upper hand.  They massacred the bishop up there even though he was hiding inside a barrel.  But the main theme was that they only really wanted aristos in the centre (dirty tradesmen had to stay in the bourg and had their own door in the city walls). The lords and ladies and bishops etc liked looking at the amazing the views from the ramparts, where you can see for 20 or 30 miles even in the dusk. It’s terrific.

Anyway, after a poor night’s sleep in the Hotel des Arts at Laon we made our way towards Dunkirk, stopping for lunch in Arques… That proved hard to find till we did the obvious and looked around near the Mairie/Hotel de Ville. But then we went to the Ascenseur at Fontinettes.    What they had there was a problem – a difference in levels between the R Lys and the R Aa (which is, incidentally, one of my favourite names for a river, being the oldest word associated with rivers in Europe). The difference was 13m, but as the French industrial revolution unfolded they needed to connect these two waterways up.    At first, they had a series of locks, five of them. But that was very slow - ninety minutes at the very fastest, but the boats had to wait to get through and that sometimes took a week or more and some cargoes were destroyed as a result (food going bad). So, they set some men to work, and filthy hard dirty work it was. A clever engineer supervised the installation of a lifting canal system, based on what had been working very well at Manchester (Anderton Boat Lift). In 1888 they installed two huge iron basins, balanced against each other and each big enough to take one of the mighty barges, and barges could then move from one river to the other with their vital cargoes and that took much less time - less than half an hour - but they still had to queue up to get in and out. Amazingly it kept working till 1967 – but of course even these lifting locks really were too slow, so then they put in a massive huge lock and that is what is used today, to get the barges from one river to the other. Up and down.

The lifting basins are still there, sort of, rusty and roped off, and their waiting basin is grassed over, with quaint little moorings all around…. it’s all very poignant and interesting, with a band of volunteers who have amassed some marvellous old maps and photographs and made us watch a shaky old video ‘een Eenglish’ which tried to explain it all. Another place worth a visit.

I am really tired. Outside, the sea is flat calm with an impending sunset and soft sky. There is a horrid list of chores to be attended to when we get home, let alone re-acclimatising ourselves to England and its ways. Commitments, invitations, the allotment, the garden, the laundry, meetings, the clearing-up admin associated with this wonderful trip. The concierge and I have had a lovely time, seen some of the true wonders of the world, learned that we still get along quite well, and can even manage our occasional bad temper with a laugh.

Old France, new France and how I miss Miss Baxter

In the 1970s I used to stay at a hotel in Paris called the Britanique, near Chatelet. It was owned and run by the slightly terrifying Miss Baxter, who had inherited it from her Scottish father. She spoke little English but demanded her British title and was fiercely proud of the whole establishment. It had been commandeered by the Germans during the war, and when they left, they tried to burn all their paperwork in the beautiful stone fireplaces - which cracked under the heat.   On our first visit, the toilets etc were down the corridor. Then she installed basins and bidets in each room, behind a little screen. Later, she cornered off small sections to make bathrooms inside each of the rooms....   Now, the whole thing is owned and managed by a large company and way out of our price range and I see that on their website they are not sure if the name has one 'n' or two.  But this story is all about how individual ownership and pride is slipping away, to the great loss and detriment of France's spirit.

In Lyon, on Tuesday night/two nights ago, we were staying in a 19th century chateau now closely surrounded by apartment blocks and suburbia. Its balconies and cellar-fronts were held up with acrow-props and scaffolding. The door was shy and hidden.  The owner was charming and determined. The decor was quirky (selling point). The woodwork had all been tanked so there was a strong smell of recently-stripped pine.    To get in and out you had to unlock and then relock three doors.  To get from the bed to the toilet was quite a long walk, despite being en suite.  The bathroom washbasin was set on top of an old cupboard and was about 18" too high, and too far back to lean over. At breakfast,  everything was set up in readiness for us, long, long before we got to the table. The croissants had been heated under the grill and were burned on top.  But - it was shining with pride and individuality. Someone, madame, cared.

Coming north - of course, I will report that it gets more 'English' the further we come along, that is to say, we now see oak trees and beech trees, in the tracts where vines and sunflowers give way.  We have come up past such veritable names - Cremant de Bourgogne (which marries the expertise of Champagne to the wines of Burgundy), Nuits St Georges, Gevrey-Chambertin, and so on, and sped past. This is not a wine-tasting trip. Here we are, after hurtling a long way, in Troyes.

I had no idea, not an inkling, what an amazing place this is. Blissfully untouched by either of the World Wars its historic centre is an astonishing collection of 15th and 16th century houses made of wood and three or four stories high, laid out on a medieval pattern and still served by churches of such flamboyance and staggering beauty that it takes your breath away. Money has poured in for restoration and modernisation, so there are squares and flowery plantings and fountains.
   

They call it France's hidden secret treasure, and apparently very few people come here. We have ourselves driven past it on numerous occasions and never known what we were missing. For anyone who likes history, or architecture, this has to be on your list.

The story-board by the cathedral is simmering with rage that in 1420, France's shameful treaty signing the whole country over to Henry V, was carried out in the building. (I say, well, just roll back 5 years, mateys.....).

A highlight was wandering into a litle tabac for a pre-dinner drink. There the owner was smoking like the old days, and had a remarkable display of forms of tobacco behind the bar.  At least eight shelves with at least 32 different brands of ciggies on each, and then further rows of pipe tobacco and loose packs for roll-ups. The Alsatian wine he poured for me into a small elegant green-stemmed glass was utterly delicious, and that plus a glass of eau gazeuze for Andrew came to €3.80.  A drunk was propped up by the bar. One or two older but very pretty ladies came in, kissed everyone though not us. Lights flashed. It was lovely.

And when we sat to eat last night, we got into conversation with a young couple on the adjoining table, and within less than a minute I happened to mention the whale-watching we'd enjoyed on the ferry from Portsmouth to Bilbao, and they said they OWN a whale-watching company in Canada! It's called Pacificprodive.com   So we had a very jolly conversation and once again we agreed that it's these little meetings and interludes which make travelling so interesting. I do so very much like North Americans who venture out of their huge continent.

Anyway, back to my theme.  Troyes is magic, but you know, for some reason, the cafe district is just a bit less than...... There are masses of choices for where to go, but something horribly samey about them all.  We chose one because...?  The service was skimpy and very very slow. They brought the wrong order - that is to say, andouilettes for both of us, which was not ok. My pork, when it finally arrived, had a very nice winey sauce but the meat was dry and really not worth the death of the poor piggie. The chips were inedible though I know that's standard now in France, as it is in English cafes and restaurants. I thought longingly of the outstanding chips cooked in goose-fat which we ate at lunch with my sister overlooking the River Tarn, down in the south, just a week or so ago, the best part of that meal.  The staff were young and looked overworked to me. We had to go and find someone to give our money to when we wanted to leave and then found ourselves pursued because someone else thought we hadn't paid. Just, bleh.  No-one really in charge, no-one really cares.

And here we are in an hotel called Brit Comte de Champagne (and that word 'Brit' seems to attract English-speakers), inside a little run of those astonishing jettied wooden  buildings, and how I wish we had been here ten or twenty years ago.  It's been 'done up' and the prices raised accordingly. The ancient wooden beams have all been painted, there's something corporate about the common parts, grand glass doors, shiny stuff.  It's true that up here in the bedroom the 'bathroom' has been squeezed into the corner just like Miss Baxter did in her rooms in Paris forty years ago, with flimsy walls and the floor sloping to accommodate the shower waste-pipe. And the bathroom is TINY. You have to move the little rubbish bin outside if you want to sit on the loo.  There's only room for one bedside table. The wardrobe is grandly described as un placard but is really just a tiny space with a sliding door, which is itself rather grandly panelled and wallpapered and has two handles though you can only reach one of them. The very few electric sockets in the room are arranged in various inaccessible places - near the ceiling in the bathroom, behind the headboard of the bed (which is luckily loose so you can reach it by rearranging the whole bed).... The wifi is intermittent.  The floorboards in the corridors squeak, which used to be the sign of a good hotel.  So, it has all the wondrous trappings of old France, but I fear it's now owned and managed as part of new France.  What we like about this hotel is all the quaintness.... Somehow, the awkwardness of the old ways is ok, while the slapdash money-grabbing of the new ways is not.  (Though I have to concede it's great having the car tucked into the garage downstairs, included in the price).

Still I will leave you with this pretty picture which I snapped while we wandered around... There are three huge fountains in what must once have been a barge basin down by the river and canals. Just look how pretty it is.....

International whirlpool

In Arles I noticed that if I saw someone consulting a tourist map, I thought (somehow) that was an intelligent and purposeful thing to do... but every time I had to stop and consult a map myself, I must look like a dumb tourist. Note to self, stop thinking everything you do is pathetic.

One of the first bits of French I ever learned was that song: Sewer le pong, Davinyong....' and it's been a life's ambition to go and dance on the bridge at Avignon, so we went to do that yesterday. The flat sandy white muddy powdery land gradually makes space for a few trees as you head north, and some of these trees do very delightfully enter into a visual duet with the shape of the church towers - something we've noticed through all our travels on this trip.

I had this sad feeling - that old France has almost completely disappeared. New France (shopping precincts, MacDs, fast food in general, roundabouts, etc etc etc) has swept in very swiftly and vigorously and there are the empty relics of the lovely old ways all along the old roads.... Buildings which were once family-run restaurants all shuttered up, little garages with deco writing now derelict. All the money, the care and maintenance, has gone and that way of life looks dusty and worthless.

At Avignon, there are a number of new bridges over the Rhone now of course and I had a nagging feeling the old one may have disappeared altogether through bombing or other mishap... We scared ourselves down through narrow passageways and enfilades into an underground parking - Hades has levels (niveaux) and we were 4 down, well inside the astonishing city walls, as it turned out. We had a coffee overlooking the river at a very nice quayside bar and then walked along to 'the' bridge. It's still there - or most of it, and that broken appearance is the whole cause of the song, the story, the romance ...

Whatever myths were spun about a man from the north challenging the bishop and picking up a huge stone to prove that God had indeed sent him to build a bridge at Avignon, they seem to have got their act together in that remarkable age - the end of the twelfth century, getting part of the way at any rate and incorporating a chapel of sorts into their structure. Looking at the river now, it's wide and powerful but not particularly difficult-looking from an engineering point of view (she says grandly). The problems come with the floods. Getting the bridge to span the whole width and stay there, even with islands to help, proved over the centuries to be impossible. They were using wood and stone, as archaeology has now revealed. Kings and princes (and more bishops, and even popes) came to get it going - but in the end it was the mini-Ice Age which did for it - bringing great chunks of ice to smash it at surface level, and scouring waters to wash away the footings.  Eventually Louis XIV came to look and they all danced about a bit (not for the first time, hence the song) and decided to stop trying. So the beautiful bridge goes about two-thirds over the river and then stops.    Traffic to and from the north could continue with its sails and oars and horses and men to pull, but traffic east-west was back at a trickle. Salt smuggling was a big-time thing.  The museum/information in and around the bridge is absolutely terrific, it's worth every penny of the €4 to get in, compared with the very poor value (€3) for entry to Constantine's Thermal Baths at Arles.    We spent a goodly while there, and, yes, we did dance on the bridge......

Bashing up the motorway to Lyon was hard work, and there was a noticeable change in the weather and (somehow) the whole culture (landscape, architecture, light, industry....) as we crossed a high pass of about 300m somewhere 30 miles short of our destination. The heat of summer fled. Suddenly we were in an international traffic flow - lorries from Hungary, Spain (olá!), Finland, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Lithuania, Croatia, Italy... None from England.

We were in a traffic jam - the first on this whole holiday! Our hotel for the night is called Une nuit au chateau, and is in a leafy uphill suburb of the city. It's slightly like my granny's house in London - a touch of Gothic, but propped up with scaffolding here and there. Hard to see where the entrance is... the sign turned out to be less than half an inch high by a bell by a garden gate. We rang. Madame appeared, unlocking everything in true concierge style, and brought us into the house. It is painted in lots of weird colours and furnished with various bizarre arty objects (her son went to art college).  The tiny breakfast room is brilliant vivid green.  Our suite was miniscule and the lavvy down the corridor - she assured me it was only shared with herself.   She showed us another suite available - for 95€ instead of €75 - a vast salon, painted cocoa brown and rather pretty, with an ensuite bathroom featuring a ladder and a second-hand whirlpool bath (not to be used after 9.30pm because of the noise).  We took it.

To get into Lyon, we caught a bus to another suburb and then found the 'funiculaire' which (on the same ticket) swept us down two stops to the old city. The cathedral is adorned with quite a few (many) beggars and homeless people who could comfortably be given space inside, but on the other hand is of free entry and clean and wondrous inside. The glory is really the medieval stained glass, and the modern windows too.  I liked very much the one telling the story of the life of John the Baptist, where Salome is shown dancing in front of King Herod and Herodias, and she's doing a sort of limb-dance, bent right over backwards.  She must have been quite a gymnast.

Across one river (Saone) we strolled and found a vast square, the Place de Bellcourt, big enough for a military parade ground which is what it may once have been of course, since it was Napoleon who built that particular bridge.  Cafe life, students, bars, evangelists, cyclists, children, all good things were going on.  We went to the other river (Rhone) and admired that too. Eventually we found somewhere to sit and have a drink, and then strolled back towards the cathedral for supper. There are still a few, very few, bits of old France left preserved as glittering tourist attractions - tiny dark brown home-like cafes, and more sophisticated mirror-clad gilded places which Toulouse-Lautrec would have recognised... these are survivors only because romantic tourists come to use them and marvel. The change in cuisine was striking - here the offerings are based on les abats or what we would call offal: liver, kidneys, brains, tripe, sausages, etc., all very rich and with a powerful tradition of sauces and presentation. However, we chose our restaurant not only for its menu but because it had wifi. That has been a theme throughout the holiday.  In fact we moved from one room/table to another because the promised signal was too weak.

We were joined on a neighbouring table by a delightful American couple from Reno, Nevada, who are keen travellers in Europe and actually thinking of buying a house of their own at Beaune, their favourite place.  This is their third trip and they were hoping their flight home to the States from Heathrow might be delayed so they could spend some time in London.  Karen and Tony - hi! Welcome to the blog.

We made it back to the chateau via funicular and bus, so many people around, more like Spain than France.

It's nearly time for breakfast now. I have just had, for the first time in my life, a dip in a whirlpool bath...... All I can say is, my bidet at home is more satisfactory.

The attraction of marshes

Marshes are pretty addictive places, if you are at all claustrophobic. The skies are more or less infinite. If the marsh is big enough, you can even detect the curvature of the earth on the horizon, as you can at sea.
The Camargue is one of the most famous marshes on the planet. That is surprising given that it is not really all that big. Compared to the rest of France, it's just a postage stamp. But it has a magic pull. It produces rice, and white horses, and little black bulls, and shimmering images which are exploited by the tourist boards and poets, and it had Vincent van Gogh along to paint a picture of a bridge, which all helps.
The remarkable thing is that it was a drink manufacturer who seems to have both helped to preserve it and to promote it. One Paul Ricard who was successful enough with his pastis to buy a great chunk of it, and then fling money at it and figure out how to make it work. So at Méjane, in the middle of the marsh, he set up a domaine and that's where you can go and ride on the white horses with their sweet expressive faces and long tails, or go on a little train ride for a safari to see the flamingos, or you can just walk on a trail of a mile or so, all for free, and see for yourself how they flood the land to grow the famous riz de Camargue, or see the great Etang de Vaccares where the sea has taken so much of the land back, and where the flamingos pad about in the distance. It is brilliant.

If you head on further south, to Saintes Maries de la Mer, you can see where thousands of French folk come for their summer holidays every August in low-lying modern holiday villages, the beach divided into small paddocks, and a wide variety of ice-cream on sale along the coast road just behind a great sea wall.
In Arles, the Roman city built where the Rhone splits into two, you can luxuriate in a mass of tiny medieval alleys and lanes, with gorgeous little piazzas, and stupendous antiquities up at the top of the hill. In the evening, as when we arrived, it's quaint and charming. In the morning, as we returned, it's awash with coach parties and tour groups being harangued in French, German, English, Scottish, American, god knows what.  A lot rests on Vincent's shoulders - for instance, what else are they going to say about the hospital where he was sent by the Mayor after he'd cut off part of his ear? It's a nice cloistered building, with a dazzling flower display in the middle, some tat shops, some students trying to get past the tourists, and - well - Vincent.

Actually, they do have, on the wall in the entrance of the hospital a lovely plaque commemorating a man who really did spend his life trying to improve things for people.....

The Thermal Baths of Constantine are quite fun. A very good place to understand how hypercausts work, and with a story reminiscent of the fate of Diocletian's Palace at Split. That is to say, once the Romans had gorn, ordinary folk moved in. Turned the buildings into tenements and lived there in non-Roman merriment for a thousand years or so until some antiquarians came along and said, 'Lumme! Look here at this marble column, this bit of vaulting...' or whatever. With some diligent clearing away (too diligent, in some cases) they were able to reveal a large part of the once-thronging hot baths of the Romans.  It is pretty amazing to think that in a place where, for hundreds of years, loads of people came to bathe, sweat, laugh, flirt, wash, play, chat, whatever, for all that time, they probably thought it would go on forever! But now the place stands stripped apart, naked, dry and dusty, with no hint of water anywhere, let alone nice warm pools or slaves to scrub you down, or sweetmeats to nibble, or bottles of oil to coat your body with.  Just a few gaunt brick walls, a bit of a dome, some boilers and underfloor stuff, and some modern steel gantry walkways for idle tourists to clamber around. The info said, entry was free or very cheap when the baths were in use. Not any more.  €3, no concessions, no guidebook.

Nearby is a church built in the early 1200s for or by the Frères Pecheurs - the fishermen. It too disappeared into a domestic use for centuries, its cloister carved up into apartments, and now standing empty and unadorned, used for theatrical and arts events. We snuck in to admire its cracks and dirt, its oldness.  A de-rig team was clearing a lot of stuff out after a Tango Festival.   

Arles has also been celebrating its Rice Festival and a Photographic Festival and is about to have a Book Festival. They work hard at extending the season and making things interesting, though we met at least two other couples who (like us) were sad that the Vincent van Gogh Exhibition (his influence on other artists) had closed, with no notice of future Vincent events.   

There is so much more here to see. Various friends have (via Facebook) said how much they love it, and we'll have to come back. We have enjoyed staying in a little hotel on the other side of the river, the 'Mestre' of Arles if you like, so we have to walk across the river to get to the cafes and the rest of the historic centre. But the whole town has a real dignity and integrity... real people living and working here, and not just a picture-perfect tourist trap.

Family

We have spent the last few days at my sister's house near Moissac, and today we are moving on, booked into an hotel at Arles. I know almost nothing of Provence and it's our plan to drive up the Rhone valley and into Germany... If time allows we will go to Wuppertal to see the suspended railway, one of Andrew's ambitions.
Here at Panel there have been quite a few changes in the two years since we were last here. All the houses have been given numbers - to help the sapeurs-pompiers, or the ambulances, in case of emergency. The old ways - where everyone just 'knows' where everyone else lives - are not fit for purpose. So this little house, whose address is just 'Panel', the name of the hamlet, will now be known with a number and street name.
The landscape has had me enthralled, with its small valleys and fields, little woods, rolling shapes and winding roads. I have tried to paint it, draw it, but not very successfully. One problem is that everyone else's timetable has to be fitted in - driving here, driving there, visitors coming, going to the market, booking in for lunch.  This is part of my pilgrimage experience - how to adapt to the moment and yet allow myself to be or see or have what I feel I need.
As we drove up from the Pyrenees, which I have not really recorded for you, we were following the Garonne which in Spain was left with visible bed-boulders and low water, which instantly, at the French border became a deep, calm, watery river (completely different management objectives, I suppose). Very near here it blends with the Tarn, presenting a magnificent huge wide calm open space with impressive bridges.
We passed various small towns - one in particularly dragged us in by waving a fortified church at us over the horizon. That was Simorre, with a 12th Benedictine glory in a small place, and I loved a tiny house (one of many for sale - petit prix).  Eventually I spoke to the vendor, English, Geoffrey - who said 'In its present state, I'm asking €60,000....'  I would offer 25, but I don't really want a house, however tempting, in the Gers.  So sweet.
On Thursday, we went for lunch to the Uvarium, a splendid little Deco pavilion in Moissac, right on the banks of the river - very very beautiful place.  It was originally built by the commune as a spa when the local mills closed, but its been through many uses and is now a fancy-pants diner. How they manage to produce so many meals from a portacabin in the gardens is a mystery.  Later we went on a mini-cruise in a little pleasure boat. €9 each for an hour, with a detailed commentary in French, for up to 12 people.  I could understand some of what the lady said, and it was really amazing what she found to say about just a mile or so of river - the history (Napoleon, the mills, the Uvarium, the wildlife, the camping, the railway bridge, the canal-viaduct going over the river, the blend of Tarn et Garonne, the Canal-Deux-Mers, the local sports, etc etc....   A lovely interlude. My sister recently went with some friends on this same boat as a booze-cruise. They had it to themselves and brought champagne with them....
Today in the pretty field across the valley a man is standing stock-still, wearing orange neon gilet, and I guess part of the chasse. Here they hunt wild boar, deer, pheasants, anything that moves.  My sister had told them she didn't want la chasse on her land, and they have been courteous about it - once bringing her a huge plastic bag of bloodied parts after they had - with her permission - come onto the field in front of her house. This was too much for her - the blood, the skin and bone and hair, so it was given to friends who reported how delicious it all was.
Now the croissants have arrived, time for breakfast, and then we're off.  We have a day's schlep ahead of us.

Slate roofs

Not much time to write this morning but here are some scribbled points…

Leaving Barbastro to the NE bring you to quite different countryside – a charming, semi-green undulating landscape, which sets up a good mood. We were heading for the sierra and it surprised me how much I was pleased to see the hills getting higher. Why should that be? No doubt it would have been different if I was walking or biking but the car did all the work. What it culminated in was a sort of silent but powerful announcement by the rocks which said … ‘ You think you know about mountains? Well, just get this! What you saw before was nothing. I! I! am a mountain!!’ because as we headed towards the French border, at the end of each successive distant gorge we could see something even higher, and higher, and higher…..

Two years ago we made our crossing from Spain to France having stayed in Ainsa, and then taken the Bielsa tunnel which straddles the border, so you go in in Spain and come out in France and it was quite a striking change – road-signage, tone, culture. This time, the main tunnel is fully inside Spain and the border will be on the road. Vielha is our stopping point and we knew nothing of it, except that our hotel claimed to be giving us a cabin on a boat which seemed extremely unlikely – reminiscent of Mount Ararat and Senor Noah.

As you get up into the mountains – certainly at this time of year – you start to get far more colours – the blues of the sky, the brushes of gold and bronze on the trees, the rocks themselves which are crazy mad for colour – greys and whites, blacks, reds, oranges, greens, in streaks and swirls. Sometimes the strata in the rocks are unsullied, still horizontal. Sometimes everything’s been squished into folds and bends. Some areas look as they are completely composed of pebbly detritus. And there are lakes up here, some apparently natural, left over from the ice age, and some are reservoirs. We stopped to look at one of these and found a sweet old Spanish couple poring over a mass of maps spread out on the bonnet of their car (the maps, not the people). They were almost in tears, spoke no English, but wanted to know how to get to Ainsa… We showed them the way, using our own maps and they noted everything down and followed us for a while….They were heading for the Parador up in that valley and assuming they made it, they will have had a beautiful drive.

We stopped at Graus (even the name looks Austrian) for coffee – again, a small river which must once have been the life-life of the pueblo now runs along the backs of the newer houses. A side-street goes to the school and traffic is barred because it’s a road for scholars. The bridge is high up over the water – we see rocks, swirls, eddies, some landscaping along the banks to create a patch of slower water. The loo in the cafe (like all we have seen in Spain) is a work of art. You get there by way of gleaming marble steps down in the basement, with ankle-level lighting, and that comes on without you having to touch a switch. You get into the ladies, and as the door swings open, once again the lights come on. In my cubicle, the lavatory flushed (with joy?) the moment I stepped inside. However it was more reluctant to perform when I wanted it to….. The funny thing is that the top of the stairwell, in the cafe itself, is guarded by thick dado-height marble walls, and these start very very close to the main wall of the room so you have to sidle, twiddle quite sideways to actually get onto the stairs. If you were disabled in any way, or had a child or used a stick, it would be awkward and quite impossible if you were in a wheelchair. You have to go and pee by the river I suppose.

The entry to Veilha is through a spectacular gorge (name to be supplied when I see the map again), absolutely thrilling stuff… Not unlike the journey we made on foot in the Roman goldmine a week or so ago but this time on a colossal scale – between parallel cliffs of dark and looming rock, with a rushing river on one side and barely room for the traffic on the heroic road engineered beneath the towering sides of the valley. It’s really dark down there, because it’s so deep.

Vielha is a shock – totally different from anything else we’ve seen – slate roofs, tall apartment blocks with wide eaves, really very Alpine in appearance. It has several rivers in the town, very little signage about which hotels are where, and some of the streets in different parts of town have the same name which is a bit confusing. We did spend a long time trying to find Calle Major, which is in any case spelled differently on the various satnav map databases… The Tourist Information is also in a pedestrian area of the town so not visible from the road, and it’s all very silly. The room in our hotel (booking.com) had been on a special offer but that did not explain the consequence – the view from the window was of the arse-end of next door, a shed mounted on a wall, filled with old junk and plastic cleaning stuff. Horrible and not ok for our last night…. ‘We didn’t come all this way…...’ etc. The girl on reception was very kind and took pity on us, gave us a more expensive room for the same price, with a balcony. The whole hotel (Riu Nere) is modernised with amazing wooden cladding and huge numbers, but doesn’t have a boat or a cabin as the website promised.

The town has a good and complicated history, centred in the Val de Aran, which has over the centuries belonged to (or paid tax to) Spain, France, Aragon, and is now Catalonian. The languages are unbelievably complicated – Basque, Spanish, Catalan, Aranese, Aragonese, Occitan….. One useful starting point is that ‘eth’ means ‘the’. And ‘aran’ means ‘valley’ in Basque. But it’s very hard to understand anything which is said. There was no direct road to Spain till 1924, and the first tunnel wasn’t made till 1948. They had to use mule trains for most their history – carting stuff out and bringing food back – they never grew enough to feed themselves and the population has been small and vulnerable till the last 30 or so years when skiing has been promoted and then less seasonal activities – walking, gourmet visits, nature, hiking, biking, etc. It is now pretty well a pure tourist-trap.  It is popular with Israelis, who perhaps remember that the locals here did them good service rescuing Jewish families during the Holocaust.  

The church is gorgeous – lavishly restored – with a 12^th century nave and 16^th century domes – very small and sweet. The army had its ski-training base here – the site of the barracks is now a huge carpark. It was embarrassing when the generals tried to take over the government – the locals had to tell the army they weren’t wanted…… The rivers head off in various directions – two to the Med, but the Garona goes north, into France where it becomes the Garonne, and we will follow it today to my sister’s house north of Toulouse.

Last night (boo hoo) we met a cheerful group of English people – he and she have been coming here for 35 years. He is in television…. They love skiing. Her sister and bro-in-law were here for their first visit in 16 years, and they were on the town’s pub crawl which is called Pintxo Pote, organised by the civic authorities.