Rocks and mountains

The valley is formed from massive impressive glaciated mountains with almost edibly delicious swirls and stripes of different coloured rocks, towering cliffs and rounded peaks, terrifying drops and what seem to be totally inaccessible hanging valleys and forests high above. A national park was created back in 1918, and it's now part of the UNESCO world heritage conservation programme due to the precious diversity and pristine atmosphere.

You can see the Torla Fold on the left of this picture 

You are only allowed to get up to the park on a bus, and we (being old) had a price reduction for our tickets. There was a long queue to get onto a bus, and each bus has kennels underneath for lucky pooches being taken walkies in tham thar hills. (It does look a bit like a Western movie).

We did our five miles or so along a rough but well-maintained gravelly pathway - boulders, sand, rocks, some parts paved where mountain streams are likely to wash the road away, some very loose scree. How this path survives winter snows and melts is a question.
Parts of the path almost looked like somewhere in Surrey - till you look up and see the massive mountains above you, through the trees. Far, far above.  In the slightly misty air it was hard to estimate how far away they are, how tall.  In fact they are getting on for 3000m high.
It was really amazing the number of people and how old and how young they were, we saw on the path. The map says it's an hour to the first waterfall, but we found it was quite a lot longer than that, even going at a fair lick.   We saw lots of babies being carried back-pack style, tiny toddlers, slightly disgruntled young teens, masses of hefty keen walkers, many older or even elderly couples or groups.  The young couples ignored us.  The families were friendly.  It was the older people who were most likely to say 'Olá!' or give us some other greeting.   We estimated that even at this time of year there must be well over a thousand people trekking along to see the waterfalls every day, and we were on just one of many possible paths through the park. There are loos at the carpark area, but none along the route. So, occasionally, as on the famous St James camino pathways, you see scraps of tissue where people have ducked behind trees for a pee or more.  The climb (which is not just up but also down and up) is said to be about 100m altitude - but the waterfalls are beautiful, interesting and noisy. 
We had noticed that some areas of paving in Broto and Torla have strange undulated veins running over them, reminiscent of the blood vessels on the coats of some well-groomed horses, and I asked via Facebook what this effect is called. It led to an interesting debate, with one friend, Duncan Grant, promptly sending a reference to something called the Torla Fold (see left of photo above), which is a mighty toffee-like squidgey sandwich of rock stripes bending back on itself, which we could see from our lunchtime seats in an excellent tapas bar.  There were no clear answers about this paved surface, but it sent us out to do more research and we came to the conclusion that it's a natural effect of the solidified rock being laid down as mud (500 million years ago), possibly heated, with possible intrusions, some of which look like white marble, and some of which are these thready decorations.  Very handy as a foot surface in a place with such icy winters.

The hotels all close for 3 months a year, maybe the whole village shuts down. There's no ski-ing here.
Our final call of the day was to break into prison, the Torre de Carcel de Broto which I mentioned before. The gaoler is now a very pleasant housewife who lives just along the alley. The tower looks pretty much like an ordinary house. However, it has three floors. The lowest is a cellar or warehouse, now completely separate from the museum, accessed from the street below, further down the hill. The prison is a stone room about fifteen feet square, lit only by two miniscule squints to the west.  No facilities at all, walls all blackened and sooty, or just dirty.  The top chamber presumably belonged to the Magistrate, with a barrel-vaulted roof, a proper window space though no fireplace, and a magnificent, well-designed bog in the wall, complete with a cylindrical stone drop for his poo to go down through to some unknown heap somewhere below.  The whole message of this was, I suppose, to emphasise that prisoners had to live in their own squalor. The ongoing fight for use of the high mountain pastures was always going to be hazardous, with the risk of imprisonment in dungeons like this if you were caught by the other side.  The prison seems to have been in use for hundreds of years. The prisoners - some of them - artists and free spirits - spent their time carving holy graffiti into the blackened walls of their cell - saints, musicians, soldiers, a Calvary, geometric shapes, crosses, animals, lots of free-flying birds....  They must have used little shards of stone to while away their stinking hours, in the near pitch darkness, drawing images of radiant light and godliness.
Life in the mountains is always going to be tough, breeding tough people with a strong spiritual quality. They apparently need few 'things' to help them live in these vast stony valleys. Just their eyes.

Day three post crash

I have hesitated to resume the blog, for various reasons. I felt very trembly and weak, for one thing. And life, ordinary life, suddenly seemed a bit trivial after the eyeball-searing moment watching the huge camion bearing down onto our car.
However, things seem to be resuming more of an ordinary cast.
More than anything else I want to celebrate being alive!
We drove - the next day - and despite my sister's wish that we stay on longer, into Spain, through the Bielsa tunnel in the end.  Lunch en route at the Les Routiers in Masseube which was wonderful, well attended and we recommend it if you are passing.

The countryside in France is so completely ordered, buckled down, managed, signposted, controlled - and the minute you get into Spain not only does the sun come out of the mist, but everything relaxes. That in itself seemed an endorsement of joy.
It was a long day's drive and I noticed I did actually flinch each time a lorry came towards us, or too close, even though my husband (who I often call The Concierge but should in this instance have titled The Chauffeur) is a very safe (even boring) driver.
The mountains shouted their magnificence.
The road twisted and wound its way.
We saw vultures - griffon vultures? And an eagle.
We saw waterfalls.
Glory glory.
To think I might have missed all that.
Our hotel was Completo (but we had a room reserved). The room turned out to have its own sitting room attached, and a balcony, and stupendous views.  The price including parking and an excellebnt breakfast was €60 for the two of us. No wonder it was Completo.
We found a sort-of rough tapas bar for a light supper.... workmanlike would be the word.
I slept like a log, the minute my head hit the pillow I think. Exhausted (and no wonder, with all that flinching).
We spent the day visiting the area - two villages in particular - Broto a little further down the valley, and Fragen, smaller and hanging above Torla. Torla itself is the main jumping off place to go and visit the National Par of Ordesa, twenty minutes away by bus (no cars allowed).  The whole place closes down from November to March. One characteristic of this town is the sweet medieval double-arch stone windows set into the strong square stone walls.  
In neither Broto nor Fragen did we spot anything like these, though all three have wonderful columnar stone chimneys with decorations on top.  In Torla, some of the roofs have these knives or cutters which diminish the impact of snowslides (mini avalanches) by slicing the snow-mats into strips. The very old houses have stone slab roofs. The very new houses do not have these gadgets.

Broto was bombed to bits in the 1930s and has been well rebuilt with modern housing and hotels around its medieval centre, and it has a fantastically beautiful waterfall (cascada) about 5 minutes easy walk from the centre.
The main topic of history is the centuries of warfare with the French, disputing ownership of the high pastures.  Wherever we go, it's war, war, war.... until my lifetime (at least in my part of the world, Europe).
My golden life. Which I still have.
We moved to another hotel which had space, and we're here for 2 nights. Now we're off to the National Park, and later will try to get into the prison at Broto when it opens this evening to see the carved art on its walls, made by people travelling through, or incarcerated for squabbling with (killing?) the French, or the Spanish.

 

Crash

The lorry hit us very fast and very hard. I thought, 'We are going to die'. We spun round. The air turned brown.  We came to a stop. I thought, 'We are ok'.

The engine part of the car was smashed. The lorry came to a stop 100 metres down the road on its side. Everything was very quiet. No-one around.

I opened the car door, got out.  I thought, 'I hope we don't have fire!'

I thought, 'I don't know the right number to call for the police...'

Steam, white vapour came from what should have been the underside of the lorry.  My sister and her friend Kate were still in the car.  I didn't want to go to the lorry. I thought, 'I hope that guy is ok. There's no way I could get to him, or get him out.'

At last I saw a man from the garage on the corner coming out into the open. He was on the phone. He would be calling the emergency services.

I couldn't find my glasses - it's hard to use the phone without them as the text is too small. I couldn't remember my sister's home number by heart, wanted to call her house to summon her husband and mine.   I tried.  It rang and rang. After a long time, Chris answered. I told him about the crash. Told him where we were - the road numbers at the crossroads.

I talked to Sheila and Kate. Eventually they got out of the car too.

People started to appear.  This must have been ten minutes after the crash. I took a couple of photos - it was hard to know what to do, what I could add.  An emergency crew arrived, parked by the lorry which was slung right across the main road, a complete barrier.  The road remained barred, by the way, for several hours.

A car stopped - some other people who were heading to the same social meeting we had been going to. They said they'd send someone back to be with us, and pass on the info that we were all right.

Teams of ambulances, police, fire engines, SAMU, doctors arrived.  There were a very great number of them.  They kept asking us, name, age, date of birth, address.... all written on random pieces of paper. It took a while for them to sort us out. Three old English women, two living in the area, one from England.  Each service seemed to need the same information, kept asking us.  Maybe this is a way for them to establish who is or is not compos mentis.

Eventually, about fifty minutes after I'd rung, Andrew and Chris arrived. By then we were in our various ambulances, having blood pressure and questions and palpations done.  They kept us separate. Kate was breathalysed twice, and had her tongue scraped for drug evidence. They kept shutting the doors of my ambulance till I said I was a bit claustrophobic and needed them open - so I had a bit of light, and air.

Two fighter aircraft flew over, very loud and very low. Practice. It seemed like an underlining of some sort of message - that there are powerful forces way out of control, which can affect us at any moment.

The medics took us to Cahors hospital - quite a long way away. We went in convoy, one in each ambulance.  I was strapped down onto my trolley-bed like a parcel on the top of a bus... and I had to talk (in French) to the young guy whose job it was, presumably, to keep me awake. That was tiring. Dredging up the right vocabulary for all these things - it took about another hour.

Then more checks, everything calm, polite, efficient. It all stopped for lunch. Then Kate and I were told we were free to go, Sheila had to have some sort of scan as she may have damaged her spleen.  Chris and Andrew had had lunch while we were being seen, brought us some pretty awful sandwiches (yum yum) and took Kate and I home. Chris then set off again to collect Sheila.

The afternoon was warm enough. I sat behind the house to paint the landscape which I have painted many times before, with the tiny road rising up the hill and bending out of sight. It's fascinating and very difficult to capture.  Looking at the painting now I can see how swiftly I did it.

There was a lot of driving during the day - to Cahors and back. France is so beautiful. I was longing just to stop. To sit and do nothing. To contemplate the grass, the hills, the winding roads, the insects.  To ponder how it was that by one split second we had avoided instantaneous pulverisation and death.

The River Loire is familiar to us from numerous luminous paintings made by great artists, and since one of the purposes of this journey is to improve my own artistic style and standards, I had to try to make a record of it for myself. It is a strangely non-existent river, hidden in this central section by massive banks on either side, each carrying two-way traffic. The water lies low in the middle, fringed by shallow beaches, islands, shrubbery, and sands. What is compelling is the light which spreads over the whole broad scene, dragging your eye away and upwards, and into the past too, to imagine how this may have been in the old days, and whether Romans and dinosaurs saw much the same thing or not. I have not been able (in a very quick sweep) to find out what age these huge river banks are. They seem modern - post-war - and in some cases they rise up out of the surrounding marsh right up against the front doors of ancient cottages which are now either abandoned or have succumbed to the ignominy of having a mountain range within inches of their front windows. But from a seat on the southern bank I sat and sketched the river looking north, and then painted it.

Our home in Tours was - this time - a camping site near to the pretty and historic village of Montlouis-sur-Loire, and we had (thank goodness) reserved a tiny cabin or chalet. This is a white plastic box in a village of identical - larger or smaller versions - well supplied tiny homes. We lugged everything in, made the bed, went out to eat at the restaurant which had attracted us back to the area. Of course, as they say, you should never go back. The meal was fine, lovely cooking, but not as good as the one we had there in May. The outstanding exception was a starter chosen by Andrew - a parfait of creme fraiche, filled with a sorbet of tomatoes. Bliss.

It was warm enough for us to sit outside and eat, but during the night, the temperature plummeted - down to 10 or so. And in fact, on the Sunday night, it rained enough to fill the river right up to the top of its banks, or that is what it sounded like. Thank god we weren't in a tent.

On Sunday we explored the area - Montlouis - Amboise - the Chateau of Bordaisière with its rampant collection of tomatoes - and then went home to cook and do nothing.  I made my second round painting - trying to reach into more unconscious areas of my art. It should be called Brexit.

And on Monday, having watched the campsite management extract a family of tiny blue-eyed kittens from underneath the communal washing-up sinks, we set off to my sister's. The new motorways coming down past Limoges and the Dordogne take you through the most spectacular landscapes, and the late afternoon sunlight only filtered through occasionally, giving us a coolish grey day to drive in, which was a blessing.  It was also a blessing to turn away from the 21st century and onto the back roads past Molière and LaFrançaise, down to the Tarn and Garonne rivers, through tiny valleys, past a huge nuclear power station, past horticultural projects and small farms, with betrothal woods planted in the wet ground (perfectly aligned new groves of poplar trees which - when cut in 21 years - afford a good dowry to a daughter). 

Arriving here we swam in the pool, had supper, laughed, retired. Today we go to meet some of her friends and then have lunch. This is the International Ladies Group. Their menfolk have formed a subsidiary independent group called the Drivers and Affiliated Trades or something. They do their own thing but ferry the ladies to their lunches and back again. 

Travelling, or just consuming?

At the entrance of the onboard shop on the cross-Channel ferry is a large cheerful and highly ambiguous sign saying 'Wave goodbye to high street prices'. Yes indeed. Here the sunglasses cost £200, and a vast array of perfumes and creams in different brands and boxes start at about £31. Whatever fun I used to get browsing such spaces has completely gone. The books and maps department has shrunk to a single shelf selling colouring-in books and comics, plus a couple of phrase books in German, French or Dutch. The entire experience is a rat trap, selling only things which maximise profit, and there is literally nothing on sale of any use, purpose, inspiration or longevity. It is all about addiction: alcohol, 'beauty', appearance. It is a shame. There's nothing wrong with making a profit, but somehow the customer, me, has been written out of the story. I am travelling to learn, change, grow, act. I do not want to feel dictated to, or passive, or merely a recipient of someone else's designs and theories. They have got this wrong.

Once again I get this big hit of 'change' the moment we get to France. It's just – French. The landscape, the tree-planting, the signage, the exasperation, all Gallic.

Through inattention we take a more circuitous route down to Tours than needs be, but find lovely Roman roads along the way, an industrial zone called Musset, a plastic chicken in a cage in a supermarket on the eggs shelf, and eventually our chalet on a campsite near the Loire. It is not a Tardis, being smaller inside than out, but it's comprehensively equipped and proves to be comfortable and fun. The bed takes up most of the space in the 'bedroom' which leads to hilarious edgings-round to get to the loo in the night. We had reserved a table at le Petit Patrimoine restaurant in town (and would not have got in otherwise) because we loved the meal we had there in May. This time it's slightly less successful (never go back) but still offers some superb cooking. The sauces are absolutely traditional reductions, and Andrew's first course – a parfait of crême fraiche with a tomato sorbet in the middle – is world-class. The meal was slightly marred by his anxiety at having mislaid his small wallet with money and cards in it.... We found it on the ground by the car when we got back to the chalet.

We have breakfasted on delicious croissants and a jam or marmalade of Oranges Amères, and today we will do very little. We are trying to have less oomphetty holidays and more wandering around time.  

Finding a balance

It's two nights since we were on the boat but I still feel as if I'm bobbing about in the water.  It's odd how long it takes for one's sense of balance to adjust.
We wandered round Split yesterday, discovering how wildly international its life has been. There are carvings in Catalan, French, Hebrew, and of course in Italian. For 400 years it was Venetian - not captured in war but sold outright by the King of Croatia to the most serene city for gold. Napoleon ran it for a while between 1806-13, straightening roads, modernising, improving the drains and (according to a pamphlet from the Tourist Office) introducing electricity, which must have been nothing short of a miracle at that date. We went to various museums - the Old  Town Hall to see a good collection of  20th century art by local makers, deciding not to go into the Fine Art Museum partly because the woman in the shop was so rude. We decided not to seek out the piano festival because it appeared that today would still be the finalists' heats. Then we walked through the inner suburbs to the Maritime Museum, meeting a charming lady en route who used to live in Belgium, so we resorted to the language of diplomacy and chatted in French for a while.
The Maritime Museum is not too big and very interesting, filled with reasonably or intermittently well-labelled items including a huge ancient pithoi later drilled with holes to be used as a keepsafe for fish, a fine collection of 20th c blocks (pulleys), many models, instruments, various small boats, and culminating in a detailed account of the history of torpedoes - we had on a previous trip to Croatia learned about Robert Whitehead in Rijecka, further up the coast, and how he invented, manufactured and developed these dramatic weapons ready for the great powers to seize them and proceed to blow each orher's fleets to bits, killing thousands of people in the process. The photographs and explanations from the factory in Rijecka are very good and there are various darkly beautiful torpedo cases and component there to see.
Somehow and quite inadvertently we jumped the queue for lunch at a popular cafe called Fife, which has an impressively long and interesting menu including various low dishes such as tripe, liver, veal tongue, etc - none of which were actually available. So we resorted to more usual choices which tasted ok but were a bit cold, and there was in any case a smell of drains along the seafront which slightly reduced our enjoyment.
We found a nice plaque saying Sigmund Freud stayed here in 1898, and it's tempting to speculate whether this is where he came up with the idea of the Split personality......
I made some sketches and paintings, we walked some more, and then we went to rest for a while - venturing out later for supper. It's so easy to overeat when the restaurants bring you extra dishes and tastes, and so-called appetisers are just huge.  A musical stage set up beside us attracted some delighted children when the acts arrived for the sound balance. We had the start of several numbers, a kind of sample of what would be played in full later. Not too loud, thank goodness.
For these last hours we wandered under and around Diocletian's Palace, and heard some wonderful piano playing coming from somewhere in the open-air ruins. The gate leading to the performance was locked but we stood leaning on the gritty walls listening to the glories of Bach and Liszt shimmering round the acoustic space, competing with children calling and passers-by talking too loudly. At the interval we went to enquire - who was the pianist? A tall young man who was locked out as we were, explained it was part of the Piano Loop festival - a recital by a star player called Kemal Gekić. He himself was not only a participant in the competition but a student at the Royal College in London. His girl friend was on the other side of the locked railings. He led us round to the other side of the whole building, round the beautiful Roman remains, through the courtyard filled with merry tourists and their banging street music, and into the performance area inside the Ethnographic Museum. We found seats, and sat to listen to an amazing second half of music. Gekić is a Croatian-born American classical professional, now Professor of Performance at the U of Florida. He looks a bit like Liszt with a great mane of long hair like a lion. His playing is powerful - had to be to drive out the pop music and crowd noises outside. I drew his portrait as he played.  He gave three encores to the small but enraptured audience, and later we showed him the drawing - which he signed.
We came home walking on air. It has been a magic day.
Now - Wednesday morning - is our last day. The church bells have been summoning worshippers. Other residents in this building have been clumping up and down stairs, although it's quite early. We fly home this afternoon, so we'll take our things to the left luggage office by the port bus station, walk up to the Archaeological Musem, find lunch, then head to he airport. We've crammed so much in during this visit.

Split

We've sailed a few times on the Lady Olivia, and of course her owners have other guests from time to time. It's quite funny imagining how this hosting experience must be different for them with the varying personalities, and also odd thinking about 'others' being in 'our' cabin. 

After a very pleasant riverside meal to say 'thank you' on our last evening, we packed our bags and bade farewell to our friends yesterday morning to head off to Split. The bus station was thronged with young people, the bus claimed to have wifi, the journey was smooth enough - first winding along the coastal roads, then  skirting huge rich horticultural plains, and finally getting into the heat and crowds of Split. 

The journey was surprisingly tiring - five hours of looking, and swaying about.

En route we had a shifty picnic of pies stuffed with cheese and meat, formed as elongated spirals of flaky pastry, and then a nectarine each. A sign on the stairwell of the bus showed a burger with a red line through it - we weren't sure if this meant NO FOOD or was merely a patriotic attempt to deter MacDonalds. Sadly when we left the bus at Split Docks we forgot the remaining nectarines and cashew nuts in our picnic bag and left them to their fate.

It was not hard to find our apartment which to our pleasure and surprise is actually right inside Diocletian's Palace. An old door leads up a pretty and narrowing wooden staircase. The key is under the mat. The apartment is small, old-fashioned, well-appointed, clean, comfortable and brilliantly locked. It has a tiny washroom with shower, good wifi, and a free litre bottle of Merlot from Istria to welcome us. 

We wandered out int the heat. 

It really is a nice place - with shining well-worn paving, happy crowds but a sense of the real life of the city separate from tourism.  It's also a great place to find novel images of Flatman, the international hero of my new project, who adorns road signs and toilet doors.  I am enjoying describing how he is looking for love, having terrible accidents, running a lot, and trying to understand how we live in our 3D world, which is as difficult for him as quantum mechanics is for us.

We shopped for yoghurt, croissants ( which are heavier than their French cousins and stuffed with 'marmalade' aka apricot jam, or chocolate), nectarines, some milk for morning coffee. We wandered into a lovely old-fashioned art shop selling paints and papers and apparently running a cat-rescue charity, and strolled around. We chose a resto for supper because the greeter said the take cards.... That turned out to be either a lie or inaccurate - we had to scrape cash together. Our neighbours a table were three young Luxembourgian business or banking types - we had a great chat about Brexit. British businesses are queuing up to register in Luxembourg, and ever Brit they've met says (as we do) that it's a disaster. One of them was born in Bosnia, two are Portuguese. They said almost no-one in Luxembourg was born there. 

Back at the flat, we shut out the jubilant noise of the streets with our heavy windows, switched on the aircon, and slept. 

This is the last day of our holiday. I am thinking of all the other travelers who come to stay in this dear little apartment. They leave happy reviews on Airbnb (tho' that is not where we booked it). Like our cabin on the Lady Olivia, there is a stream of people who come to stay. If places have souls, and they may, they must find it funny accommodating us all. The tiny shower-room here has an almost-hidden medieval stone archway over the door. How many people have walked through it? Who were they?