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Bonjour!
A long rave about our four weeks in the French countryside, just to get the rust out of my typing fingers. Actually my typing is a bit jittery at the moment due to acute nicotine withdrawals - I am giving up smoking for the 10th time this year. I think I'm getting better at it, but the first few days really get me down. This time I'm in preparation for my Alpine assault on the mountains and fiords of Norway - I've been told that long distance bushwalking is easier without having to carry a carton of cigarettes, and there aren't too many Tabacs around. This is all by way of idle preamble actually, I'm here to tell you about my month of touring the French countryside.
Having had to self-cater for the past four weeks, you can be rest assured that the observations that follow are entirely truthful and are not wild generalisations - I've had to get my fingers dirty with these strange people. You may be surprised to know that my high school French was almost entirely useless for communicating, and only of mild assistance in reading billboards. Luckily Maureen had continued French into university, and could continually annoy us by extracting complements from everyone about how good her French was. I meanwhile have gained valuable insights into the life experience of the mute. Mind you, by the end of our time here, I think I was knocking out a "bonjour" with a certain je ne sais quoi (but continually being made to look silly in the late afternoon when everyone else switched to the much sexier bon soir).
The journey was really of three parts - travelling (by car), two weeks in the Auvergne, and a week in the Charente. The car trip was not without incident - I had deliberately engineered some mechanical troubles just so I could have some fun with the French automotive industry. Before departing we were encouraged to take out the AA's European Motoring insurance. Whilst this seemed quite expensive (£71 for 4 weeks), it was worth every penny. The Ford Escort started making some strange groaning noises just as we go on to the ferry at Dover, these got louder as we cruised into Reims for our first night on foreign soil. Reims is the home of many fine champagnes, but unfortunately I was driving and so didn't think it appropriate to get stuck into too much of the local brew. We then cruised on down through champagne country and by the time we got to Nevers (it should be called Nevers-Nevers), the car was clearly on its last legs. "Il ne marche pas" was the diagnosis passed to the local Ford dealer, and on closer inspection it was decided that a new gearbox would be a start. I still have no idea of the French word for gearbox, but onze mille francs was the important part of the message. It was at this stage that I understood why there's a clause in the AA insurance to get your car shipped home. The cost of car repairs in France is about three times over the odds. The deal was that the Ford goes home to get repaired, and they give me a hire car for the remainder of the holiday. Not bad, I thought, particularly as it was nicer, newer, bigger, and had the steering wheel on the correct side for driving in France. So, after an unscheduled stop in Nevers, we headed off to the Auvergne in our Renault Laguna, feeling pretty pleased with the result.
The Auvergne is a fairly high area in central France, which also could be called the Massif Central. There's quite a number of extinct volcano craters scattered about and a few mountains up around the 2000m mark. Our destination was an old medieval town called St Flour, built high on top of a volcanic outcrop. It has narrow streets, a fairly complete set of city walls, all the buildings are made out of stone and are about 3 or 4 storeys high.
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Our house was built into the buttress of an old church and had five rooms all on top of each other. We didn't visit the top two rooms very often. The town is a popular holiday spot for the French, and hordes was completely devoid of the usual of American tourists. This seemed to give it a lot more character and authenticity, but it also meant that speaking English was a complete waste of time. We soon worked out the best baguettes, cheese and place to buy cheap wine, and were feeling like regular French folk in no time. They're fairly proud of their cheese here, and we managed to find some pretty interesting varieties which really needed to be locked outside. I'm not totally convinced about French food - we did find it difficult to get into many of their meat products, and especially some of their "produits du terroir" (which I believe translates fairly closely to English). They seem to take pride in finding a casserole of way of preparing every part of a pig, and the Pot du Auvergne seems to be a all of these in a light cabbage broth - a wondrous thing to look at, but surely not for eating.
After wasting a few days wandering around the local shops and some of the farmland and churches we decided to check out the mountains. We had a guide book called Walks in Auvergne which got us started on some really spectacular scenery. The mountains are quite jagged and dramatic, and we found it very easy walking country.
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I'm sure that armed with one of the good topographic maps available, you could head off for days into some quite spectacular country (and you even may find a bit of wilderness). I was impressed with the French people's attitude to the countryside. There were any number of family groups heading off for a good 10 kilometre walk, stopping off for a pique-nique on the way. It didnt' matter if you were six or sixty, you were along for the ride. At one of the more inaccessible peaks (at least, I was pretty stuffed after walking there), I was amazed to find a group of little kids playing alongside the rest of the family (including grandmaman). I asked if they'd come up in a chairlift or something (well, Maureen did), and they said no way, in France, everyone walks.
One of the other curiosities of the area was mineral water, with the towns of Vittel, Vichy and Perrier. We went to a Musee de Thermology, which attempted to describe the various quack schemes that had evolved to cure people using various water therapies. Still doing pretty good business actually. This was in a town called Chaude-Aigues which had a hot spring coming out of the ground at about 82 degrees. The locals had quite cleverly rigged up the town's plumbing using specially machined wooden pipes so that all the houses were heated from the spring. Could probably do with something like that in Canberra right now, eh! Chuckle, chuckle.
We were temptingly close to Provence at St Flour, and so headed off for a couple of days to see how the rock stars lived. I was surprised at how dry and dusty it was, and we never made it all the way to Nice. Spent most of our time at Avignon, which was one of the prettiest cities I've visited.
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The Americans have discovered this as well. Apart from the mandatory walk "Sur Le Pont D'Avignon", we spent some time wondering the papal palace. The Rhone at one time divided France and Italy, and Avignon being on the wrong side was once called Rome. (Rome being any place where the Pope lived). Our last day trip in Auvergne was to the capital Clermont-Ferrand, home of Blaise Pascal, Jacques Chirac, and the Michelin Brothers. It was Sunday, very very hot, and everything was closed, so I decided to get a migraine and hate the place. It was enjoyable in the end because we met Nicole, Scott and grandson Ryan at the the holiday with us. Great fun learning how to be a doting grandfather and annoying mum and train, and they spent the rest of dad by absolutely spoiling him rotten. He soon learnt who to go to if he wanted something that he wasn't allowed to have. We arrived back into St find a large video screen in the village square, and hordes of ecstatic Frenchman going crazy Flour on Sunday night to about some minor football match. The blaring of car horns went well into the early hours. Allez les bleus!
We then moved to the Charente region which is between Paris and Bordeaux, and very rural. The countryside is pretty much covered with crops of corn and sunflowers, separated by small forests of oak trees. There's still quite a few old trees left here, and the farmers seem to leave quite a few in the paddocks - it made me wonder what Australian farms would have looked like if they hadn't grubbed every tree out of the ground.
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We stayed in a small village called La Madrinie, and it was nice to have a backyard so we could eat "al fresco" and even light a barbecue.
Went for a tour of the Remy Martin cognac distillery, where you could almost get drunk breathing the air. The town of Cognac was really pretty, and you wonder about a place that has dedicated its existance to the production of an extremely alcoholic drink. Was absolutely staggered by the quantity of cognac at Remy Martin, my rough calculation was that the grog that we rolled past in the cute little tourist train would have a street value of 2.25 billion dollars. Thats not excluding the expensive stuff which somehow I resisted buying at $3,000 for a litre bottle.
The other morbid fascination with France was to see some reminders of the war. The countryside in La Madrinie looked exactly like that I was brought up watching in episodes of Combat. I could just image Chuck Conners rolling past our stone house in his jeep, maybe picking off a sniper in our attic. War just isn't glorious like that, though, as we found on a visit to Oradour-sur-glane.
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This village had been left exactly in the state it was in on June 10th 1944, when the German SS massacred the entire population and destroyed all the buildings. Even the children visiting the site were hushed as you wandered down the streets, trying to imagine the horror of that day. A truly moving memorial, which left the usual questions of why and how unanswerable.
Our trip home was via the Loire Valley, with a mandatory stop at one of the magnificent chateaux. These buildings are different from English castles, mainly because they appear to be build for comfort not defence. Even so, they appear to be folly to me, no longer suitable for your modern aristocrat to live in, who would probably prefer something like a penthouse in Paris. They do seem to make a lot of money out of tourists, however - we went to Chateau Chambord and it was absolutely packed. Luckily the place was massive enough to handle the numbers. The Loire Valley has some wonderful little towns, we quickly dashed past Blois, Amboise, Tours, before stopping for the night at Orleans. My memory of Orleans is sitting under the statue of Joan Of Arc (very butch, it was) and eating mussels - I've never eaten a kilo before at one sitting, and they were delicious. After Orleans we visited Chartres (to see the cathedral), and then headed up to Charles de Gaulle airport to send the family home. This involved a mad dash along Paris motorways, it was like being in a Formula One race, and I was physically tired at the end of it. I certainly wouldn't want to be half-pissed going at 100 mph through some of those tunnels.
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After dropping the family off we were sad and lonely and spent a quiet night in medieval Rouen, before the last drive back to Calais, and then home. Au revoir, France.
