04 - 060902 

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St Martin de Ré; Phare des Baleines; Ars en Ré (unfortunate name);

La Couarde sur Mer & on down the south side and back to SMdeR.

Overnight we'd collected out first mosquito bites. The little beasts do find me particularly attractive. Each bite over the next 24hrs produces a lump similar in size to a small and lengthways sliced hard-boiled egg and it slowly and uncomfortably hangs around for at least another 72 hours. (The midges in Scotland keep us away from the Highlands between mid May and late September). 

I wonder if Buddhists can refrain from harming mosquitos? 

We had with us three sprays, two for before and and one for afterwards, mosquito coils which burn like a joss stick, smell like woodsmoke and require ventilation or else they'll make you ill and much later we bought a "Goodmark First Aid Gel Calmant" roll-on which was quite effective after the event, as were hay fever tablets, (anti-histamine), as prescribed by nurse Jo. 

There was touristy stuff at Le Phare, (and a big lighthouse(!), and North America behind the subject.  

I bought myself a (not shown), instant favourite shirt "Made in Nepal". Jo had spotted it, but how was I to know that it'll have to be hand-washed for the rest of its life? 

It would seem that here, as indeed at Llaregyb, it was too rough to go fishing. We drank apple juice and sunbathed near Pointe du Fier. Too late I noticed that the excellent drink was really made by Coca Cola in disguise. 

A British chap left his partner and a dog on their yacht while he rowed a dinghy ashore, stopped, went back, picked up the dog and returned to the shallows to catch a musselly / oystery lunch. 

The north of the island looks a good wildlife area with piney woodland and lots of pools left over from the salt industry. 

In La Couarde I bought another tap connector for filling our inboard water tank. It seemed to fit no tap which has ever been made, but worked better than the one we'd brought with us. La Couarde has a scruffy disused fairground / showman's scrapyard near the beach. 

We tried sunbathing again, but the sand at La Couarde was fairly hopping with little non-flying flies. The town drunk, (Guillaume NoMates? SansCopains?), sat alone nearby. 

The little towns are elegant, neat and old. 

In the evening we walked around the enormous gatehouse and dry moat of the town wall at St Martin.

050902:

SMdeR; La Rochelle (cv); Rochefort; Saujon; N137, etc. to Bordeaux;

N10 through Les Landes; Mont de Marsan; Tarbes; Lourdes!!

We'd intended to drive through the centre of Bordeaux, but missed a turn and were dashed away clockwise along the huge loop road. We counted down the junctions to the N10 which only until it escapes the built-up area, looks to be an old-fashioned and neglected road. As is often the case an A road runs parallel. The N's are therefore generally quiet. 

The pine forests of Les Landes soon snuck up on us and filled the van with their wonderful, never to be forgotten smell, my olfactory memory taking me back to the essential oily whiff of Scotland's bog myrtle. 

Almost all the forest areas here seem to be  commercially managed and they look little the worse for it. Roads comprise of astonishingly long straights and distant tarmac blurs into mirage pools of heat haze from which approaching vehicles can take you by surprise - you are well advised by road signs to keep dipped headlights switched on. 

One of my French A level books was set in this area and, (though I remember little about it), it may well have had much to do with a sense of isolation in Les Landes. I failed the A level, by the way. 

We were by now about 650 km by road south of Paris, before car ownership an almost prohibitively long distance. The population is small being mainly clustered in a few villages and very small towns where forestry and crafty activity provide the main employment. 

We trundled around the uninspiring outskirts of Tarbes. 

Haziness, and later on some light but thundery rain, had prevented us from getting that early and almost magical long distance sighting of the snow patched Pyrenees. 

And why were we going to Lourdes?! I wanted to show Jo just how astonishingly tacky it is. 

Our  campsite a few kilometres short of Lourdes was convenient. Through the trees you could see a mountain which closely resembles Moel Siabod. 

We generally didn't leave our campsites until between 10 and 11am and on several days we travelled further than one would have wanted. This was one of those days and I felt quite frazzled when the young woman in charge of the site answered my knock at her door with a telephone in her hand and for at least the next five minutes kept up her lightweight conversation before booking us in. 

At half the campsites passports were required. At two of them one passport was retained until we left.

060902: Lourdes (cv); Argeles-Gazost; Cirque de Gavarnie; Luz St Sauveur.

Lourdes was even more shocking than I'd remembered it. Beautiful mountains form a backdrop to it's central streets which are lined with shops selling, for the most part, thoroughly tacky Roman Catholic paraphernalia. Our way was very frequently blocked by carers pushing the unfortunate in wheelchairs. 

We came up behind a fake train at the back of which in a backwards facing seat were two nuns one of whom was smoking a cigarette. It looked most odd. (I had thought that the nun was a wimpled nurse but Jo, who is a nurse, said not). La Grotte itself is, architecturally at least, as outrageous as any of Disney's excesses. 

On the hotel terrace, one hour's walk from here, we drank cold Kanterbrau, (pronounced even worse by the staff than by the British, and this after my ears, which are twenty years older than the rest of me, had struggled with pression in a regional accent). 

The air was like wine, but it had been thin enough to make us laugh at our dizziness on the steeper slopes. (This was before the beer). 

Rainbows hung in the swirling spray from the large glacier fed waterfall. (They did too, but we managed to run out of film).

Part way down I picked two wild strawberries for Jo. She forced me to eat one.

We wound back down to Luz St Sauveur. Our camper is much less unwieldy than any camping car and very much less likely to delay following vehicles, up or down hill. Even so I tend to head into occasional lay-bys to let other vehicles overtake us. Only professional French drivers with experience of driving in Britain are likely to understand that indicating right, slowing down and moving in towards the verge is an invitation to overtake. 

In Luz at the foot of the Col de Tourmalet we found an excellent campsite, Le Bergon. The only drawback was its low amperage electricity. We tripped it twice before the owner told us we couldn't expect to operate a kettle or a hairdryer. 

At night the ruins of a castle nearby were floodlit. 

Jo said she almost wished we'd walked further. 

Gavarnie, and the path into the Cirque, not surprisingly, had strongly reminded me of Zermatt and the valley below the Matterhorn. (2003 perhaps?).

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