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Sunday 080902:
Luz St Sauveur; Lourdes; Bagneres de Bigorres Tournay peage A64 towards Toulouse;
Auterive; Villefranche; N113 to Carcassonne.
A grey morning. In Luz centre I popped into a bar tabac. It was about 10.45 and a little strange to see a dozen or more of the hungover starting all over again. (That's assuming they'd stopped).
I know it's not at all grown up, but I long ago made up two "rules" for our bus:
- I must overtake every caravan ahead of me and
- we must never be overtaken by another camper van.
The second has been broken twice, but today the first rule was for the first time broken, (more like shattered), while we were doing high sixties up a long rise on the autoroute and a caravan towed by a Peugeot 607 overtook us doing 75-ish.
At one point on the A64 there was a large tourist info sign referring to prehistory at Gargas, with a picture of an outlined hand painting, but no other information. (It would perhaps have been superfluous at France's max. speed limit, 130kph). And here perhaps is the only disadvantage of an unplanned holiday: Thinking of the wonderful cave paintings which I'd seen 20 or more years ago at Les Grottes de Cougnac in the Dordogne, I did some planning and got Jo to locate Gargas. There were two, so without looking at the map I decided, (logically?), that the one nearest to Toulouse, towards which town we were heading, must be the Gargas referred to on the road sign. It wasn't, (see 120902).
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Each day we saw one or two high-top T25's and generally got poor responses from their drivers, but today produced an enthusiastic headlamp flash from one owner and two hoots from another, both French owned. In these days of mass-produced nonentity vehicles it's most heartening to be reminded that one owns a vehicle with at least some character.
I'm reluctant to anthropomorphise, but at times it was very hard not to think that our van was smirking to itself as it sat on a campsite at the end of a long hard day. A (Geneva-registered?), Samba bus in Auterive caught my camera's eye. You can't see how rusty it was! |
The "modern" Carcassonne is not the fairest town, but Carcassonne, (la Cite) is medieval and fabulous, (and better then I remembered it). From a distance it looks and is so improbable that you might assume it's a fake. We found the excellent campsite at Camping de la Cité.
090902:
We walked into along the Cotswoldy and trout-filled river snapping away like mad, the camera, not the trout. You expect to have to pay to enter through the monstrous great walls into the city, but you don't.
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Into the first shop, a mainly eastern-themed place where some fantastic Brazilian jazz was playing. It sounded like Miles Davis with every Latin percussion rhythm you can imagine and I wish I'd bought the CD, but perhaps it wasn't for sale. We bought some joss sticks and a holder. In another shop we bought an olive dish which included compartments for the stones and sticks, (as if you need sticks). There are no tacky shops here, (apart from a newsagent / book / gift shop where I was massively overcharged, ((for a book, (for my dad) about the Cathars and for Jo's British newspaper)). I didn't realise the cheat in time and had been given no receipt by the sulky old bat behind the counter). We had (a late birthday) lunch at a terrace cafe in a square where a man played excellent jazz on a Yamaha piano. Then he got up and himself went around the tables collecting money. Now, that's not British, is it. We followed and paid him as we left. I have yet to hear any good, really French, modern music. The pizza was very good, (though in fact only very slightly better than the Mandorla from Pizza Margherita in Lancaster). We walked all around the town walls and dived down plain-looking alleyways to escape the crowds and get the back views which tourists aren't expected to want to see. In a gallery was an exhibition of photography including some of the ruined chateau of Peyrepertuse. The photographer described how he got his stunning shots, (by being there very early, or by waiting until long after all the other photographers had gone home).
I worked hard to finish off the bottles of shandy bought on the Ile de Ré and mistaken for beer.
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We'd read about the walls being floodlit and in the evening walked back to La Cité and right around the walls again. No-one switched the lights on. These almost flat-topped towers look Roman to me. That is the new moon left of the central tower.
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