Tough Guys on Horseback

The Rhone delta might as well be Bangladesh. It's flat, salty, and mostly marshland and seems to go on for ever. If global warming is a reality, and there's even a moderate rise in sea level, the place will disappear. This is bull-breeding country and the Gardiens – Camargue cowboys – are the ones who do the 'Rawhide' bit with lariat and pointed stick, supplying the arenas with both fighting bulls and those bred for entertainment, leather and meat. This is a real job - not just a divertimento for tourists. In every restaurant in the capital, Saintes Maries de la Mer, there's 'pavé de taureau' on offer, or bull steak, along with the obligatory gypsy flamenco and guitar music. 

I rather think that this was for the tourists, however. I was reminded of the church fete...

There's even a stuffed bull's head in the supermarket butcher - see above. In case you're wondering, bull meat tastes just like most other good steak varieties – dependent on the cut – but the impression is given that it's wild and strongly flavoured. It's usually offered rare-the meat conferring the strength of the bull on the consumer– psychologists might have a field day with this – perhaps it's a bit like sheikhs and young deflowered virgins.

It seems that this is quite a religious community – the cross of the Camargue represents faith, hope and love, and is everywhere from the black-haired gypsy girls' earrings, to the churches.

A Day in Provence

I had always wanted to visit Avignon. Quite a shame, really, since it turned out to be something of a disappointment. Not because it wasn't beautiful in all its medieval splendour but because it seemed so much like other, smaller and prettier local towns, with the exception of the chic little boutiques with Paris prices on every ticketed trinket. The old town is walled throughout and the walls are remarkably well-preserved. Pius V built a large monument when the papal seat was here rather than Rome and the papal palace is grand indeed, but one seventeenth century castle seems much like another with the inevitable snail with audio link craning its collective neck to admire yet another mildewed ceiling and being disgorged into the gift shop at the end. Perhaps I'm just getting touristed out. The French occasionally juxtapose ancient and modern to mixed reviews and here was no exception. Which drink-sodden urban planner in their right mind places an eighteen foot carbuncle of a bronze elephant balanced on its trunk in the Papal square...The girl smiled winningly at me, so I left her in for scale. The famous bridge – it's actually half a bridge – over the Rhone was a bit lame, I thought. There's a tiny church perched like a wart at the end which I really didn't see the point of getting out of the car to visit.

A little bit further on was Arles. Quite a different pickle of clams, this. Van Gogh painted here. I was encouraged by the fact that there was a parking space conveniently vacated a second before my arrival along a narrow street (they're all narrow, in fact) in close proximity to the Arena. This one is smaller and more modest than the one in Nîmes, but there was shouting and clapping coming from within, so I bought a ticket. They had got to the second bull. Fifteen white-clad, fit-looking young chaps with their names emblazoned on the back were in the ring, together with a bull which pawed the sandy ground aggressively before charging the nearest young man to a four foot barrier, which he nimbly leapt over. Another young man attracted the bull's attention. It charged him and at the last moment before leaping the barrier, the young man tweaked a ribbon from between the two foot long horns, waving it in triumph. The bull, it seemed, was wearing a number of these and the crowd erupted into thunderous applause every time the bull lost a ribbon. After a while, the bull was coaxed back into a pen under the arena and another took its place. The crowd apparently rate the performance on the ferocity of the bull and the nimbleness of the participants - one animal which partially demolished  some of the red wooden slats surrounding the arena was particularly warmly received.

It struck me that the locals here had been going to the Arena for centuries. Despite the presence of many young families, children waving hats and balloons, mothers with tissues mopping up their spillages, there was almost a miasma of dark, suppressed violence about the place. It was a short flight of fancy to imagine bloodsports of all descriptions happening here, martyrdom, gladiatorial duels to the death and slaves raking over the bloodstained sand. One imagined the thousands of ghosts of the slain in silent witness. Images from 'Gladiator' sprang, unbidden, to mind. H'm.

Dulce Domum

An hour's drive away from the mountains is my temporary home, a converted pumphouse which once fed water to the long-gone steam train system, completely rebuilt with proper plumbing and IKEA showers. Villages with names like Le Vans, Joyeuse, and the unforgettable Mejeannes-le-Clap, which looks good on your passport,are all around. Initially, the quiet is unnerving. Cicadas scratch endlessly and the stream at the foot of the hill ripples over a tiny waterfall. But, that's it. No cars, no music, the nearest human habitation is more than two kilometres away in any direction. Light pollution is minimal; the nearest significant centre of population is about fifteen kilometres south which lights up the sky a little, but the overall impression is 'I'm an awfully long way from a Starbucks.' In almost cloudless skies, the Perseids, the annual meteor shower produced by the Earth's orbit passing through the tail of a comet, were spectacularly visible, long gashes of light from tiny particles travelling at over 70 kilometres a second skimming like stones on a pond and getting brighter and brighter across the sky before vaporising in the atmosphere. I sat outside for an hour and watched the light show.

Might be a nice spot to retire to...

Light Entertainment

Driving down the road, I noticed a large number of young, black bulls grazing in a field. These animals are bred here for both their meat and the curious and incredibly popular 'sport' of bullfighting. Not every bull ends up in the arena, however. Every little town has its summer 'feriá' or Feast – usually overlapping or close to the festival of the Assumption. Whereas in England, such events are characterised by grown men rolling large cheeses down hills, here it's a little more red-blooded. This is mining country – I was reminded irresistibly of Wales, not only because of the geography, but also the stocky brawniness of the locals – including the women – and the brass bands. Everywhere. With almost no concept of noise pollution. Standing almost in the middle of a nine-piece outfit in a café in Quissac – they set up wherever a space exists, it seems - left me feeling (and probably looking) like Quasimodo.

I was directed up the hill to the arena, which was a space about sixty metres in diameter with an ominous barred lorry at one end and bars, seven feet high and two inches thick circumscribing the space. Young men, perhaps with something to prove to appraising female eyes in the crowd, stepped into the ring and waved their shirts as the bull was released. The aim of the game, it seemed was to bait the animal until you were chased by it, leaping nimbly over the barrier or climbing the scattered bales of hay out of reach of the eighteen inch horns. These were padded, but a number of the contestants retired 'hors de combat' with alarming bruises, keeping the Croix Rouge busy. If the beast, which could accelerate rapidly and corner astonishingly fast, actually caught someone they were tossed in the air like a rag doll. I was told that if anybody has to be hospitalised, they might stop the show. Thus, young men returned grimly to the arena, sporting antiseptic-coated welts and bruises.  The bull had a disquieting habit of charging the barrier randomly, so, for the most part, I maintained a discreet presence behind it. The finale of the evening was a bull run. Camarguien cowboys armed with long, steel-tipped staves and riding their small white horses, wearing trademark leather hats and flowered shirts, corral a bull and drive it through the narrow streets, barricaded in the same way as the arena. Meanwhile, the local youth run in between the horses and the bull to try to wrestle it to the ground. A five hundred kilogram bull which is disinclined to be so treated can lose its temper very fast. The stench of fear, adrenalin, testosterone and, well, bullshit was quite unforgettable.

With thanks to the anonymous Flickr poster whose daylight image was so much better than I could get at night.

Merci, Sebastien, pour la photo..

Bridges and Other Remarkable Objects

The Romans were here for quite a while and their presence is everywhere. The Arena at Nîmes is better preserved than the Coliseum in Rome and is used for both bullfighting (but more of this later) and also rock concerts; Mark Knopfler was here in July. The town of Uzès still has a duke in residence complete with a castle in the centre of town. Should marauders wish to invade his lordship's privacy, the battlements overhang the walls, presumably to facilitate the pouring of boiling oil.

At the head of the Ardèche is the Pont d'Arc, a natural rock formation carved out by glacial erosion. The image isn't great since i got there about an hour before nightfall, but you get the idea. Further south is the spectacular Roman aqueduct, over the Gardon, the Pont du Gard, built to take water from Uzès to NÎmes. The angulation is exact ensuring a smooth flow of water along a 40km stretch; these guys knew their sines from their cosines, for sure. Apparently, the engineering is so exact that even with modern methods its accuracy cannot be duplicated.

It would have been so helpful if everybody still spoke Latin since as I travel further south, words become more and more difficult to understand. I was reminded of the line from "Kingdom of Heaven" '..travel east until they stop speaking Latin and start speaking something else.' That'd be about here, then. Occitan is not a dialect, it's a completely different language and even when the locals speak French, the accent and intonation is as thick as wet cement. With much grunting and shrugging. Beh, oui. Bieng.

In Rebel Country

The Cévennes are rather like the Appalachians. It might be Scotland, but grander and warmer, with purple heather and pine. Old mountains, worn down into gentle, rolling woodland, the landscape stretching grey and blue to the horizon. Tiny villages with dwellings clustered around either a church or a simple Huguenot Temple. This is the land of the Rebellion where for a hundred years  Protestant Camisard guerillas fought the armies of King Louis for the right to worship freely in much the same way as Wallace harried Longshanks' troops. "Braveheart" could have been filmed here.

During the rebellion, the austere theology of Jean Calvin, Ulrich Zwingli, Martin Luther and Philipp Melanchthon shaped understanding and family Bibles were read illegally while the women watched the windows for approach of the King's troops. Meetings were held out of doors or in specially camouflaged dwellings - a mobile pulpit could in seconds be transformed to look like a small grain silo. This temple was erected after the Revolution when freedom of worship was finally transformed into reality. Many are still in use, while Catholic churches have fallen into disrepair.

This is a disused mill. Brits are buying up these old places, and the old crafts like silk-weaving are dying out. Shame.

Wet String and Hope

Being a long way from a Starbucks, persons hereabouts are infrequently troubled by the Internet, wet string and hope being the connection medium du jour. Blog posts therefore back up, like buses, and three or four arrive at once. So sorry...