P6140032
Originally uploaded by nilexuk.

The largest solar oven in the world. At Font Romeu. Not entirely sure why…

P6100094
Originally uploaded by nilexuk.

Tres chic. I think anyway.

Just how do you get the things to say knotted?

I had to drive for 12 hours straight to get to a position to be able to write these words.

I never meant to go to Bordeaux but I got horribly lost on the motorways between Perpignan and Perigeux. Four motorways go into Toulouse, and I managed to get on the wrong one out, getting past the toll booth before I realised. Rather than getting back on the motorway in the other direction for another attempt, I took small roads all around Toulouse to get back the motorway I actually wanted. When I finally got back to a toll booth on the right motorway, I took a moment to try and look at my map before heading off.

Unfortunately, a hitch-hiker took that as a signal I was prepared to give her a lift, and lept into my car. (A welcome sign, at least, that there will be room in the car for P when I pick him up from the airport next week…) I was basically too embarrassed to tell her to bugger off. Hitch-hiker was headed for Bordeaux, I was headed for Perigeux, so I challenged her to look on the map for me and decide where she would like to be dropped off.

There wasn’t really anywhere that suited. The motorways split between where I wanted to go and where she wanted to go pretty much immediately after the toll booth and went in different directions. Since all that really mattered to me was that I head generally northwards, I told her I didn’t mind heading to Bordeaux instead and we set off in that direction.

I’m generally in favour of hitch-hiking. From a green, environmental perspective, it uses up an otherwise empty space in a wasteful journey. I also like to do random good turns from a zen / good karma perspective: what goes around, comes around. Maybe one day, I’ll be stuck for a lift and someone will help me out. It’s also vaguely Christian along Good Samaritan lines. Where it breaks down is when the person you help is not seeing it from such rose-tinted specs lines and tries to rob you along the way. I’ve certainly been taken for a sucker that way several times before.

This specific hitch-hiker didn’t seem very bright. I’ve a niggly feeling I know more tenses in the French language than she did (1), but in fact, since she sat in almost total silence for the entire journey, except to point out at one stage when I’d taken a wrong turning that I was perhaps headed in totally the wrong direction. (She was right.) Still, I think I brightened her day. I bought her a sandwich when I stopped to fill the car up with petrol. I didn’t get the impression she was eating very regularly so offered to get her something. She didn’t twig that the main reason was to get her to come with me to the cash desk “to choose a sandwich” rather than leave her sitting in my car, stuffed with all my nickable kit, on her own, whilst I was out paying.

I eventually dropped her off near the St Jean railway station in Bordeaux, and went on to try and find a hotel for myself. It was time I got an internet connection for a night, apart from anything else.

I tried maybe 8 hotels around the station. All were full. There’s a “Vinexpo” going on in Bordeaux at the moment, and everywhere is fully booked. Eventually, I went back to my car, dug out my Hotel Ibis handbook and phoned round the branches in the near vicinity. Eventually found somewhere 100km away that could accomodate me, so signed up.

And hear I am at Hotel Ibis Saintes. Multimap says I’ve done 361 miles today. Factor in the circles when I got lost at several stages and round up to 400. It’s gone midnight, and I’m sitting here eating the remains of an olive loaf I bought a couple of days ago and a tin of evil strong beer that should hopefully knock me out for the night.

And all I saw of Bordeaux was a railway station and a vague glimpse of a cathedral spire. No time to go back!

(1) I know, or at least I was once taught, some really obscure ones that don’t get used apart from in 18th century literature.

I’ve taken the Petit Train Jaune for most of its length to Font Romeu, a ski resort high in the Pyrenees. Problem: I’m here for one hour only until the only return train. And it’s tipping it down!

I’ll spend a wee while re-acquainting ,yself with the french keybopqrd lqyout in qn internet cqfe, then see if I can get some coffee somewhere warm.

Since last posting, I’ve spent two nights in Provence, driven through the Alps to Nice, driven right around the Med to Montpellier, and then driven inland to Vernet les Bains.

I’ve now driven over 2,000 miles in France.

More info and pics at a later date.

I had spent some time on Thursday whilst waiting for the TGV to Paris wandering around Lyon. Much more time than I had expected to because there were train strikes in France last Thursday. How amusing that there were strikes in Britain too! How we laughed.

Wandering around Lyon didn’t amount to much more than getting off the Metro at the stop called ‘Vieux Lyon’ and poking around the streets there. Some more entries to the ‘sounds better in French’ compo: ‘Place de la baleine’ sounds so much better than ‘Whale Square.’ Vieux-Lyon has some gorgeous old streets, a fab icecream stall (I had licqorice, ginger and pink grapefruit flavours). From Vieux-Lyon metro station, you can also take two funicular railways up a hill overlooking the town, so I went up one and saw some views, and also Lyon’s Roman amphitheatre, which was gearing up for Les Nuits Fourvieres. Scaffolding staging and wings were all set up on the stage part of the arena, and people were wandering around in various fabulous costumes.

Unfortch, no Lyon pics (and no stag night pics from me, alas, either): camera, along with medications, were the things I accidentally left in the car.

Having ‘done’ Lyon on Thursday, when I got my car back on Tuesday, the aim was to get out of town and back on the road. I headed down the A7 motorway to Vienne, where, the Rough Guide told me, I could see some more good Roman Remains.

And I certainly could. Firstly there was a huge museum, with a display about winemaking throughout time (Romans used to drink wine diluted with water, either hot or cold, and flavoured with herbs like lavendar and sweetened with honey). Then a permament exhibition about Romans in Vienne, then finally a chance to walk around acres of preserved archaeological sites with explanations about Roman life.

But floorplans are a bit dusty — I was hoping for a some real remains I walk in not on, and so went around the town a bit more. Happily Vienne has an amphitheatre too, bigger than the ones in Lyon and recently lovingly restored. Now the centre of Vienne’s jazz festival.

And yet another self pic!

Last weekend’s activity, then, whilst leaving car in Lyon for repairs, was turning up as unexpected (but definitely invited) guest at R’s stag night in Nottingham. TGV from Lyon Part-Dieu to TGV Aeroport CDG. Plane to LTN, another train (eventually) from there to Nottingham, and was home from Friday afternoon to Monday morning.

The French for stag night is ‘enterrer sa vie de jeune homme’ — burying your life as a young man. We did that for Richard in a series of pubs from Market Square then along the Derby road. A series of proper beers, a retelling of some old stories, and a chance to hear some new ones about the bride from her father. I haven’t laughed so much in months!

Then on from there to a curry at Sabera, and from there to watch some corny bad horror movies.

Sunday, we met up for a cracking roast dinner at R’s local, and then various parties went various ways. Three of us met up again in the evening to go and see the new League of Gentleman film (which was great — but, if not and, bizarre.)

I flew back to Paris on Monday morning, and got back to Lyon at about 8pm in the evening. The following day, I went to check up on the car, and joy of joys, all was working fine. And the work to replace the exhaust wasn’t as expensive as expected either.

So, back on the road.

Let me relate two paragraphs and see if you can see where I’m going.

In Epernay, I got talking to a very nice young man who skateboarded over to talk to me whilst I was cooking because of the GB plates on my car. Turned out he was a 100% anglophile who likes to spend his holidays climbing in the Peak District (to the chagrin of his girlfriend who would rather have gone to the south of France.) We had a great, wide-ranging conversation, he promised to e-mail when he got online and left me his phone number. One of the topics of conversation went something like, going from Nottingham to Geneva? In a 10 year old Skoda? Are you totally mad? I’ve now done 1,200 miles in France…

The second bit of information is about the campsite I was at. They were having repairs done which meant that the water was turned off at 9am sharp. They did warn me, and I duly set an alarm, but simply couldn’t find the energy to get up early enough to shower that morning. So, I put on smelly old clothes, put my hair in a pony tail through the back of a cap, and wore shorts, all with the intention of driving straight to the next campsite (destination: Lyon) and getting in a shower there before attempting any further interaction with other members of the human race.

Can you see where I’m going?

50km out from Lyon, I make a stop for petrol and food, and walking back to my car, I notice that the exhaust pipe is not at the angle it should be at. Kicking it slightly (the limit of my car expertise in many fields) and it doesn’t actually fall off, so I get back in the car and carry on for Lyon, thinking through my options, and working out the French phrases I’ll need.

I can go straight to campsite, pitch tent and emergency tent, unload car into emergency tent and try and find a garage on campsite staff recommendation. I can go straight to a garage and see whether I actually need to unload the two tonnes of sundry camping equipment, or whether they can just fix the exhaust on there and then. I can keep going and see what happens with the exhaust.

As it happens, as soon as I hit Lyon I can hear the exhaust scraping the road whenever I go uphill, or there’s a minor bump in the road. I head for somewhere populated and end up parking in the Place de Paris opposite the Gare de Vaise, and I can see a garage from where I end up, so I walk in and ask if they can help. Ah, non m’sieur, we don’t repair cars. (building labelled Controle Technique Voiture, which I suspect must be an MOT centre.) They point me at another garage, who said they only repaired Renaults, and then, only with an appointment. Finally, they sent me to a third garage, still within easy walking of where I’d happened to end up in Lyon quite by chance, and I’m finally in with a chance here. Yes we repair all sorts of cars. Yes we can fit you in, but we can’t do it before Friday at the earliest.

This actually fits with my plans, because believe it or not, I was planning to find secure parking in Lyon and take a TGV out of town for the weekend. I tell them I don’t want the car til Tuesday, will that suit? They tell me drive it round here and they’ll see what they can do.

Back to the car. As I start to reverse out of the parking space the pipe gets seriously caught in the ground, and a young guy across the street runs across and bangs on my window and asks me if I realise what’s up. By this point, I’m stuck in a manoevre and there are angy cars around me, so he holds hands up to the other cars and directs me off the street.

“I’m a mechanic,” he says. “I can fix that for you,” and he’s on his knees asking for a plastic bag so that he can slide under the car and have a look. He pretty soon comes to the conclusion that the exhaust is knackered beyond mere soldering and tells me to hold on whilst he phones the scrapyard to see if he can get a new part. Either that he says, shrugging, or you could fix it with some fil de fer (iron wire?!). “That’s what I did to mine and it got me all the way to Morocco!”

I’m getting a bit nervous at this point. It’s very kind of this completely unknown guy to offer help and even serious repair work, despite the fact he doesn’t know me at all (I never even asked him his name!) I’m seriously torn. I could do him and me a favour, get him to do the work (I was assuming by now he’s one of France’s many unemployed, but maybe I’m being unfair?) and save money. But you don’t get any sort of guarantee that way. And if I’m honest, I’ve been conned in the past by people who seem kind in the street.

In the end, I thank him very much for his offer, and decide to go back to the mechanic with the workshop around the corner. He fixes the pipe up with string so that I can get around the corner, and we part company.

The mechanic is happy to take the car with all its contents, so I just liberate what I need for the weekend, and set off. It’ll have to be a hotel stop, because I can’t camp without the car. I warn the guy there’s a gas bottle in the boot in case he does decide to do some soldering, and I hand over the key. After some scrabbling, we find documents in the glove-compartment that include the year of registration and the serial number. I leave him with my mobile phone number and instructions about international dialling, and I get a card off him so that I can find him again on Tuesday.

And I just walk away to find a hotel. Will the car and all my kit still be there next week? If I manage to drive away this time, will something else fall off before I get to Paris at the end of June? Tune in next week…

Let me relate two paragraphs and see if you can see where I’m going.

In Epernay, I got talking to a very nice young man who skateboarded over to talk to me whilst I was cooking because of the GB plates on my car. Turned out he was a 100% anglophile who likes to spend his holidays climbing in the Peak District (to the chagrin of his girlfriend who would rather have gone to the south of France.) We had a great, wide-ranging conversation, he promised to e-mail when he got online and left me his phone number. One of the topics of conversation went something like, going from Nottingham to Geneva? In a 10 year old Skoda? Are you totally mad? I’ve now done 1,200 miles in France…

The second bit of information is about the campsite I was at. They were having repairs done which meant that the water was turned off at 9am sharp. They did warn me, and I duly set an alarm, but simply couldn’t find the energy to get up early enough to shower that morning. So, I put on smelly old clothes, put my hair in a pony tail through the back of a cap, and wore shorts, all with the intention of driving straight to the next campsite (destination: Lyon) and getting in a shower there before attempting any further interaction with other members of the human race.

Can you see where I’m going?

50km out from Lyon, I make a stop for petrol and food, and walking back to my car, I notice that the exhaust pipe is not at the angle it should be at. Kicking it slightly (the limit of my car expertise in many fields) and it doesn’t actually fall off, so I get back in the car and carry on for Lyon, thinking through my options, and working out the French phrases I’ll need.

I can go straight to campsite, pitch tent and emergency tent, unload car into emergency tent and try and find a garage on campsite staff recommendation. I can go straight to a garage and see whether I actually need to unload the two tonnes of sundry camping equipment, or whether they can just fix the exhaust on there and then. I can keep going and see what happens with the exhaust.

As it happens, as soon as I hit Lyon I can hear the exhaust scraping the road whenever I go uphill, or there’s a minor bump in the road. I head for somewhere populated and end up parking in the Place de Paris opposite the Gare de Vaise, and I can see a garage from where I end up, so I walk in and ask if they can help. Ah, non m’sieur, we don’t repair cars. (building labelled Controle Technique Voiture, which I suspect must be an MOT centre.) They point me at another garage, who said they only repaired Renaults, and then, only with an appointment. Finally, they sent me to a third garage, still within easy walking of where I’d happened to end up in Lyon quite by chance, and I’m finally in with a chance here. Yes we repair all sorts of cars. Yes we can fit you in, but we can’t do it before Friday at the earliest.

This actually fits with my plans, because believe it or not, I was planning to find secure parking in Lyon and take a TGV out of town for the weekend. I tell them I don’t want the car til Tuesday, will that suit? They tell me drive it round here and they’ll see what they can do.

Back to the car. As I start to reverse out of the parking space the pipe gets seriously caught in the ground, and a young guy across the street runs across and bangs on my window and asks me if I realise what’s up. By this point, I’m stuck in a manoevre and there are angy cars around me, so he holds hands up to the other cars and directs me off the street.

“I’m a mechanic,” he says. “I can fix that for you,” and he’s on his knees asking for a plastic bag so that he can slide under the car and have a look. He pretty soon comes to the conclusion that the exhaust is knackered beyond mere soldering and tells me to hold on whilst he phones the scrapyard to see if he can get a new part. Either that he says, shrugging, or you could fix it with some fil de fer (iron wire?!). “That’s what I did to mine and it got me all the way to Morocco!”

I’m getting a bit nervous at this point. It’s very kind of this completely unknown guy to offer help and even serious repair work, despite the fact he doesn’t know me at all (I never even asked him his name!) I’m seriously torn. I could do him and me a favour, get him to do the work (I was assuming by now he’s one of France’s many unemployed, but maybe I’m being unfair?) and save money. But you don’t get any sort of guarantee that way. And if I’m honest, I’ve been conned in the past by people who seem kind in the street.

In the end, I thank him very much for his offer, and decide to go back to the mechanic with the workshop around the corner. He fixes the pipe up with string so that I can get around the corner, and we part company.

The mechanic is happy to take the car with all its contents, so I just liberate what I need for the weekend, and set off. It’ll have to be a hotel stop, because I can’t camp without the car. I warn the guy there’s a gas bottle in the boot in case he does decide to do some soldering, and I hand over the key. After some scrabbling, we find documents in the glove-compartment that include the year of registration and the serial number. I leave him with my mobile phone number and instructions about international dialling, and I get a card off him so that I can find him again on Tuesday.

And I just walk away to find a hotel. Will the car and all my kit still be there next week? If I manage to drive away this time, will something else fall off before I get to Paris at the end of June? Tune in next week…

Something mountainous was definitely on the cards for the trip, and after discussions with various Swiss residents about where might be best, I headed for Chamonix Mont-Blanc back in France on some more rather exiciting motorway — the Autoroute Blanche, which takes you through more tunnels and viaducts. One night of heavy rain sent me scurrying to an hotel instead of braving it outdoors, and the following day, I took the cablecars of the Aiguille Du Midi, a mountain pointing to the south of France. The cablecar up to the top is one of the steepest in the world, climing to over 3,000 metres in just 20 minutes, in two ear-popping stages. It is not cheap, but the views from the top were amazing, and I spent hours snapping happily away.

Once you get to the top there are further excursions possible: they try and sell you elevator tickets to the top of the mountain for example.

But more interestingly, after the huge, 80-person cable car that hauls you to the top of the mountain, there’s the chance to take a 5km expedition in tiny cable cars that take you all the way to Italy across the Alpine border. The cable cars drop you off at Hebronner, where the staff in the mountaintop restaurant speak Italian. I spluttered ‘un’espresso doppio per favore’ and got what I wanted but fell far short of ‘cor, that sandwich looks great, I’ll have one of those’ and certainly didn’t understand it when the lady behind the counter told me how much it cost. It was startlingly cheap compared to the caff on the French side of the mountain, and they were actually slicing ham there and then. Got hopelessly confused about whether I wanted my sandwich caldo or fredo: caldo sounds like cold, but means hot.

In addition to walking around the platforms and terraces intended for the grand-publique, there are doors in the mountain which lead directly onto the slopes of the Alps. There were various thin, outdoorsy-types up there with crampons and skis taking their lives into their hands and roaming the high alpine plains. The cablecars swept me past a mountaineer climbing a bare rock face who waved (hopefully not waving for help–he was much higher by the time I returned). On the Italian side of things, the warnings on posters were still as severe (“Taking life into own hands, very dangerous, no safe paths, not beginners’ slopes”) but whole families with small children were sauntering out into the snowy wilds. Scary.

Somewhat overawed by the staggering scenery, I was uploading photos of it direct from my cameraphone to Flickr — no idea how much that technological gimmick will end up costing me. I was also carrying out text conversations with Paul and my brother, and even fielding a security phone call from my bank who had noticed odd spending patterns on my visa card (motorway tolls). Bro was warning me that climbing quickly to high altitudes and staying up was likely to be very bad for my health, so after 5 hours wandering around at the sub-zero temperatures of the mountain top, I took the cable-car back down to the sweltering heat of the valley floor and went to find a pitch for the tent that night. Stayed at a very nice 3* campsite called La Mer de Glace — the Ice Lake.

So, last weekend spent in Switzerland in the company of stellar people from the Archers newsgroup. Fab time had by all: started off in Geneva with a lovely soiree on a balcony on a warm summer’s night. Excellent food, plenty of time for discussion and getting-to-know-you. I think I share elements of the same sense of humour with Gumrat which lead to some hilarity.

Saturday we all got in the car and headed right across Switzerland to Basel taking in some sights of lakes and mountains and fountains and so on. We stopped in Bern for lunch (I had authentic roesti, and failed utterly to understand Swiss German being spoken to me, although the waiter seemed to understand me. Also usual problem of knowing enough for a chat, and yet knowing very little about words for food on menus.)

Before leaving Bern we drove around it taking in some sights of old Bern, the Swiss Parliament (outside thereof) and a bear pit. Photos of bears here. Many of them came out like photos you see of abused animals in street stalls, but these bears looked quite happy, if a little hot under all that fur. There was plenty of space in the pit, and vegetation, and water. About four bears in total, I think, three of which just wanted to sleep and a fourth was prepared to play tricks for the people above who were dropping vegetables straight into the hungry bear’s mouth.

On to Basel, where we met up with further umrats including one who lives in Basel, and a group who’d flown in specially. Basel was celebrating something, not quite sure what, but included football team having won something. Small groups of about 30 men in various different mediaeval costumes were marching around with familiar but different tunes on pipes and drums that others identitified as the tunes for Scotland the Brave and British Grenadiers that probably have different words in Swiss German (like the French kids in Reims who seemed to be singing My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean). Some over excited naked drunk men were playing in a fountain and our host felt she vaguely recognised one of them.

At a pre-ordained time, we went to wave banners at a webcam for our newsgroup-reading friends stuck at home: two pics to show what we looked like on the ground and what the webcam saw…