Languedoc-Rousillion

Week 16 — November 26th to December 9th (Tony)

We set off from Roanne in freezing cold by train to Montpellier where we picked up our car, a Citroën C4 hatchback. Practically all accommodation in the city was booked out for some expo but we somehow wangled a couple of nights in a very central, cosy hotel. Montpellier is a city that appeals to everyone. Its architecture is an eclectic mixture of old and new with wide boulevardes and winding narrow lanes full of interesting shops and eateries. But most of all you can hear people having fun, playing music, laughing, calling out greetings across the street, a stark contrast to the ghostly silence that prevails in most urban areas in France. Sixty five percent of Montpellier's population is under 25 and 65,000 of them are university students. You can almost smell the testosterone.

Beziers on the other hand is old, tired and filthy — meaning dog pooh! Beziers could easily claim a prize for the greatest spread of doggie doos in France; Perpignan would come a close second. It's hard to admire a place when your eyes are glued to where your feet are about to tread.

We rented an apartment in Sète, looking out over the Mediterranean, for a week. A lively town set on a high promintory attached to the mainland by a long, narrow strip of sand, Sète is famous for its fishing industry. Watching the fleet and its trailing flocks of thousands of seagulls return to port late in the afternoon to disgorge the day's catch is a tourist attraction in itself.

An excursion up to Millau to appraise the incredible viaduct built over the Tarn was an absolute must. By far the highest bridge in the world, the scale of the structure is difficult to comprehend let alone photogragh — impossible to fit into a single snapshot without trick photograghy, or a helicopter. Yet far from imposing on the landscape, it suspends itself gracefully like a spider's web across the vastness of the gorge. I salute the brave, innovative engineers who resolved the technical difficulties of spanning such a massive ravine — it kept me awake for nights figuring out the intracacies of how they did it — even though I knew — it just seems so brazenly ingenious, and risky!

Another day we drove up to Aigues Mortes to view the quaint, perfectly retained fortress town built by King Louis IX (St Louis) in the thirteenth century, near where part of the Rhône River drains into the immense, marshy Camargue (its bulk discharges into the Mediterranean near Marseilles). It was a political success for the kingdom but became an economic disaster when in the middle ages the place was left stranded three miles from the sea as it receded (yes, global climate change was an issue, even then). Thereafter, strategically, it wasn't worth attacking; and so it remains, unscathed, almost pristine, far from the route taken by most tourists in the south of France. For us it was also an opportunity to check out the canal through the Camargue and down through the estuaries all the way to Sète and the start of the Canal du Midi.

We paused in Capestang, on our way to Touolouse, to investigate Oppidum d'Ensurene. This ought to be a major tourist attraction but receives no mention here at all other than a couple of road signs. Built by the Romans, this huge radial drainage configuration first caught our attention, by accident, about a year ago when we searched Capestang on Google Earth. And behold, looming out of the landscape several kilometres east of the town was this colossal geometric design. We gazed in awe from high atop a lookout where some clever Roman must have observed the natural dish-shaped formation of the land and conceived a plan to convert it into a catchment for their water supply. Check it out, it's amazing.

We also stopped by to introduce ourselves to Richard and Linda, former owners of Vertrouwen, the first barge we had set our hearts on buying, but miised out. She is still presently moored in Capestang, looking beautiful, but we're pleased we bought Sable.

We have been exposed, literally, to this region's unique climate. Sheltered from the north and west by mountains, the weather has been like a GC winter, with clear sunny days, although sometimes the wind can be fierce and cold. After climbing over the range our descent into Toulouse brought us down into the foggy, damp, cold climate that the rest of France knows in winter; a bit like driving into Dunedin really... Toulouse, France's fourth city, is big, bustling, boring. Perhaps I'm unfairly judging her because (a) we couldn't get through the Airbus factory (foreigners have to provide their passport details three days in advance) and (b) the unkind weather. Next stop — Perpignan, then Spain.