the languedoc

I float in the pool.  All I see is the sky, an unbroken china blue; pure white cotton balls of airborne seeds floating across; and the black silhouettes of swallows diving and weaving in screaming squadrons.  Perfection.

We have reached our main destination, the little guest house in the village of Roujan in the Languedoc.  The rain is behind us and we have just this clearest blue and the heat of summer, like all those French films of family vacances in the ancestral home.

This was a family house once, but our hosts, the very handsome Alex and Gregg, have taken it and subtly modernised it to provide rooms that are comfortable and efficient, a blend of ancient and modern.  They have a unique proposition.  The rooms are self catering with full kitchens, allowing guests to go out and find the best of local produce, and cook themselves, but with all the social aspects of a well run guest house.  And here they excel, taking immense trouble to make everyone feel at home, spending time to chat or to fix any minor problem, and even inviting us out to the local social scene.  In the eight days we were there, we were taken to three local events: an evening wine tasting in the shadow of an old chateau and its spreading oaks; a jazz concert in a new performance space created from an old barn; and a special dinner at a nearby B+B.

We travelled around the area on several days.   The local villages are built tight and winding, the houses huddled tightly and defensively together in this once fought over area; seemingly  unchanged since medieval times.  And close by to the north are the outliers of the Pyrenees, cut through by astonishing deep gorges such as the Gorge d'Heric, and the valley of the river Orb with its villages clinging to the hillsides.  The coast along here is a little disappointing: though there are good long beaches, they are very exposed, with no natural tree shelter behind. There are beach clubs which provide more comfortable environment - but we preferred the garden and pool at our guest house. 


Several days we spent just lazing there, and getting to know some of the  lovely other guests in this little heaven under the blue Languedoc sky.

pau

A short drive across the border takes us to Pau.  Now this is a town with a fascinating history. Set on a high ridge with a huge panorama of the Pyrenees, 50km away (apparently - it was too cloudy for us to see!) this was a castle that was turned into a little jewel of a royal palace for the kings of Navarre, and by Henri IV who became king of France (a good king!).  It's on the turn between gothic and renaissance and now beautifully restored, a white limestone jewel still dominating the dense little streets. 
The city later, in the time of Napoleon III, became a fashionable resort with Europe's elite, especially the English, who no doubt came to inhale the clear mountain air when London got too much.  Or maybe the casino and the steeplechase course were more of a draw!  Well, Pau eventually lost out to Biarritz and has been on the slide ever since.  Faded grandeur is taking over the once grand Empire-style hotels along the Boulevard des Pyrénées.  This promenade, with te mountain view, stretches along the whole south side of the town, and was once filled with grandees in boaters and ladies in bustles.  Many of the hotels are now turned into apartments, and many shops in the old medieval streets are dying or empty. 
The funicular still rises as graceful as a grand duchess, from the station up to the promenade, but there are no belle epoque passengers now.  Instead, Pau seems to have more than its fair share of alternative yoof - think matted hair, tattoos and piercings in unusual places, and nervous looking dogs on lengths of rope.
It's still a beautiful town though, and well worth the visit.  We did find a great restaurant near the chateau - the Henri IV - with good regional specialties and a friendly waiter.  The days of surly service, with a refusal to understand your rusty French, are gone.  Nowadays waiters seem glad to practice their English, or indulge your attempts to dig up that O level phrasebook from some suppressed mental recess. 
Thunderous rain in the evening and quite cool.  But still better than arctic London over the jubilee weekend.

bilbao

And so we arrive in Bilbao.  This is a spectacular city, busily trying to reinvent itself.  It was once one of Spain's great manufacturing cities, but most of the industry has been swept away and replaced with modernist masterpieces - there seems to be a consensus to produce whacky and wonderful buildings, many a product of Spain's mad property boom.
Gehry's Guggenheim Museum, of course, has pride of place, beside the river. 
Bilbao is built in a gorge, steeply rising on both sides, with little level ground to build.  So it squeezes everything into a tight space along the valley bottom, with many bridges across the river.  There is a tight little medieval centre with one of the pilgrimage churches on the route to Santiago de Compostela, a grid of narrow, shady streets with high stone buildings, like Barcelona's old city. Most of the rest of the city is either from the late 19th century, the time of the industrial boom, or is very recent.  All around are the green slopes of the mountains on either side, rising up with terraces of villas.
We were lucky to arrive on an evening when there was a festival.  Somehow I always manage to do this in Spain - or maybe there are just a lot of festivals!  It was to celebrate the midsummer and buildings were specially illuminated.  The theatre had a projected son et lumiere that cleverly used the features of the building - a bit like the recent Buckingham Palace concert.  There were street performance all over the city.  We saw a local choir perform miscellanies of Beatles and Abba songs, rather well, in the porch of the medieval church.
Next day we walked and walked all over the town, taking in the very well looked after park and finishing at the Guggenheim.  Of course this has a spectacular presence within the town, but its interiors are also very spectacular, and good for large scale modern 3 dimensional art display.  With some exceptions, the permanent collection is not so interesting as the building, sadly.  Though we did take in a David Hockney exhibition (recently seen in London), which at first I thought was a bit banal. but grew on me as I went into it more.

bay of biscay, june 2012

I've been neglecting the blog lately, and now time for a catch up. I an and I are on a trip to the south of France by car.  Maybe I will add some notes on earlier trips this year, shortly.

We set off from a dreary, drizzly London, having arranged to take the car by ferry from Portsmouth to Bilbao, then driving across to our main destination in the Languedoc.  The Cap Normandie, run by Brittany Ferries, turned out to be much better than epected, and feels more like a cruise than a ferry crossing.  There were loading problems and we set out late, but as we pulled from port the sun broke out for a bit as we sat in an open deck watching the ship's wake unroll, rounding the Isle of Wight and off for open water.  A relaxing way to travel.
The menu was surprisingly adventurous and well prepared.  We had fairly low expectations based on shorter cross channel crossings, but they really seem to try here.  Even the self service food is a cut above average.  For dinner I had rack of pork slow-baked in hay, which I have vaguley heard of but never tried.  It was a revelation.  I am not normally a big fan of pork but this was meltingly delicious, served with a sage and onion sauce and wok fried vegetables.  Must get the recipe. 
The rooms on board are somewhat spartan but have everything you need, packed into a minimal space.  Soon after going to bed we hit the Bay of Biscay and things got pretty rough for a few hours. I was glad to be lyoing down because it felt like standing up would have been an effort.  The ship was pitching violently forward and back, and at times rolling too.  Sometimes it felt that the whole ship was being lifted and dropped into the next wave trough with a huge crash.  Eventually I got off to sleep and things seem to have calmed down.
By morning it was a lot easier, though still pitching up and down so that as you walked forward or aft you were alternately weightless and double weight, like some NASA astronaut training programme.
We pulled into Bilbao's port about 24 hours later having avoided a full day's driving. All in all a good way to get down there.

central coast

Now we are back on the Coast. Back at sea level, high summer - and the living is easy. Except getting down to the coast itself, we hit a traffic jam and get stuck for over an hour. The cause? Wait for it - a farm selling pumpkins (still a month to Hallowe'en, guys!)
We are travelling down the Coastal Highway, stopping off first just south at Carmel. A well heeled, lovely little town - famously Clint Eastwood was once the Mayor. Well, it made our day anyway. We drove along the 17-mile drive that leads to Mendocino. 20 years ago this seemed a lonely and magnificent bit of coast, and still is spectacular, but houses and golf courses are encroaching at an alarming rate.

to the city of zion

We leave early - frost on the car roof but still feeling comfortable in the still, sunny, extenuated air - because today we are driving down through Idaho and Utah to Salt Lake City. Another 300 miles ahead of us, and again we are going through many different landscapes - semi-arid mostly, like those classic western movies, with scrub oaks along the rivers and dusty ground hugging plants. Occasional valleys of farmland, with elaborate irrigation systems, great scaffolds that rotate infinitesimally to water circles of alfalfa so big they can be seen from space.
We are approaching Mormon country. You can tell it's their town - very green, estates of modern, tidy, big houses grouped around the whited sepulchre of a temple.
Then a glimpse of the Great Salt Lake and we are in the City itself. It stands up proud against the Wabash Range towering to the east. At sunset the clouds whip up into a biblical scene that would have got Turner in a tizz.
If the USA were designed by Disney, it would all be like this. Rows and rows of very prosperous houses, perfectly maintained and landscaped. Driving around town, it's clear that something is going on. The conference centre is holding a convention for the Latter Day Saints. It seems like all those young men who go out to evangelise have returned to Mormon ground zero for the day. Hundreds and hundreds of them, all in business suits, white shirts and ties (Tierack must do well here. - Ian) and with tidy short hair and polished suits, on this warm Saturday afternoon, are wandering about, laughing, chatting, debating - begging for tickets to the event. It is surreal, when compared to any other slacker, slobbily dressed western town - taken over by Stepford missionaries for the night, all robotically identical.
Interestingly, only about 60% of Utah is signed up to LDS nowadays- and only half of the members are active. But on this day, they dominate the city visually as they no doubt do politically.

The death of Yellowstone?

The Rockies are dying. We saw whole hillsides of grey dead, lodgepole and ponderosa pines, victims of a fatal combination of global warming, poor management and a sudden aggressive change in the behaviour of the tiny mountain pine beetle, which bores into the trees and rapidly kills them if their numbers are great enough. Previously they only killed mature trees at low altitude. The warmer weather has allowed them to greatly expand the territory and the amount of time each year they can operate – and to reduce their life cycle from two to one year. Coupled with an under funded park service, the result is devastating. A whole forest of dead trees will inevitably lead to huge forest fires in years to come.
We may well have unwittingly come to Yellowstone in the last year when it looked so stunning. The creeping grey plague is spreading even in the high altitudes here, and there is no stopping it. Though immature trees are pushing up between the dead hulks, they are extremely slow growing and it may take at least a couple of generations to restore the forests of this region, even if they can develop resistant strains and see off other effects of global warming. Meanwhile the stress on the rest of the ecosystem will be enormous. More at:

http://e360.yale.edu/content/feature.msp?id=2252

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/02/garden/02tree.html