Russan 1

We picked up a hire car in Avignon on Saturday. Usual difficulties. We’d pre-booked the smallest option, which Hertz’s web site advertised as a Fiat Panda or similar but when we arrived we were offered a Chevvy Matiz. Dale recoiled in horror exclaiming ‘’Daewoo death trap’’ so we paid a bit extra for the Opel Corsa .

We are spending this week in one of the Richards’ cottages in a village called Russan that is very close to Nimes. When we arrived we discovered one very busy little village. Roads were blocked off and we couldn’t park in the ’centre ville’ per our instructions. This was because the centre ville was blocked off with barricades and there was a great commotion going on. What was keeping people endlessly entertained, besides copious amounts of alcohol, was what we will describe as ’bull taunting’.

Bull taunting seems firstly to require that the bull’s horns be taped up with some padding because heaven forbid that a human might actually get hurt by the bull. Secondly serve lots of alcohol and thirdly ramp up a few dance tracks that can blare away throughout the village. Fourthly you set up some barriers within the centre ville so that the taunters can escape from the bull they are taunting. I should explain that all these barriers consist of vertical railings that humans can squeeze through but that bulls can’t. Fifthly put a beat up old Peugeot 205 in the centre ville as well (we christened it ‘’Grease Lightnin’’ ) that can also act as an escape pod. Finally you let the bull loose, you throw things at the bull and every bogan within a 50km radius comes to test their bravery against the bull.

Go Grease Lightnin

On the bogan front, Dale claims that he’s never seen so many track suit pants in one confined space although I disagree I still think you see more at the Melbourne Motor Show.
Back to the Bull taunting. It occurred to us later that we are right in the middle of France’s bull fighting country. Bull fights are held at both Nimes and Arles and it seems that the season is getting underway. On the one hand this variation is less cruel because the bull didn’t look like it was physically hurt although it was clearly very agitated. On the other hand it must be about the softest way of testing yourself against a bull if that’s your thing.

Enough of bull taunting. The village is lovely and everyone gives you a cheery ‘bonjour’’. We’ve been out running two mornings around beautiful vineyards and up hills that give great views. The hills are beautiful but murder to run up. Russan is on the banks of the Gard River about 30 kms upstream from the Pont du Gard and at the start of the Gorges of Gardon.

The charming cottage we are residing in

View of Russan from across the Gard River

We canoed about 10 kms through the Gorges today and I wouldn’t describe it as a success. We were paddling downstream but against a fierce headwind for the second half. The river runs at a pretty fair pace so we enjoyed that even though it tends to mitigate against taking pictures because cameras might get wet. The scenery is also good, although it doesn’t have the magnificent castles you find along the Dordogne or the beautiful colours of Canada in autumn. We were just exhausted by battling the wind. We suspect that this might happen a bit as we had originally thought that we would paddle down to the Pont du Gard but Madame at the canoe hire place insisted that we check in with her about 8 kms upstream from the Pont to see how we were feeling. When we did and said that we were stuffed she promptly refunded some of our money to us, which was fantastic, but it does lead us to suspect that this head wind has been known to appear on other occasions.

Canoing on the Gard River

We’ve visited Nimes and Aigues-Mortes, both of which are very interesting. The amphitheatre at Nimes was built in AD 100 and is a most amazing solid and immense structure. Nimes also has a beautiful city park and a Roman Temple. You get to see a particularly naf 3D movie in the temple, all about the bravery of the Nimes people. Like the rest of France they seem to lose gallantly all the time (to quote a friend “Cheese-eating surrender-monkies”).

Nimes Arena (exterior)

Nimes Arena (interior)

Les Jardins de Fontaine in Nimes

I’d never heard of Aigues-Mortes before. It literally means dead waters and is in the Camargue near the mouth of the Rhone. It’s surrounded by marshes and salt pans and has great medieval town walls that are close to fully intact. You get a great view of the town and the surrounds as you circumnavigate the city wall.

Aigues-Mortes city wall

Aigues-Mortes within the city wall - note the trained trees

Popeing Around Avignon

Flew out on Tuesday April 14. Not much to say about the joys of flying cattle class to Paris with 3 hour lay overs in Kuala Lumpur and Amsterdam except that we arrived safely if somewhat shattered.

I unknowingly committed a terrorist act by carrying a swiss army knife in carry on luggage. I unknowingly managed to evade security checks in Melbourne and Kuala Lumpur but the officious, sorry efficient, Dutch were right on to it and it was au revoir to the expensive swiss army knife. This may evoke a sensation of déjà vu for our New Zealand hiking companions JA and FL.

Travelled down to Avignon by train from Paris which was delightful if expensive given that Malaysian Airlines’cancellation of our direct flight to Paris caused us to miss the non exchangeable non refundable but very cheap train ticket we’d already paid for to Avignon. Dale naturally, but politely, challenged the meaning of non exchangeable and non refundable with the very nice people at SCNF but they very nicely explained that non exchangeable and non refundable meant the same thing in French and English but that they would be delighted to sell us a more expensive ticket that would still get us to Avignon toute suite.

Avignon – what do you say about it – we’ve been there twice now but it doesn’t grab me the way that Johnny Depp or Brad Pitt do – or at least I wish they did. Il a une histoire cést beacoup interessante but that’s kinda all. Visited the Palais de Papes this time and it is vast – I’m reminded of the line from the musical Into the Woods that goes ‘he’s tall – is that all?’ That’s not exactly fair the audio guided tour is really interesting. On that note we decided to get a French language audio guide to practice our French but rapidly discovered that we need a lot of improvement to be able to understand what on earth is going on.

Palace of the Popes - up close

Palace of the Popes - from La Tour Phillipe Bell

Parts of Avignon inside the city walls are tres beautiful – and you can buy very cheap pain au raisin ou pain a chocolat but even inside the walls some areas are pretty run down. It has a decent university so you do see some very attractive young French men wandering about but an equal number of not so attractive thuggish types loping around in gangs.

I love the shadows cast by this freshly pruned plane tree

I’ll go out on a limb and say that the best things about Avignon are the views of it from Villeneuve les Avignon, which is across the Rhone, and of course the views you get from everywhere of the mighty Rhone itself.

Lunch in Villeneuve-les-Avignon

We stayed in Avignon for a couple days and had a lovely meal one night at Le Ripert, recommended by the very helpful Michel (real name Michael) at our 2 star hotel. As I’m not exactly a gourmand traveller I decided that the next night I’d like a cheap crepe – I am bit partial to your cheap crepe meal. I’m not sure how Kath (Jane Turner) would discuss or pronounce your crepe. I suspect she’d think it was paper that you use for a bit of your origami making. Anyway I’ll leave this for PD to ponder. Anyway anyway, it was hysterical. We were the only customers in the restaurant and they seemed to have the dumb nephew serving. Jack, Matthew and Tiaan if you are reading this - and I suspect if you are there is some poor parenting going on by our siblings – none of you are dumb nephews. Anyway the restaurant proprietors then called in a friend from over the road to be served a meal to try and make it look like people were flocking to their Breton style crepes. This was not very successful as even some Americans appeared to pass by, and we left the moment we could because we were getting freaked out by the constant hovering. Having said all that I liked my meal!

Next instalment from the Richards’cottage in Russan.

How to prepare for an extended break

On Thursday 2 April we caught up with some friends at a bar in Melbourne called Lily Black for some drinks before departing. This was a chance to say goodbye as we hadn’t been able to catch up with everyone before leaving.

Nous

CR, JA and FL



We arrived at Buffalo at dusk on the evening of Thursday 9th April, with just enough light to get the tent set up.

On Friday we were rostered on for dinner and planned to make a chickpea curry but JK asked us if we could do lunch on Friday instead, and if we could possibly make a soup. Here is the improvised recipe – by popular demand.

DA had spare red kidney beans, so we thought that we would use these in place of some chickpeas.

Ingredients (for 6 people)
3 onions
6 cloves of garlic
Half a pepper – can be red or green.
2 tablespoons of cooking oil.
1.5 teaspoons of Mexican chilli powder
1.5 teaspoons of vegetable stock
1.5 teaspoons of turmeric
1.5 tablespoons of ground cumin
2 cans (approx 425 g cans) of drained chickpeas
4 cans (approx 425 g cans) of drained red kidney beans
6 freshly chopped tomatoes
2 tablespoons of sweet mango chutney
Enough water – we’ll come back to this later.
3 tablespoons of butter – I am indebted to DA for his advice in order to soften the ’chilliness’ and I think it adds some nice ‘texture’ to the soup.
Sour cream and grated cheese which each person can add to their bowl according to taste. Thanks again to DA for this suggestion.

Cooking instructions
1. Finely slice the onions and garlic.
2. Chop the pepper.
3. Heat the oil then add the onion, garlic and pepper and heat over medium heat until the onion and pepper are soft.
4. Lower the heat and add the chilli powder, seasoning, paprika and cumin and stir for 1 minute.
5. Add the chickpeas, kidney beans, tomatoes and mango chutney.
6. Add enough water to cover the mixture.
7. Bring to the boil and simmer covered over low heat for 30 minutes, stirring occasionally.
8. Add the butter.
9. Serve into bowls. Individuals garnish with sour cream and grated cheese according to taste.

And everything goes nice with a big bottle of JL's 50th birthday red

On Friday AH, DA, Dale and I took several short walks, including to the Horn



On Saturday a group of us walked to Mac’s Point Lookout. This is a relatively straight forward walk of about 3 hours out and back but we have encountered some bad luck on the walk.

This year Dale’s sunglasses fell off into a 3m deep crevice while we were at Mac’s Point and we couldn’t find a way to retrieve them.

On Sunday some more people decided to do the walk so we jokingly encouraged them to attempt to rescue the sunglasses. We were amazed when they returned with the glasses. Thirteen year old LW removed rocks in order to get into the crevice. He enlisted the help of NG to move the final monster rock and then got into the crevice to recover the glasses which had not been damaged.

Mac's Point - Nice view, shame about the curse