Lots and lots and lots (04/06/2010)

Hello again folks ..... the wifi works in this cafe!!!!!

We are in a VERY basic refuge in St Sever (in the convent) and we had a beer in the local bar around the corner which said it had wifi so I have just pulled together some of the older and some of the latest stuff into one file so that we can up load it if the wifi really does exist and works, etc....

Again, totally unedited and a bit on the rambling sid rumpold style but we are sort of living in odd places with odd bunches of people and try to get things done as and when at the moment – and there is not a lot of chance to do as much as you want, etc.

So, sorry in advance but it does give you some idea of the latest bit.... more to follow when possible

PS we had a lovely dinner in Mont de Marsant yesterday and had great news that Ken (Alison’s dad) had returned home that day and is being looked after by Amy (Alison’s mum) so things are definitely looking up for him now – phew!!!

Here’s the rest of the stuff I could muster 

Philippe was our hospitaliere in Rocquefort and he was lovely. (02/06/2010)

That didn’t stop me from having a couple of difficult moments before things settled down. Partly, it was because I was tired and hungry and had put together a scenario in my mind that he simply blew apart by being there and offering hospitality – yes, you have to work at being given hospitality as well as sharing it.... I knew this but it still takes a few minutes, sometimes.

So, I tried to communicate with him and offer my help. But he didn’t understand me at first, which really added to my difficulties, and he didn’t want my help to prepare the meal, which also made it hard.

I realised later on that he had not understood me because he thought I was Dutch and was listening to me as if I was trying to communicate to him that way. He actually understands more Dutch than he understands English so he was listening in a different way and was not hearing my French as if I was speaking English. Although that seems weird, I can assure you it is quite significant. Once he understood where I was “speaking” from he was able to get his head around what I was saying and that really helped.

So we sat together in a very well kept refuge and had a really nice meal provided by Philippe. We started with Cassis and white wine which is a standard drink across France and can be seen drunk by me from Normandy to the Mediterranean in Bar/tabacs everywhere. It was lovely and also interesting to watch the reactions of the Dutch man and German woman we were sharing the refuge with.

We then had some very nice duck pate with bread and Philippe had cooked some home grown onions, some local potatoes and some local, free range eggs as a large omelette for us to share with some salad, his own dressing, and more bread. The eggs were so fresh and so good that the colour of the yolks almost looked artificial. I would have needed to add turmeric or saffron to the omelette to make it as yellow as it was! It tasted great but, and this is only an addition rather than a correction, it would have been even better with some garlic.... and even with a fresh herb as well. But the simple solution was great and served everyone, regardless.

The conversation was good, too and we were able to enjoy a relaxed meal despite my initial dark feelings. Phew, even the simplest of things can be hard.... I had hoped for some simple salads, perhaps a bit of rillette and bread and some ice cold white wine because of spending so long thinking about it during the walk. But this was good and we ended up talking to other people, too, which is always good and was something I had expected to be hard simply because it had been hard the night before with the same people, but when you add a third party it is often a lot easier to get things going when you are all struggling and, despite our best efforts, it had been a bit difficult the previous couple of nights.

Does that all make sense?

Ho hum, and tonight we arrived after a longer day to find ourselves all cramped into two small rooms with two Dutch men in the best room and us sharing with the Dutch man and German woman. We settled down and got ourselves clean, washed stuff and checked out the shops, restaurants, etc. It is our Wedding anniversary (27th) and we thought it might be nice to eat out if we could.

On our return the hospitalier sorted us out a separate room. OK so it is still bunk beds and we are in a room just big enough to fit the beds (makes Dominique’s room spacious...) it is still a huge luxury! We can dress/undress without worry, share private space together, read/write/wake up/pack and so on without having to worry about our fellow travellers!!! In our world that adds up to a great deal. Add in the times for switching lights off and on and the closing of windows and you have pretty much sorted out an authentically private space...... just one or two things also needed but those will have to wait....grrrrrr.

So our evening in Mont de Marsand has been great – we found a really good little restaurant, we like the town (despite the presence of a Bull Ring – it used for more things and less for the bull fights, apparently) and it feels really good. It is a really good, busy small city with traffic to prove the point and we are situated on one of its busiest roads. We will come back!

Toodle oodle oooo

Ou est le tom tom? (02/06/2010)

Today we walked along more and more old railway lines and crossed over unfinished motorways. We also struggled with the stupid updates to an already silly set of route instructions BUT we moved from the Gironde to the Landes regions and the sign posting suddenly improved enormously!

It is amazing how important good signage can be on a walk like this. Especially when we are using these French route instructions and when there is a massive motorway cutting up our route in unpredictable ways.

Let me explain. Our French guide has led us to gain a wonderful new set of French words for things like paths, road conditions and features you might encounter on the way. All well and good but the style is, at best, annoying, often quite unreliable or astonishingly vague at crucial moments or mind numbingly detailed in ways that make your heart sink when it is a long and hard day.

So, for example, we are walking along a series of country paths and roads and we will need to keep an eye on when we have to turn from one path to the next. We will get endlessly detailed information about all of the junctions that we should ignore – the turning on the left with the old house marked 1840 and the disused telephone box next to the small road named Rue de Villion .. do not turn left here, keep on forwards – is the sort of instruction you get endlessly. It may be helpful to have the distance marked against each of these but the detail can be enormous and you may turn down one of them if you read it wrongly (turn right and keep on going can be remarkably similar in French, especially when it is pissing with rain and you are tired and hungry). But that is not all – the important turning will be shortly after several of these in a row and will consist of a turning on the right after 200m. So, no detail for that one and it can be any one of the next three turnings on the right that all fall within the next 200m – as it stands, 200m in this context is basically more than 50m and less than half a Km. So, good signing at this point really can help ease the pain of a well seasoned traveller!!!



Dusty old roses (01/06/20120)

Walking to Captieux we spent a lot of time on a disused railway line. Someone had taken the lines and the sleepers away but had not levelled out the path se we were constantly walking on an irregular surface with the bumps and furrows just the wrong distance apart for any sort of normal person’s steps. This is a tiring experience.

It was also overcast and mainly damp but the line was long and straight with forest ether side for most of the way so we were relatively sheltered, too.

We got onto the line after eamdering across the country side trying to follow the new changes made to the route to take into account the new motorway that is being built in the area. The changes on the Amis de St Jacques site led us a merry dance along different minor roads and paths and we ended up avoiding part of the way as the path was basically covered in knee deep dense grass and weeds and the mist was hanging over it like a nasty dark cloud. Instead we ended up walking along a very busy N road with thundering lorries and high speed cars whipping up a nice spray for us to enjoy so, when we saw a sign pointing us towards the old railway line we knew we had to take it.

By the time we reached Captieux we were happy to accept most sorts of accommodation. As it was, we ended up in the only hotel in town. The town, by the way, is full of parked lorries and other lorries seem to pass through it in all directions. When the new motorway is finished Captieux may end up a quiet little dusty afterthought and the remaining cafes, shops and so on will probably start to dwindle away. As it was, we ended up in the pilgrim room which had twin beds – identical twins as they both sagged in the same way and were equally hard. But the place was clean, the towels were big, the food in the evening and the breakfast were included and the TV worked.

On the TV we saw the riots in Paris and other cities following something that had happened in the middle east then watched part of a live debate in the French parliament where everyone was talking about justice and fair play, dealing with the unacceptable actions of a repressive state on what was humanitarian aid and so on. So we went out and bought an evening paper and sat in the bar/tabac across the road drinking pression and reading about the Israeli commando attacks on a flotilla of ships.

If we had not gone on this pilgrimage I had been planning to get involved in acting as a peace worker in Palestine (well, one of the people who act as a mixture of passive witnesses and so on in order to try to minimise the level and types of attacks the Israelis seem to constantly wish to inflict on the Palestinians. I could just as easily have been there as here, I suppose, and will have to think about this a bit more. When I recover from this I will do that.....

So it was strange picking up this news in such an obscure place. The world seems to be still ticking along (like a time bomb....) as we walk along the misty roads of southern France. Weird to think it is only about a week to go before we reach Spain!

On the way out of Captieux I noticed some roses in a hedge. They had once been white but were now a dirty sandy colour. The land all around here is very sandy and so fine that when it dires the wind can fill the air with the dust. Hence the dusty roses.

And all that Bazas (01/06/2010)

We visited Bazas two years ago on a hot July day as we worked our way back along the road towards Sauveterre de Bearne. This time we walked in through the medieval pilgrim gate and up to the place before the cathedral. It is a special place with its high facade looking a bit like the entrance to the basilica in Vezelay but larger and without the narthex – sorry, you have to know both to understand what that really means, I suppose.

It is the Cathedral of John the Baptist and there are some amazing paintings inside the building as well as the medieval carvings on the facade. The place is long and wide and lined with a number of arcades and so, after finding out about the refuge and its location, we sat at a bar shaded by one of these arcades and looked at the church happily with our feet slowly beginning to throb and our stomachs rumbling (we needed to get something to eat).

What was very strange was the fact that we walked around looking for a place to eat (everything closed) and for a bakers that would be open in the morning for our next loaf of bread and for some breakfast (we ended up with croissants) then went to the small supermarket (8 a 8) for the night’s food and we encountered an old man who was begging and passed a few other people who looked pretty much like homeless men close to where we had encountered the old man. In such a small and quite isolated place this seemed a surprise, somehow and was quite disconcerting. They were all a bit desperate looking and the old man was pretty aggressive when I told him I had no money to give him.

The refuge was quite odd, too. It was in the old boys’ school a short distance from the centre of town and its windows overlooked the side of the cathedral. It consisted of two rooms at the top of the building. One had the kitchen whci was basically a work surface with a two ring electric hob, a kettle and a coffee maker and a few random pots and enough plates and bowls for 4 people. In the same room on the opposite wall was a toilet, a sink and a shower cubicle. A three panel screen was available for privacy purposes. In the room next door were two sets of bunk beds and a table with 4 chairs.

We shared the place with a Dutch man and a German woman of similar age to me. She has done the Camino 4 times or more and is heading towards the northern route by the coast in Spain. He is walking for a bit longer then turns off to Lourdes. He comes froma town about 30 kms from the place Renee comes from but we are now 2 or 3 days behind Renee and may only see him when we connect with his blog at some time in the future....

Bazas is worth a bit of time on your journey south but go there during the week, and not on Sunday or Monday!


La Reole and the lion hearted eagle.... (30/05/2010)

When we were in La Reole my oldest friend Peter rang us hoping to be able to connect with us as we passed near his new home (Peter and Jackie live in Cahors, which is on another Camino route).As I talked with him we walked through the town looking for somewhere to eat. It was Sunday and virtually the whole place was closed but we walked along with the sky just edging towards rain yet keeping us hopeful and with some amazing old buildings emerging around each corner. One we passed was on the edge of the street named after Richard the lion heart and turned out to be the oldest Hotel de Ville in France. Then we walked up to the church and found that besides the church was this amazing old building that house the order that lived there and the passage which led between the church and what looked like the cloisters was not only lovely, it led to a sort of platform (in stone, of course) which looked out over the river Garonne some distance below us. Stairs led down to a large garden area with further steps leading down to the esplanade by the river. As I talked I watched a huge dark brown bird of prey with wings edged in very light feathers wheeling below us across the river and back, then around the trees down near the bridge. A wonderful sight etched against the dark green river.

We then walked back into the passage way and walked along another passage which led down the side of the church and ended in a reception area serving what must have been the concert hall. Lots of people had just come out to enjoy a glass of wine and various canpes, etc and we were seriously tempted to join them as we were very hungry but I was still on the ‘phone so we left there and eventually found a pizza restaurant which was open.

I could still picture the bird of prey the next day as we walked down those steps and ended up walking along the bank of the river towards the suspension bridge. Its ghost still wheeled above us as we walked out of the town in the vague morning mists.

Houses in a dream or two (31/05/2010)

Yesterday we walked from Ste Ferme to La Reole and we seemed to go higher and higher with each stage of the journey but it was OK. We walked at 5km per hour and did the 20 Km in just under 4 hours (and that was with a stop, too) but the weather was all over the place and we walked on some pretty grim paths as well as some OK ones.

In La Reole we stayed at a Chambre d’Hote where the man running it gave us the room at a standard rate and the breakfast for free. The house was on the edge of the medieval bit of the town just next to the hospital and when we arrived it looked like some sort of unremarkable house apart from some flowers in hanging pots outside a couple of windows and the door. In fact it was those that suggested to me that the house was where we might be staying...

We discovered how large the house was when we entered it. It reminded me a bit of a type of house I encounter in my dreams. Strangely, we had a conversation about such places when we were going to have a meal with Pauline and her two friends Karen and Jane. In the car Karen said that she often dreamed about a large house in her dreams. Although my dreams and hers will not be the same, there were similarities in what she said and so I was able to refresh my memories regarding my own dreams during our stay and was quite non-plussed to find that we were in a sort of dream like house on the first night away from Pauline’s. I must stress that this is not a “dreamy” house or a house that is like a dream but a house of the sort that can quite often feature in my dreams.

This one was much larger than it appeared to be at first notice from the outside. It was wide enough to actually have six windows across it on the first floor but it was also much deeper than you would have expected, too. The entrance led you to a large hall with a wide staircase swerving up to the next floor and there were several doors leading off in different directions and glimpses of rooms leading to other rooms as you stood in the centre of the hall. On the left hand side was a front room with a large pool table (possibly a billiards table as this is a very popular game in France, especially weith someone as old as our host was. There were also two large shotguns hanging on the wall casually between a couple of doors. The place was full of pictures, furniture and nick nacks which made the whole place “busier” in visual terms and compressed the space a little visually but also made you aware of the size and variety of spaces that were contained within the building.

In the morning we went to have breakfast and walked down the stairs. We turned to our right past the billiard room, past another room and below the landing behind the stairs were other rooms leading you further back into the building. We walked through one of these and past a vast living area to our right and another room which was a huge kitchen then entered a room that had a sloping roof (with several sky lights) stretching across the whole width of the back of the house. It was very large with a space for several tables, a fire place with arm chairs wither side of it, a large table with a huge TV in it and other areas, too. Several doors led out to the gardens on the back on either side. Goodness knows what was beyond the first section of the gardens at the back. As we ate we could hear sounds coming from other doors that led back into the house beyond where we were sitting – places where other people lived... places where other rooms led to other rooms, leading to a maze of unknown proportions deep into the bowels of the town, perhaps....
Upstairs was the same – several doors leading off each part of the landing and hints that beyond some doors were several rooms and corridors leading into other parts of the house. Strange place.

I will write about other parts of La Reole in another thing as I am now in Bazas and the place we are staying is somewhere we are sharing with a German woman and a Dutch man and the whole thing is a little bit disruptive so it is difficult to do everything i want to do and I need to get myself sorted before we decide to get ready for bed or it will all become very difficult. This is one of the problems with living in this sort of situation – we have to work around each other and we are all wanting to get up by 6 in the morning and have all walked for around 30 Kms today and expect to have to walk that again tomorrow.....

Suffice to say that I have bloody sore feet and am still trying to work out a better regime where I can actually walk without my little toes erupting into pain and blisters ... for a change... As it is, every day is a bright kaleidoscope of pain from my two little toes (and a cluster of blisters on my left inner heel, of course) and at times they just seem to balloon up into little balls that somehow cannot be put into bearably comfortable locations within my boots, so I walk along trying my best not to hobble while I try to force them back into a workable position to keep going. Eventually they comply and I can get the Kms done with some semblance of bearability.... Grrr it will sort itself out again soon but I just want it to work out sooner than it seems to want to.

Anyway, that is for tomorrow and now it is time to do things out before people finish sorting themselves out.


Weeding, water and wood-smoke - and the bells, the bells! (29/05/2010)

We did a lot of checking on the internet yesterday (I cannot connect this computer to Pauline’s internet but we can use her computer and I will transfer some files over and up load them shortly – if you are reading this it is probably because I have done that....duh..). Anyway, we looked at the internet and worked out how we might get back to the UK if we need to (if Alison’s dad is getting worse and we need to be back home) and we realised that if we walk today as planned we will end up in a small town in rural France with no means of getting anywhere except by walking or phoning up Pauline to come and collect us again. So we are with Pauline for another day – very big thank yous to Pauline!!!

The small town we were heading to had no bus service, no train service and no taxis and the nearest town with any of those was another day’s walk away. So we are here doing gardening, washing more clothes and airing/cleaning out our rucksacks and other belongings so that they are all sorted and ready for the next bit of the walk (or the journey home).

Our contingency plan is to get to Bordeaux, hire a car, drive it to Paris and drop it off there then jump on the Eurostar to Londres and hey presto we will be home. We know where the trains and buses are, where and when they go to Bordeaux and which company to use to hire the car. We also are keeping an eye on the availability of seats on the Eurostar bit too. For very many reasons we are hoping we will not need to use the contingency plan and although news from Alison’s mum sounds good, we are waiting for corroboration before we step deeper into rural France and make it very difficult for ourselves if the situation does go downhill for Alison’s dad....

So the agonies of not walking and not getting the journey done, the anxiety of being in the same place for more than a night or two (even a lovely place like this with lovely people for company) and the frustrations and difficulties surrounding the whole affair are leaving us in need of some sort of alternative regular activity. Hence we have washed the wood smoke smells out of our things (sleeping bags and silk liners, for example), we have aired everything we can including our rucksacks and bivvy bags and we have dug up and weeded part of Pauline’s garden (and will do more later). We may even get a swim in her pool because the weather has begun to improve a little and this may be the only day for a few days when the weather will be this nice. Forecasts for the next couple of days or so suggest rain and I am thinking that diving into a cool pool will be a very nice thing to do even if tomorrow sees us walking through the rain yet again. Despite staying at several campsites with pools we have not been able to have a swim and none of the pools have been open. The French seem to think that you can only use the pool during the high season and even recent hot spells have not been enough to convince them to open the pools earlier!

One weird thing I have begun to notice is how unsettling it is to hear the same church bells for more than a day or so. During our walk we have encountered many, many churches and have heard them ring the morning, mid-day and evening Angelus. Each church has its own distinctive style of doing this and their bells are all different in some way or another. Hearing the evening and morning one is quite common (7pm then 7 am we will hear when we stay in one of the many refuges and other places located next door to the church) but then we will hear a different mid day one and the evening is spent in a new place, etc. Even on rest days we are only ever going to hear one mid day Angelus from the same church.

Here at Pauline and Ian’s house we are next door to the local church and it has rung its second mid day angelus and I am beginning to get a bit disoriented.

Ho hum..........

Woodlands and their ups and downs (29/05/2010)

There are a lot of birds in France; I think I have mentioned this in the past. So much so that we have, from time to time seen dead/squashed song birds of various sorts (all of the small and brightly coloured sorts) as road kill along the way. This took a bit of getting used to because I swear I have ever seen a small bird in Britain as road kill. Lots of pheasants and a few other biggish birds (smallest being pigeons) but no smaller birds. I was thinking about this because we have been walking through many more areas with woods set aside for hunting and I recalled the overhead conversations about how the French shoot almost anything and I imagined that these were just collateral damage... but it is just the law of numbers. France has more wild birds of all sorts (apart from birds of prey) than much of the UK.

The previous day’s walk was spent crossing a landscape of mostly forests and the occasional village. The first stage of forests were a mixture of mushroom and hunting reserves and gradually became more hunting than anything. Of course there were the regular etangs man-made lakes) too. The French cannot resist damning up their local small rivers and streams to create small lakes so they can get a bit of serious fishing done alongside the shooting.

Gradually the paths got steeper and steeper on our way through these wooded areas and then, when it cleared for a bit and the vineyards began to appear in larger and larger forms the hills began to take on serious proportions. Our last major climb was pretty vertical but, thankfully it was on a reasonable surface. After a lot of winding paths and the occasional large tractor blocking our way we eventually arrived at the route down to Ste Foy and the Dordogne river. 34km of walking generally up was turned into a single, steep, very rugged drop through the woods. We thanked God that it had not been seriously raining for some time as the route would have been impossible (impassable) with added running water and mud. Usually such descents are compensated by stunning views but these were well hidden by the dense woodland covering the steep slopes.

The town was dusty and busy and we decided to enter it immediately and make our way to the church rather than take any detours suggested by the guide. So, on we trudged dreaming of cold beer and a sit down wondering if Pauline had found her way there yet when we walked towards the steps of the church and she emerged from its door looking just as surprised to see us as we were to see her.

Fretwork and worry (28/05/2010)

This rest day has been quite stressful in the sense that I have been worrying about Alison, her father and mother and the rest of the family and Alison has been worrying too..... Just to explain – Alison’s dad had a serious operation a couple of weeks ago and he is still not well; partly because it was a tough operation and partly because he is 89. So I worry about how Alison is coping with the worrying about this, I am worried about her mother who has been coping with the situation on a daily basis back in England and also concerned about the rest of the family, too. Of course, Alison has these worries and more to deal with.

So, it makes sense for the day to be stressful, but that is not the whole reason why it has been so difficult. Another reason is because it has been so easy and comfortable!

Yes, we are in Pauline and Ian’s French home and there are two other guests, Karen and Jane, and we have had a great time talking, eating, relaxing, getting washing done, and checking out stuff on the internet, etc. But we have hardly walked any distance at all and even on our rest days we usually have to walk around a lot looking for shops that sell the things we need, finding Laundromats, buying food, etc... and we have done none of that sort of thing. Staying two nights in a place and not even walking a few times around the town somehow feels like there is a seriously important thing missing from our lives. I am edgy and uncomfortable wondering how to cope with the immobility and the relaxed security of it all. Where is the pain? Where are the uncertainties? When shall we worry about the weather and wonder at the lack of places to sit or go to the toilet? I’ve been to the loo several times more today that I have on any day since I left Walsingham..... What’s going on?

At least my feet still hurt – that’s something to cling onto. Phew, I thought I was going mad there for a bit but now I know everything will be alright.

Now I can get back to worrying about the important things like Alison, her father, mother and the family....