Writing to Catch Up

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Friday, August 6, 2010


We have slowed down. That was the plan, to spend a laid-back week at the gites, taking six days to see what could be seen in three. It has worked, and we have been glad to sleep in, take naps, enjoy the sun now that it has come back, and read.

I’ve kept a synopsis of the days, just to jog my memory:

Sunday: Gourdon festival, music, snack lunch of felafel, samosas and little fried chickpea-flour patties, yum, Sarlat - dinner at home, lentils cooked in duck fat

Monday: Gourdon festival - lunch in town (bird/salad/spuds, followed by bird/salad/spuds), sandwiches at home for dinner, with lots of wine and lots of blogging

Tuesday: kayaking - walks in La Roq Gageac and Beynac

Wednesday: traffic jam (held up by slow-moving truck), Sarlat market, altercation in kebab place, Castelnaud chateau and crowds, more traffic jams, Prinquieres barbecue

Thursday: laid-back day; out to pick up supplies locally, found an unexpected market, lunch at La Gabarre in St-Julien, aftenoon nap for me, to Rocamadour for sunset dinner.


The details:

Sunday, August 1

We didn’t know in advance about the annual Medieval Festival that occurs in Gourdon the first weekend of every August. We saw the signs and banners as we entered town on our way in from St-Cirq. We stopped in at the tourist info to get the details.

Gourdon is large by town standards, maybe even a city. The old part is built on a hilltop, like most medieval towns, and for the festival, the entire old town was blocked off, with people collecting a few euros for entry. Several town squares staged events: one was a marketplace for artisans to sell their wares (what you’d expect—jewellry, leatherwork, clothing, pottery); another was set up as a village, with felters, carvers, an instrument-maker, a forge, all working out of white canvas tents, and the scent of the burning charcoal permeating the air; the church square (St-Pierre) staged entertainment, several acts, musical and chivalrous, which repeated through the day. The streets between the squares were also lined with artisan stalls and food stalls. The smells! The majority of people were visitors and gawkers, like ourselves, but many, many people were dressed in medieval garb, and, given the setting, they seemed to be the ones who belonged.

As I lined up for felafel and samosas (the medieval period was influenced by contact with the east during the crusades, right? right?), a flock of geese came by the narrow channel, squeezing through the crowd. They were led by a young man dressed in purple, his long curls blowing in the wind, a staff in his hand, In the rear, a black dog. The man and the dog never lost eye contact. Occasionally the man would give a soft command, “Doucement, doucement!, when the geese took to moving too quickly. The geese (there were maybe 30 or 40 of them) had that vacant, apparently-unaware, straight-ahead stare, but I realized that they were completely focused on the dog behind them. It was a beautiful ballet.

As I waited (medieval people take their time cooking!) a sudden wind picked up, and thunder. The flaps of the tent stalls threatened to lose their moorings, and shop-keepers dashed to hold on to them. I finally got the food, stacked in little reed trays, and got back to John, sitting on hay bales in the square. The rain held off.

The group performing was fantastic, playing bagpipes, shawms (ancient double-reed instruments that sound like rough oboes), recorders, drums, and singing. The group leader was an animated, dramatic speaker, almost more entertaining than the musicians. I caught much of the performance on video, and I hope I can figure out how to YouTube it when I get home. We bought the group’s CD, but the spirit, the sound, is not the same.

The rain hit just as the group finished playing. The crowd poured into the church for shelter, but we left and drove up the highway to Sarlat. Sarlat is the biggest city in the immediate area, and is the touristic center. It is known as a very fine example of a medieval city and is large enough to support a major market twice a week, and to host millions of visitors. You have to do the “rise-above-the-crowd” thing, as I call it, when visiting such a place, to try to imagine it in a more reasonable, natural time. This day, however, the crowds were minimal, probably due to the threatening weather. We parked easily (!) and walked down (a rare example of a medieval city built in a hollow rather than a hilltop) into the old city. We walked the short Rick Steves walking tour, picked up some cash at one of the many bank machines, and headed home.

We had picked up a big jar of lentils cooked in duck fat (the people here do love their duck fat, and why they are not obese or cholesterol-ridden is a mystery to me) in a “cave” in St-Cirq, so we heated it for dinner at our gites. It was salty but otherwise bland, a disappointment. Accompanied by fresh baguette and some of our very expensive cheese, it was a decent meal.



Monday, August 2


Gourdon festival, day 2. We wanted to see more, so we returned to the festival. We saw another amazing group perform, a kind of circus with clowning jugglers, acrobats, and performing dogs, all accompanied by wonderful music similar to what we heard yesterday.

Again, we are struck with how Celtic this music sounds, with touches of Arabic and African influence. It makes me realize that these cultures were not isolated, that there was a lot of travel and commerce between societies, and that these people probably shared common roots with the Celts. I’m sure there have been academic studies of the roots of various folk traditions; something I’ll have to look up.

We had planned to visit several paleolithic caves in this region, including Lascaux II and Font de Gaume. We’ve decided not to go to either. The famous Lascaux has been closed to visitors for many years due to degradation of the paintings, and Lascaux II is a replica created for the public to view. The highlight of our experience in caves thus far has been to stand in the spot our ancient ancestors stood, to imagine them in that very space. We have already experienced the magic of seeing the paintings, their scale, the command of the rock these early painters had, so we feel no need to vist a replica. I’ve heard it’s fantastic, regardless, for anyone who has not had the opportunity to visit such caves before. As for Font de Gaume, I would love to go, but it is solidly reserved for the entire month. I tried repeatedly to book from home, but with the nine-hour time difference (and us working during the day), we could not get through when they were open. There is a way to go: arrive there at 8 a.m. and get one of the fifty tickets they set aside for non-reserved people. It’s a long ways to go, a good hour, at least, and doesn’t seem worth it at this time. There is a cave very close to here, Grotte de Cougnac, not nearly so large or popular, so we’ll try to get to that one. Like Lascaux, no reservations are taken; we can show up and be given a tour time.

Monday evening, we ate bread and cheese and salad at home, I drank a substantial quantity of Cahor rosé, and wrote.


Tuesday, August 3

I finally got John in a kayak. A sorry, plastic excuse for a kayak, but a kayak nevertheless. It’s been a long time coming. He’s “terrified” of the water, and he’s concerned for the health of his back. Neither were a problem here. The river is rarely more than waist deep, and kayaks, as he discovered, are very comfortable.

There are proably dozens of companies renting out canoes and kayacs along the Dordogne River. We chose one that picks up in Beynac, a 3-star village, so that we could explore it before riding the bus back to our car. We put in at Vitrac and drifted, barely paddling, through a woodsy turn of the river, past campsites and fishermen. We were not alone, not by a longshot; yellow and red and green canoes floated down with us, like a windfall of autumn leaves strewn across the river. There were quiet paddlers and boisterous ones, families with dogs, and teenagers dumping each other. Somehow, it was peaceful, regardless. There is nothing like floating at the water’s surface, drifting with the current.

We had a picnic on a rocky beach. No cameras today; the paddles provided had no splash-rings, so we expected to get soaked, and did. No matter, the sun was out, and the water was cooling.

Around a bend in the river, we saw Domme high above us. Another bend, under a stone bridge, Ceynac on our right. Around another bend, La Roque-Gageac clung to the cliffside, and the tourist boats motored up and down. We stopped for a break in La Roque, leaving our kayaks and gear on the shore along with many others. The traffic was horrendous on the one riverside street through town. This is when I realized that we had chosen the best possible way to visit the river villages; by car it would be a nightmare. We climbed to the top of the village and found a little plaque commemorating a disaster in 1957, when a piece of the cliff gave way and crushed three houses built into the stone below. The scars of the houses are still visible against the rock face: three lines of peaked roofs, some carved out holes for beams, two or three clinging shingles, still. We looked up and saw the potential for more such disasters: the cliff really overhangs the town.

We took to our kayaks and joined the masses, again, on the river. Around another bend, the Chateau de Castelnaud, once held by the English in their war with the French for this territory. We could see the trebuchets (built recently by enthusiasts of medieval warfare) on the donjon, from the river. Another bend, another bridge, and there was our destination, Beynac. It is yet another cliffside town topped by a fortress/chateau, this one held by the French in the Hundred Years War. We pulled in and climbed to the top of the town for spectacular views. Again, the riverside main street (the only route through town) was practically a parking lot, and we were grateful not to be driving. We stopped in a few shops, then caught our canoe-company bus back to our car.

We ate in Gourdon, at a café recommended by our gites hosts. The salads were huge, but sandy. You get a beach in the sink when you wash lettuce here; this restaurant seemed to have forgotten.




Wednesday, August 4
(Simon’s birthday, and I was unable to get online, waahhh)


Wednesday is market day in Sarlat. I have been wanting to get another Provencal tablecloth, in a different size from the one I got last time, and have waited, not realizing just how local the shops tend to be. In the Provence, all the tourist shops sell the cloths, in Rousillon, less so. I had thought I’d wait till we got here, a bigger city and more time, to shop for my tablecloth, but the shops here are full of foie gras, and foie gras. And wine, some conserves, and foie gras. I thought my best chance to find something might be in the market, as people come in with imports from other regions and even other countries.

It was a risk, as the world descends on Sarlat’s market, and parking can be nearly impossible. It turned out parking was not the problem. Some ten kilometers from town, traffic suddenly came to a near standstill; there was a truck at the front of the line (a sweeper? I couldn’t tell), moving extremely slowly and not allowing anyone to pass. It took an hour to get into town. We watched some people park and walk, and they got there sooner. This was the kind of traffic nightmare we’d avoided yesterday by taking the river from town to town, but there is no river in Sarlat. When we finally reached town center, we took a wrong turn, to the right instead of to the left. Ack. We realized it right away, and turned left onto a little lane that led right through the market! It was a driveable street, but you wouldn’t know it; we crawled along, so as not to knock over baby buggies and crepe stands. We made it, however, back to the right route, arriving just as someone was leaving a parking spot. Lucky. We had been thinking we would arrive just as the market was packing up (a pattern we seem to have), but things were still in full swing. It was a huge contrast in spirit from the Sarlat we’d visited just a couple of days earlier; this place was bustling! We wandered the stalls, breathed deeply at the cheese stands (well, I did, while John held his nose), stopped to look at Langouille knives, Provencal spice graters, olives and tapenades. No tableclothes, though. I found a permanent shop with a small selection, but nothing I wanted. I did find some more of my napkins to go with the yellow cloth I have, so I bought those. Maybe I will find a cloth in Paris.

There was a kebab café that beckoned to John. We sat down just as the owner began shouting at some customers, “Allez, allez!”, as he sent them from the terrasse. We couldn’t figure out what had happened. The owner’s son went out to the terrasse to say something, and the owner slapped him. It was all too much for me; I left John to order his kebab and went for a stroll down the main commercial street of town, a street with banks and hardware stores and clothing chainstores. Sometimes it’s therapy to be in the 21st Century.

After we rejoined, we sat for coffee and crepes on the “goose square”, watching the market merchants fold up their stalls and maneuver their trucks through the crowd to haul their wagons off. It was time for us to leave, too. We pulled out of Sarlat, snarled in more traffic which only cleared once we were several kilometers out.

I wanted to visit Castelnaud, the chateau we’d seen from the river, which is now a Medieval War Museum. After the obligatory meander on country roads, we crossed the river to the town, then wound up and up and up to the chateau parking lot. It was huge, and it was very full. All of France was at the chateau with us. We found a spot way back in an upper corner, and had quite a time backing into it.

We walked from parking lot to upper village, past a woodturner working magic on his lathe, to a line-up for the chateau. Then John realized he’d left his wallet, in the fluster of parking, in the car. So it was back through the upper village, past the woodturner, through the parking lot again.

At least one of us was not in the best of states by this time.

The chateau might have been special at another time. Have I mentioned the screaming babies? All morning in Sarlat, and now at the chateau, we were hearing the protests of unhappy babies and three-year-olds in tantrums. Who can blame them? I think they are just vocalizing what the rest of us are too polite to express: the crowds are nuts, and (for kids) cheese and stone are just not that interesting. I loved the chateau, but there were too many people there. We climbed to a platform where several working full-sized trebuchets were displayed. I took a bunch of photos, when people stopped sitting on them. I like the one with the abandonned water bottle, I think.

We started to go through the rooms of the donjon, where there was a variety of weaponry displayed, but we were peopled out and decided to leave. The way home took us back very close to Sarlat, where, again, traffic was practically at a standstill. There was a “Casino”, a huge supermarket, mid-traffic-jam, so we stopped in for supplies, and things were moving a little better when we came out.

What a day of crowds and traffic! We realize, as we near the end of our stay in southern France, that we have had enough of medieval towns, enough of tourists and traffic. We decide to lay low the last two stays of our gites stay, to relax before we hit Paris.


Eack Wednesday night, Derek and Sue host a barbecue for guests of the gites. There are four rental suites in all, and three couples showed up for the meal. (The fourth staying this week is a French couple with a little girl; the ads for the place clearly state that the gites is rented “exclusively for couples”, but I think this couple may not have understood that; they have kept their daughter low-key. If I’m outside and they come out, they go right back in again; it’s a bit uncomfortable.) We all brought our own meat/fish, which Derek cooked for us, and salads and copious amounts of wine were provided. Turns out the other guests are all from Yorkshire (but the couples hadn’t previously met); Monty Python jokes aside, we had a wonderful, laughter-filled evening. There were stories only fellow Englishmen would really know about, which they delighted in sharing with us, such as the story of the Hartleypool football (soccer) team with the hung monkey as their symbol. Apparently, when the people of Hartleypool were at war with the French, no one had ever seen a French person. A townsman happened to see a monkey, and thinking it was a Frenchman, hung it. Trust the English to be able to laugh at themselves enough to adopt the story as a team emblem!

I think the funniest part of the evening for me was that I could barely understand most of what was being said. This was English! I felt I could have done as well if they’d been speaking in French!

The local wine is very good, and must be very pure. I drank more than I would normally be able to get away with, yet woke up without the slightest trace of hangover. It’s dangerous, really.






Thursday, August 5

Was able to get online in the morning and send a birthday email to Simon. How he would love this country and its medievalness; I can’t get him out of my head. (Not that I want to!)

After the madness of yesterday’s crowds, a day of rest.

Around noon, we went to a local village for toilet paper and a baguette. I noticed, as I often have, that the woman in the little shop did not want to take my €3.70 for my €3.65 purchase. She saw that I had change, and she wanted the exact amount. She smiled the whole time, probably wondering what on earth we were doing in her shop, in a tiny village in the middle of nowhere, buying such a combination of goods.

We drove a little more into the countryside. The region is dotted with small stone villages, often no more than two or three kilometers apart, separated by forest or farmland, fields of corn, tobacco or freshly-baled hay. Farmhouses are sprinkled along the way, usually large and modern; the region seems prosperous. We drove to St-Julien de Lampon, a larger village (almost a town?) some six or eight kilometers from here, to have lunch at the Restaurant La Gabarre, recommended by Derek and Sue. On the way we came upon a village market in and stopped in to check it out; it was packing up as we arrived, of course, but there was still a crowd at the wine stall, where a good deal of sampling was going on. One stall in the market was selling imported percussion instruments, mostly tourist-model items from Indonesia. John bought a bamboo jaw-harp after we tried out a number of djembes, shakers, mbiras and balafons, none of which were tuned (hence useless, for looks only).

We found the recemmended restaurant, and what a find! It hangs above the Dordogne, a sleepy wooded area far from the crowds down river. A few families ate with us on the deck under the trees. It was silent, beautiful. It’s what a visitor hopes to find, authentic, and away from the crowds.

I ordered the lunch menu, and John did the same. We started with a salad with the chewy dried duck so popular in the region. The main course was veal kidney. John didn’t know that he didn’t like kidney, and the look on his face when he tried it was priceless—such shock and disgust! He said it was all he could do not to gag. For me, kidney takes me back to Dad’s Sunday brunches, kidneys and fried eggs and breaded green tomatoes. Mmmm. I had no choice but to eat John’s portion, beautifully arranged around a disk of rice and dried tomatoes. As he said, I “took one for the team”, because it would have been a little embarassing not to have touched the meat. Dessert, we’d been told, was a little white cake. It didn’t sound appealing, but when it came, we realized each tiny cake had been baked as the order came, so it was fresh from the oven, tender like angelfood, with a crispy crust. Fresh wild strawberries were arranged around it, with a tart raspberry coulis. Amazing.

With two lunches in my belly, I took a nap when we got home, sleeping until almost five. John sat out by the pool in the welcome sun (weather here has been pleasant but not particularly sunny).

We drove to Rocamadour for dinner. It’s ways to go from here, about twenty kilometers on a very curly road, but our neighbours said it was a must-see, and it is, or has been, one of the top pilgrimage sites in Europe. In the 13th Century, 20,000 to 30,000 people a day would arrive. The village itself is home to less than 1,000 people to day, but had a population of about 8,000 at its peak. It’s hard to imagine the impact of so many visitors, but suffice to say, the town flourished. The chief draw, for pilgrims, is a small carved black madonna, said to have delivered miracles to those who pray at her feet. Henry III was the first, I think, followed by a number of famous others, including Louis IX, Richard the Lionhearted and Eleanor of Aquitane. The town has been pillaged a number of times, too, especially in the Religious Wars of the Reformation, and little remains of the original medieval structures. I wanted to see the site, though, just to understand the lay of the land and have an image in which to place the history.

The town is built, once again, on a cliffside above the Lot River. The “cité” is on the lowest level, with various religious structures on the two levels above that. There are stairs or an elevator (!) for getting between levels. This day, we were not up for any of that. We had a small dinner (prawns/scallops, and salad) at a hotel restaurant overlooking the whole site, where we watched the sun go down and the village floodlights come up. It was gorgeous, and it was enough.

We drove home in the dark, but I find that the driving is almost easier at night than during the day. The notorious French tailgater is home with his family, and we can poke along at a pleasant, safe speed.





Friday, August 6


So here I am, at last, caught up! I have been sitting and writing the last eight pages on the front patio of our gites, just out of reach of the sun. Can’t write in the sun, because the laptop screen is too hard to see.

I haven’t meant to be so detailed, but things come to me as I write, and I can’t help myself. This is a chronicle for myself, really, to keep the memories clear for the future. Hard to know whether it is of interest to anyone but us.

A green anole skitters across the stony patio. A butterfly flutters by. A few puffy clouds hover, not moving. I hear the neighbours at lunch, the clink of their cutlery. Their food smells delicious.

Today, we will try to get into the Grotte de Cougnac, a painted cave just near here, and we will return the rented guitar. We will clean the gites and pack our bags for an early departure tomorrow.

There may be more. As we head out in the car, I’ll look at the map. The day is open, and wonderful.



. How can I write with an empty glass??




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