Meeester Nik

Les Baux de Provence

Arles is not that nice, it turns out. I’d forgotten that. All I could remember was the market that went on for miles, and all the olives.

Well I was right about the market. It stretches right along one side of the city walls and you can buy pretty much anything you want. Bags, hats, cheeses, jams. Chickens, live and dead. In fact, I think the dead ones got the better deal as the live ones were crammed into crates and gasping for breath in the 35-degree-plus heat. Poor things. Ducks, quails and guinea fowl, too. I don’t think I could buy dinner when it was still capable of making a run for it, so I’m assuming they’ll crack its neck for you before you take it home.

It’s all very interesting and full of great smells, but once you get away from the market – where you could easily spend 90 minutes looking, poking and tasting – the rest of the town is a bit grubby. There’s the Roman ampitheatre and the matching Roman theatre, and of course there are city walls (this is Provence, after all) and a river to walk along, but none of it can be said to be very ‘nice’. Probably the worst bit, though, was the crappy service we got in a street-side cafe where they repeated the order wrong and, when we followed them inside to check they’d got it right they got all shirty and insisted they had.

Except when it came they hadn’t.

Ho-hum.

So we spent half a day there and then headed over to Les Baux, the little medieval town perched on top of a rocky hilltop. It gets hideously busy in high season when the seven car parks that scale one face of the hill get filled to overflowing, but today it was actually pretty quiet, leaving us plenty of space to wander around and look out across the valley views.

22 people live there.

Anyhow, it’s a nice place to spend an hour, but we didn’t stop for drinks or shops. The best thing to take back with you is photos, which is what we did – both from within the village and looking back at it from the other side of the valley where we had a very informative discussion about the forest fire risk with a student guarding the road, whose English once again put my pitiful grasp of French to shame.

Nimes Roman Arena

Today we went to Nimes to see where dad is thinking of buying a flat. He goes there a couple of times a week to dance, and as it’s a 45 minute journey and most of his friends live there it makes sense to move.

Like Avignon, Arles and many other towns around Provence, it has Roman roots and buildings several thousand years old around which the rest of the town is built. There is a well preserved Roman arena and, opposite a modern library and arts centre designed by Richard Rogers, a column-clad building called the Maison Carree, which used to be free until they put an exhibition about Roman history in it and started charging for entry.

Maison Carree

I’d never been before, but it seems a nice place. There’s a great indoor market where you can buy just about any food you could imagine, with much of it so beautifully produced that you could serve it up right away if you had friends coming round to dinner. Beyond the market, the city is split into wide boulevards and narrow, older streets that sit in shadow and offer respite from the sun.

We passed by the estate agents to pick up leaflets and looked at the streets where dad would like to buy. There’s one particular quarter with a grocer, a good paper shop and a small restaurant, its leafy streets bordered by some notable landmarks that give it a villagey feel within the city that he’s picked out as his preferred location, and it is certainly nice.

The plan after Nimes had been to head for the Pont du Gard, the three-level aqueduct that carries water to the city from Uzes, skirting a large hill along the way. But as we left Nimes, the clouds rolled in and heavy drops of rain hit the windscreen, and so we cut straight to Uzes and sheltered in the colonnades along the edge of its large town square. It didn’t last long, and was more of a shower than a storm, and so we pressed on to the Pont after an hour or so, parked up and walked across it as the puddles evaporated and turned the air humid.

It doesn’t matter how many times you see it: the Pont du Gard is an impressive feat of civil engineering. It’s stood for centuries longer than the half bridge at Avignon, and yet it looks not much older than a hundred years or so. Only the graffiti confirms that it’s actually much older, as for millennia tourists and travellers have been scratching their names into the soft orange rock from which it’s constructed.

The amazing thing is that it was still a working road bridge until earlier this decade. Now, of course, you can only walk across it (it is a Unesco World Heritage site, after all), and only on the lower level. Dad remembers walking across the very top 40-odd years ago, but that’s no longer possible.

Pont du Gard

The Gard river is calm below the Pont, and a lot of people swim there, jumping in from the rocks to cool down. It’s obviously fairly safe or they wouldn’t let you do it, except that while we were walking along the furthest bank, having passed over the bridge and set off along the other side we noticed two ambulances pull up. They another. And some more, followed by blue-suited medics, who ran down to the river with stretchers.

Leave it to the Americans to leap to wild conclusions, which ranged from a kind jumping in and breaking his back to some sort of mass suicide event. They were even stepping over the safety ropes strung along the edge of the bridge to keep us all back so they could get a better look.

We never did find out what happened, of course, because we didn’t hang around to gawp, but plenty did. Instead, we headed home and, finally, made it to the Cafe Des Arts to toast Rich’s new tenant. A day late thanks to the storm.

Avignon rooftops

Wednesday is market day in St Remy. So that’s what we did. We spent the morning close to home, wandering through the winding streets looking at the fruit and veg and the cheese and fish stalls that shame our market at home, and at the photos, paintings and carved wooden trinkets laid out to tempt the tourists.

The market is a stream of stalls that cuts a twisted path through the tightly-packed buildings that have stood there for hundreds of years. They pick up close to one of the many plaques that mark a spot where Van Gogh painted one of his pictures of the town, sweep past the fountain that commemorates Nostadamus’ birth in the town and ends up by the carousel opposite the church.

It’s a lively way to kill a couple of hours, after which we headed back to the house empty handed – as we’d expected – and made plans to spend the rest of the day in Avignon.

This was to be our first link with home since arriving in France: it’s twinned with Colchester, just a few miles up the A12 from where we live. It’s a small city with a glorious past. Like so many Provencal towns it has impressive walls, but its most notable features are undoubtedly its incomplete bridge and the Pope’s palace.

The bridge did once stretch right across the river, but seemingly nobody could quite work out the currents, and the furthest half was always being washed away. Eventually someone had the bright idea of just giving up on it and leaving it like that, looking like a great stone pier to nowhere that was eventually immortalised in song (Sur Le Pont d’Avignon) and now that’s what most people associate the town with.

Whatever the reason for building the bridge, it’s a shame that this, rather than the Pope’s Palace has become its symbol. I’ve not been inside, and we didn’t venture in today, either – just walked up behind it so that we could look out over the terracotta roofs – but the grand palace that lines one side of the main square at the head of the town was the centre of the Christian faith in the 14th century, when the pope and his entourage fled unrest in Rome and settled in Provence. From here, seven ‘official’ popes guided their global flock until it was safe to return to Rome and build the Vatican as it stands today.

The only trouble is, when the last official pope left and subsequently died, rival popes carried on in Avignon, which must have led to no end of confusion over the years as each camp fought for supremacy over the other.

Anyway, there is no pope there any more, and after the French Revolution the palace was seized by the state so it’s not papal territory, either. It does look good, though, but if you have seen the Vatican in real life then it doesn’t even come close. It must have been impressive when it was first built.

It’s not actually that curved and Disney-esque in real life: that’s just the way the panorama got stitched.

So we kicked around there for a while, watching the world pass by on various scooters and street trains as the kids of the town span around on their heads and knees to the music they were blasting across the square, then headed back home to eat, with plans to head into town for a drink.

You know what they say about best-laid plans, though and, inevitably they came to nothing as the clouds rolled across and we were treated to a spectacular thunder storm that barely pierced the muggy night air.

It’s hot, and reckoned to get hotter as the week goes on. The cigales sing when the thermometer tops 24 degrees, and they were out in force before six this morning. We joined them, eventually, and sat by the pool eating croissants and bread, then threw our stuff in the car and headed for the coast.

From St Remy that means a ride through the Carmargue, famed for its flamingoes, horses and bulls. It’s a bit like the Fens with rice and better wildlife, although today that too seemed to be hiding from the fierce sun. Flamingoes, we saw a few, although none close at hand – not like last time. The bulls, which are said to make a fine beef steak (I was unaware beef came from bulls, no cows) sheltered under the trees, and the white Carmargue horses that weren’t out being ridden through the salty wetlands were tied up in the shade of their ageing open-sided stables. Only the humans, it seemed, were foolish enough to brave the full heat of the day.

Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer is a small seaside town with particularly good beaches and a small harbour where the fishing boats land their catch. We weren’t there for the beaches, so we walked around the out-of-season town and into the small church about which it is built. It’s small and dark, and on the walls there are plaques with the names of people said to have been cured by miracles at the church.

They’re attributed to the black icon in the crypt, a brick-built cellar kept hot by the flames of several hundred candles whose flames have blackened the arching roof. The icon is Saint Sarah, the daughter of Mary Magdalene, one of the three Biblical Maries after whom the town was named in the 1800s. Once a year, the gypsies of the town take out the icon on St Sarah’s day and walk it through the streets and into the sea. It’s quite an event, and always brings large crowds.

Not today, though.

So we dodged the lavender sellers outside the church and drove on to Aigues-Mortes, from which King (later Saint) Louis IX launched the Crusades. Like Saintes-Maries, I’ve been here many times before, but it still holds a certain charm. It’s walled on all four sides, with the bulk of the streets knotted up in the middle. There’s a square at the centre, with little shops and houses leading off it in all directions, slowly baking at the height of the day.

The city was rebuilt because Louis had no sea ports under his own control as he set out on a mission to convert, the other Mediterranean towns falling under control of Provencal rulers. Yet I don’t think he’d have too much trouble recognising today the town he founded centuries ago. He might even recognise his own statue at the centre.

We sat around, cooling down with a drink and putting off the moment we’d have to pour ourselves back into the roasting car for the ride back home, via what is reputed to be the most expensive supermarket in France to finish up the day in the pool.

Work feels a world away – not just a few hours’ train journey north. And, heat aside, Provence beats London hands down.

Swimming pools are pretty cool, too, in every sense of the word.

It’s four years since I was last in Provence, and little has changed. As you might expect. This is, after all, a part of the world where vast tracts look the same now as they did a hundred years ago. Much is older still: the Roman Maison Carree in Nimes, the Popes’ palace in Avignon, the three-tiered Roman viaduct in Gard, and the Carmargue houses built with rounded ends, their windows clustered in a way that protects their inhabitants from the fierce mistral wind.

Neither have more recent additions much changed. Not since I was last there, anyway. The Eurostar remains the best way to get to France, and the TGV is still as efficient, speedy and smooth as ever. It puts our trains to shame.

We caught a single-decker out of Gare de Lyon and sped down through the French countryside, watching as the Massif Central and then Lyon passed by to the west; the Alpine foothills and Mont Ventou to the east, calling in at such fragrant stops as Valence and Orange on our way to Avignon.

Dad met us at the station and drove us out to St Remy where we sat eating dinner on the patio in t-shirt and shorts, still hot at 23h as the bats swooped around the courtyard, the cigales sang their rasping songs in the trees all around, and fireflies danced in the trees at the end of the drive. It felt good to be back.