MikePadgett.com

If Van Gogh had Wheels

— How to cram a three week trip to Provence into three days.”

A rather belated entry, this, but we’ve been very busy lately with Fincaso’s first year-end!

J and I decided to do something a bit different over August bank holiday.

So I booked some flights and wrote to some hotels and then spent three weeks planning a short driving holiday in the South of France.

Three days isn’t a long time but we made the best of it in the kind of heat Britain could only dream of this year.

Sometimes we would have liked to have stayed longer in some of the locations we visited, but you have to tell yourself you’ll go back some day and do it properly.

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South of France 2007

Summer 2007 will be remembered for its high temperatures. This was a short trip consisting of long, hot days.

3 days in the South of France

I planned for this one. I planned it thoroughly and it did go mostly to plan. There was one conspicuous glitch, but we’ll come to that later.

For years the South of France (what the Brooklyn Funk Essentials once called the ‘fly-infested South of France’ and not without reason) was off the map for me. I’d simply never been interested in it.

Perhaps Marcel Pagnol may have been more or less responsible. Dean Jowett, Owen Barton and I read his La Gloire de Mon Père for A-Level French with Mr Capstick (RIP, sir).

Twixt the covers, young Marcel trips around the garrigue, listening to crickets and dreaming big daydreams. Pleasant enough, but hardly the stuff of inspiration, nor was Yves Robert’s 1990 film adaptation, which we also sat through back then in early 1997.

Then there was Vincent Van Gogh. I never enjoyed Van Gogh (though increasingly these days I ‘get’ him) but his image of Provence and the Arlésienne hinterland is writ large on the walls of history.

Oh and let’s not forget the Provence Set. Before Umbria and Toscana were annexed by the mobile phone wielding barbarian hordes of Surrey, there was Peter bloody Mayle and his Year in Provence. What was once a travel writer’s tour de force is now the cliquey cliché of private dental surgery receptions.

Actually, it was something more prosaic that persuaded me to plan something: a glaring space on my TripAdvisor travel map. France below the waist was frightfully naked.

The route

We had to pack a lot into three days and Avignon didn’t make the cut. Don’t all write in now – it just wasn’t feasible and it being the former home of schismic Popes (if that’s the right phrase) I don’t like mass religions anyway.

Things we did unfortunately miss: the Roman remains of Glanum and Ambrussum, the famous Romanesque church at St Gilles and, it pains me to admit, the Perrier bottling plant at Vergèze.

Beaucaire and Tarascon

Our first stop after leaving Garons airport in a Citroën C3 (left-hand drive comme d’habitude) was the conglomeration of Beaucaire and Tarascon, two towns facing one other across the Rhône.

The stop was more like a pause. The ubiquitous Saturday morning market rendered the stout 11th century castle at Tarascon effectively unreachable within the limited time available to us. Anyway we beat a hasty retreat lest the tarrasque came and ate us.

St Rémy de Provence

Van Gogh holed up in an asylum here after lopping his ear off. St Rémy was also the ancestral seat of the de Sade family, whose former home is now a museum containing artefacts unearthed from the Roman site of Glanum, just out of town.

Early on a Saturday afternoon, however, there was little evidence of debauchery or self-mutilation. There was nevertheless plenty of other outrageous behaviour as we engaged in a particularly ugly round of the European Parking Contest. Sadly for us, given that the English middle class was so well represented, the Swedes comfortably won the day. Wogan would have wept.

Les Baux de Provence

Some communities will do anything to avoid invasion. Les Baux (the ‘rocky outcrops’) was the seat – perch is better – of the Lords of Baux, a long line of nobles who claimed descent from Balthazar, one of a certain triumvirate of Three Wise Men.

Les Baux was later a hotbed of Protestantism and l’éminence rouge himself Cardinal Richelieu had the castle razed to the ground, doubtless to the chagrin of modern visitors.

Despite the formidably imposing appearance of its surroundings (rumoured to have influenced Dante’s Inferno), the village took on the somewhat uglier character of a theme park when entered. Still, everyone’s got to make a living, right?

Abbaye de Montmajour

We didn’t have enough time to enter the Abbaye, though in hindsight, I rather wish we had.

I had actually been momentarily preoccupied with a disused church down the road, which I later learned was, despite its unassuming surroundings, the 12th century UNESCO-protected Chapelle de Sainte Croix.

Coming upon the Abbaye barely 500m later, I almost ran over some American tourists crossing the road as I stared at it in something approaching awe. Next time I won’t miss! ;-)

Benedictine monks established the Abbaye in 948 and remained there until 1790. Fodor’s reports that ejected corrupt monks sacked the place, then having been sold off it was further stripped down before a brief spell of restoration in the 19th century. More details about the Abbaye’s demise are decidedly thin on the ground.

Arles

Arles has been around since at least the 6th century BC, but Julius Caesar propelled it into prominence after the painful civil war between himself and his arch-rival Pompeius, installing his veterans there.

In the late Roman empire, the port of Arelate played host to the Western Emperor himself, capping 500 times its current size and reflecting the increasing importance of the city to both secular and ecclesiastical interests. While the fortunes of the Western empire waned, Arelate maintained its religious prominence well into the Middle Ages despite the unwelcome invasions of outsiders.

And it may be a mere comma in the book of history, but Arles was destined once more for immortalisation in 1888 when a disenchanted Vincent Van Gogh set off south in search of peace and inspiration. Indeed, by the time the good people of Arles petitioned for him to be institutionalised, the oddball Van Gogh had already generated the images that now define the impressions of people the world over.

Having successfully fended off the attack at the Crêperie La Piraterie of barbarian moustiques with our trusty citronella, we dropped in for a welcome sleep at the hotel Le Calendal. There would still be a little more time for Arles in the morning before we headed out to the Camargue.

Whatever the intentions of the makers of this memorial to Van Gogh, one might be struck by the rather tragic look of it today. It looks much as if Van Gogh’s head, whose face wears a mildly disconcerting expression, has been decapitated from a lost body.

Lost in the Camargue

The Camargue is Europe’s largest river delta, fed by the two rivers Rhône, Le Petit and Le Grand.

This particular part of France is growing steadily. It was mentioned in Part 1 that Arelate (ancient Arles) was a port and indeed it was once at the shoreline of the Mediterranean. Today Arles can be found a number of miles inland.

It was also mentioned in Part 1 that we experienced one major glitch and it happened in the Camargue.

Somewhere after Salin de Giraud we missed a turn and we were projected instead onto a long causeway of sand and loose stone that stretched out for miles until finally checked by the sea. Within a quadrant in which there was shown as much water as land, it was almost impossible to establish where we’d gone wrong, or more importantly where we were headed.

What was plain enough was that our Citroën C3 had not been built for off-road driving. So we crawled along while a range of battered vehicles raised dustclouds as they flew past, for at least their drivers knew of imminent shores.

Sure enough, there was only azure at the end of the delta and no option available other than to turn around and claw back all those miles of rocky, rutted tracks.

We found a sign containing a map of the Camargue was installed at a layby beside the western shore of the Étang de Vaccarès. It shows graphically how you were never quite sure of whether you were driving over dry land, wetlands or salt pans!

Saintes Maries de la Mer

A hokey old legend has it that the three Marys – Magdalene, Salome and Jacobe – were washed ashore at this small settlement. Saintes is a destination for religious pilgrimmage even today, but today the secular pilgrimmage of sun worshippers probably far outstrips the numbers of relic worshippers: the town is a popular resort for French holidaymakers.

I have of course seen photos and television images of beaches in which the actual sand is no longer visible, obscured as it is by brown and browning bodies. I cannot however remember seeing one with mine own eyes and whilst Saintes hardly shared quite that extreme, it was surprisingly full.

Aigues Mortes

As another former port now landlocked, Aigues Mortes was a stepping off point for two of the later Crusades.

The town is renowned today because its remparts have survived in such excellent condition. When we arrived in the very late afternoon, the historical appearance was further augmented by an annual festival of a Mediaeval nature whose character and description I have since been unable to source.

Heading for the hills

After almost driving into the sea deep in the Camargue, we headed inland toward the garrigue and vineyards of Languedoc-Roussillon.

In Aimargues, schoolchildren had decorated an outer wall with a mural of colourful bulls’ heads. The young painters were of course on their summer holidays and the school was strangely silent in the morning heat.

At the top end of the département of Gard lies the distinguished town of Uzès and it was here we stopped first.

It was lunchtime on a quiet Monday. Uzès was comparatively deserted. Close knit streets of medieval buildings provided some shade from the heat of the high sun. The whole town felt as if it was holding its breath.

Pont du Gard

The Pont is probably the most famous surviving section of Roman aqueduct in the world (I’d bet on a toss-up with Segovia). It was built during the middle of the first century to carry water from the source of the river Eure at Uzès down to Nîmes.

Roman aqueducts were engineered on the slightest of gradients, just enough to guarantee a consistent flow of water. Throughout its 30 mile journey, the Eure water actually descended less than 20m (a 1:4800 gradient, I believe).

The local topography was a challenge that had to be addressed. Whilst the Gardon river is not particularly wide, its beautiful gorges around the vicinity of the town of Collias are quite deep and surrounded by hills.

The Romans routed their aqueduct to a relatively shallow crossing just west of the modern town of Remoulins in the Gard département and there the Pont was constructed. It is popularly believed that the work was finished in three years, but in this textbook example of the durability of Roman architecture, the structure still stands tall after two thousand more.

Taking the D3 down to Nîmes

The D3 crosses the Gorge du Gardon at Collias and climbs through the garrigue before taking a steep descent through Cabrières and joining the Languedocienne at Saint Gervasy, the main road which sweeps into Nîmes from the east on its way from Orange to Perpignan and by another name to Spain.

We stopped for water at Cabrières. By now the heat outside of the Citroën was unbearable. Only a single person could be seen walking up through the village at this hour and he turned out to be the shopkeeper from whom I bought the water.

We were now leaving the hills behind, descending to the sweltering plains north east of Nîmes and beyond, the city itself.

Nîmes

Nîmes (from the Roman ‘Nemausus’) borne out of a spring around which Julius Caesar’s Nile campaign veterans were settled in the last century BC.

Evidently the spring alone couldn’t satisfy the burgeoning capital of Gallia Narbonnensis since the aqueduct brought 5 million gallons of water over the Pont du Gard every day to supply the citizens.

The prosperity of the first three centuries AD gave Nemausus an amphitheatre, a curia and a basilica before a lack of protection from the weakened late Empire exposed the rich city to the successive attacks of various Gothic forces.

History then dealt Nîmes a cruel hand, as first the Moors of Spain then religious wars and plague ravaged the city until the 17th century when a lasting peace was more or less restored until and after the Revolution.

Today both the Roman amphitheatre and the nearby temple are still in an amazing condition. The temple, popularly known in modern times as the Maison Carrée (Square House), remains the finest example extant of later Roman architecture.

The virtuosity of the Maison Carrée‘s late Corinthian capitals is astounding. As we arrived, the light of early evening bathed the temple in golden relief.

The modern city built itself around the amphitheatre, which remains a focal point today. The proximity of buildings on all sides makes photographing the amphitheatre a difficult proposition!

As our final evening set in, we enjoyed one last dose of gallettes from a lovely backstreet crêperie that seemed to have been serving customers since the dawn of time.

For change comes slowly to this region. And that’s what keeps people coming back and the evidence of history firmly intact.