CHAPTER 1: THE SOUTH
I had heard of the “three month slump” – where your average traveller falls into a pit of despair, yearning for home; looking up cheap flights on whichever cheap flight aggregator website is on trend. For me it took four months. I had woken up in an international student dorm room at a French university; hauled into the land of the living from a lucid dream where I had gone back to New Zealand for the weekend to see my family – as if you could just do that. The reality of it hit me quite hard. Until then I had never experienced it, but homesickness IS a real thing and it is VERY heavy. A Romanian girl was half asleep on the floor next to my bed – she looked up at me and simply said “everything in your life will be ok”. Everything was. We got up and joined the others for breakfast. As usual everyone was speaking fluent French in whatever native accent they had (Russian, North African, what have you). Apparently the Kiwi one is rather cute. I never looked at return tickets. Breakfast was actually lunch. It had been quite a big night out in Grenoble. Everything was fine.
Four months ago I left New Zealand. I had grand intentions (and made promises) to write about my travels. I’ve always been a late bloomer, but I’d like to think I follow through, hence here we are – 4 months later, tapping away on a tablet keyboard. About 2 months ago I left my journal at a bus station in a small town halfway between two other small towns in Portugal (along with all of my written memories). I went back to find it a week later. The bus station had been relocated. That’s Portugal. My “diario preto” is probably still there. I’m going to be relying purely on hazy memories and a lot of photos. Bear with me.
Let’s start at the beginning. En debut: AUCKLAND, NZ -> SINGAPORE -> PARIS.
– 29 hours of watching films of mixed quality (English and French).
– Watching bush fires in Northern Australia knowing that you were one the only people on the planet to know of their existence.
– Looking down over the Middle East knowing that people were doing all sorts of nasty things to each other, and also that most people were just living normal lives (most people in the world are frighteningly normal).
– Eating plane food that was actually quite good (Singapore airlines – tick tick).
– Landing in Paris in 30 degree heat. Au revoir to a cold and wet Hamilton.
BZZZZ. BOUNCE BOUNCE BOUNCE. CRRRRRRRRRR.
That was the plane landing.
Picture a guy in jandals and singlet dragging a Macpac and snowboard bag over the Seine River in Paris from one train station to another. Same guy dumping his things and doing a bit of sightseeing whilst he had time (2 hours – LOL – one needs two weeks to see Paris). Same guy steroytypically consuming coffee and croissant in plain view of the Notre Dame.
Coffee and croissant being both average (Paris obviously less so). Same guy sprinting back along the river, sweating through his shorts, in full realization that the train south was “en train” to leave in 15 minutes. The highlight of this little race was bursting through a fashion shoot on the river bank – maybe I’m a blur in a French magazine somewhere…I was wearing my cool singlet with the tattooed chick on it.
I made the train by two minutes. 5 hours to Cahors in the beautiful south of France, set of a thousand films and books where people escape England and live lives of poetry, and wine, and fixing old houses.
My aunt was one of the original people (offscreen) to actually do this in the 70s. For the last 30 years she has been renovating 1000 year old houses, she also lives in one of them, and so was I for about a week before our big Road Trip North (next blog post). I was welcomed by three dogs, two cats, my aunt and a friend of hers. The view from her place was out of postcard. The photo I took her house could be a postcard (taking orders). There is well over 2000 years of history sitting there. Those old famous caveman paintings are not far away. There is a castle at the end of her drive. Its tower is now half its original size, the site of a battle a thousand years ago (Catherine of Aquitaine – look her up). Her little village of 250 people is between two slightly bigger villages called Moncuq and Lauzerte. Both classic medieval towns with winding alleys of stone – real Game of Thrones stuff. No surprise that the author of the book series (on which the TV show is based) took his material from actual events that occurred in this exact area.
So I had a week to recover in this beautiful little place before the next phase. WEEK 1: I set up a French bank account. For the first hour of the rendez-vous we talked about rugby. The manager played for a regional team and his brother played for one in Auckland, so obviously rugby was to become the theme of meeting (my bank account being a bit of a sideshow at the end). We talked rugby. Actually he talked rugby. I didn’t know a lot of French back in July. We didn’t talk about the previous world cup. I tried to bring it up. He ignored me. WEEK 1: I set up a new phone number. Again I didn’t talk. This time because the French girl in the shop was too beautiful. My aunt did all the talking. I just stared at the girl. Actually I did try to talk once, but then she went quiet and shy. This all transpired in beautiful Cahors, the capital town of the area. A really beautiful place, originally inhabited by Gauls before Jesus, taken over by the Romans, taken over by the English, retaken by the French, now you can get WIFI.
WEEK 1: A classic southern French lunch: confit canard, lots of bread, wine and cheese in the warm early summer sun. I was daydreaming an old battle in valley below when all of a sudden we heard a roar – a French fighter jet stopped right in front of us in the valley, the pilot looked at us mopping up our duck fat with bread, stalled, turned his machine 90 degrees and took off back to Toulouse (probably, the airbase is there) – it was a really strange experience.
It was quite a first week. I’ll stop it there. This is the internet age and attention spans are waning fast. Well done for not stopping. Next edition will include a road trip all the way to the top of France maybe including things like sleeping outside castles in the wild, big French feasts in Bretagne, and such similar things. A toute heure as they say here.
Theo Sangster (c’est moi)
7th December 2014
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