On the Road Again

There was a purpose to this road trip: to visit a new country (and the first place I had ever been starting with the letter ‘X’).  So unusually I actually booked five nights at a campsite in Andorra (the new country) in a village called Xixarella.  We just had a week or so either side of that to fiddle around with.  It was Peaches’ first road trip since her incident.  But also, it was a chance to visit Rennes-le-Château on the way.  This was a place I had a particular reason to visit – more of that later.

It was not the best of starts, for after setting off at 4 a.m. the campsite near Nantes, where we found ourselves at 7 p.m. had a sign outside saying “Complet”.  Well, it didn’t look very full so I thought I’d ask anyway.  And in fact, yes they did have room for one night, lots of room as it turned out.  There is something to be learned from this, I’m sure.  Uzerche was the next stop and Marilyn (the SatNav) sent us right into the wild end of nowhere to a very smart campsite.  Curiously, everyone there seemed to be Dutch.  But the bar/restaurant was swanky-looking, the pool inviting and the landscaped grounds were refined in the extreme.  It was expensive and even the camp leaflet was all in Dutch.  The lady I asked at the bar was Dutch too and she looked at me as if I were mad when I enquired about the possibility of a pitch for the night.  Then she called a man from the kitchen who told me that there was no space at all, even for one night.  I worked out later from the leaflet what it was with this site at La Bonne Source.  It was an exclusively Dutch site offering “a vacation spot where you can really feel at home as a Christian.”  Ah, all became clear, I understood that look; she had obviously remembered the bit about no room at the inn from The Instructions and when she saw a mother with child, had decided to follow that bit rather than other passages advising charity.  So back on the road it was, and in heading to a near-ish site we drove past a completely empty site next to a fishing lake close to the village of Lubersac.  Oddly, this too was run by a Dutch couple, but unlike the one up the road, was the polar opposite: deserted.  So they obviously had room then.  The only problem was that neither Janny, nor her husband, Bertus, spoke a word of French.  How could a site be so totally empty in the middle of the high season?  No matter, they actually spoke English, but I didn’t ask why this was so depopulated and the one up the road was so full.

Cheers!

The dog

Setting up on our own France

It really was only us by that lake

An empty campsite

READ: Andorra

DON.T YOU DARE PHOTO-BOMB ME!

Rennes-Les-Bains

The first longer stay was in Rennes-Les-Bains, in the low Pyrenees of the Aude region.  This was described as the “esoteric Mecca of the Aude”.  Should be interesting then.  Josette, who is retired, along with her husband, comes down here in the summer from Normandy to help out their daughter and son-in-law with the running of the site.  She takes us to a golf buggy so she can show us the options.

“Watch out; she doesn’t know how to drive that thing,” comments one of the staff at the reception with a giggle.  That evening we stroll past the bar, where a tagine and Sangria evening is being prepared, and walk along the river into the village.  It is a spa, offering treatments in the 33 degree thermal waters and the place is unusually full of hippy-looking types: baba cools as they call them here.  In the square, we stop for a drink on a café terrace.  Oddly, the waitress does not speak much French.  She is an Australian working here over the summer with the aim of learning the language.

Maria, the joker from yesterday, is cleaning the shower block the next morning when I get there.  She complains that there is no work for the likes of locals such as her and that most of the tourist facilities are owned and run by “people from the North”.  She advises me to visit the “Fauteuil du Diable” (the Devil’s Armchair) as this special stone has the power to re-energise people in some mystical way.  It has been carved in the shape of an armchair and has a Templar cross engraved on the back.  No-one knows how old it is, but it is said to have been carved for the Comte de Fleury in the eighteenth century.  On the evening walk into the village, we head up into the woods where we find a small waterfall into a pond, beautifully lit in the golden evening light.  Near here there is a she-hippy, living in a cave in the woods.  By the river, a man comes out of his house and we exchange a greeting.  I ask him about the Devil’s Armchair.  Has it really got powers?  Has he himself felt it?  “If you stretch out your arms and touch each side you can feel its power in your spine.  You will feel different afterwards,” is his solemn reply.

A traveller summed up Rennes-les-Bains by describing the characters she met there.  It captures the place in such a perfect way that I offer a loose translation of the piece here:

“A woman with a cascade of hair will stop to talk to you.  Her long hair is flecked with white.  Her colourful, organic cotton dress may seem a little too big for her, but is incredibly comfortable.  She will explain that she and her friends have come to Rennes-les-Bains to feel the forces of nature, so alive in the forests here.  She will confide to you that they are in fact looking for the tomb of Mary Magdelene, her idol.  In a whisper, she tells you that Mary Magdelene was the husband of Jesus and it was she who gave birth to these lands.

A man will have his feet in leather sandals, in the style of a monk, a scarf around his neck, with a pleasant face.  He will explain that he has spent more than ten years in India looking for ‘The Truth’.  Then he found his truth here, in Rennes-les-Bains.  He will spend hours explaining how the most important thing in life is the love we have for each other – ‘If I speak to you, it is because I love you.’

Another man carries a salesman’s case.  His shirt and townie trousers will give no clue as to the ideas in his head.  He will hold a serious meeting in a village shop where he will explain to the attentive audience that in Rennes-les-Bains one can communicate with the water spirits.  Using a clock at the end of his talk, he will measure the size of your aura and maybe you will have the good fortune to give him a pleasant surprise: he won’t be able to work out the outer limit of your aura and respectfully declares that you have the gift of healing.

Then there is the man wearing all the latest technical hiking equipment, his waistcoat has useful pockets, his hat of weather-resistant fabric, his trendy backpack.  He will admit to you that he is over seventy years of age.  He will just have overtaken you as, out of breath, you stumble up to the Château de Blanchefort.  Not a drop of sweat on his brow, he will offer you a cereal bar…

And all of these diverse characters, so different one from the other, co-exist in the greatest mutual respect.”  (http://www.terre-de-mysteres.fr/hauts-lieux/rennes-les-bains-haut-lieu-esoterique-de-laude.html#more-91)

 So we got up to the Fauteuil du Diable and sat in the stone chair.  It has comfortable armrests.  And did it work?  Well, my back had been a bit of a nuisance but didn’t hurt for the rest of that day.

The girls wanted to go to the thermal spa pool so I dog-sat as it was too warm in Peaches for him.  I was disappointed to have missed the healing waters and be forced to sit reading in the bustling village square over a beer or two at a café… but only slightly.  Before, the square had had some raucous teenagers in one corner behind a large tree and now some hippies are there smoking joints.  It must be the naughty corner.

On our last morning Maria asked me if we had been to the Devil’s Armchair. “Did you feel it?” she asks.  “I don’t know… it’s weird… like some sort of magnetic vortex…”; she’s rolling her eyes now.

Pooh-sticks maybe?

Rennes-les-Bains

Town Square – naughty corner to the right

Rennes-les-Bains (photo by Natasha)

River at Rennes-les-Bains (photo by Natadha)

Les baba-cools by the river

Dinner on the river

Light on the pool by the she-hippy’s cave

Main street Rennes-les-Bains

If you can’t beat ’em…

Les baba-cools

Les babas-cools on and in the river (photo by Natasha)

Lovely waterfall and pool near the troglodyte she-hippy’s cave

The Devil’s Armchair Rennes les Bains

Rennes les Bains

Re-energising the dog

The lady re-energised

And… relax… re-energise

Pool by the troglodyte’s cave

Rennes-Le-Château

Rennes-le-Château (inc.) makes the most of the story of the Abbé Saunière.  I had wanted to come here ever since reading the story of the enigmatic Abbé in the excellent book “Rat Scabies and the Holy Grail.”  It concerns the true story of a nineteenth-century parish priest who mysteriously became an incredibly rich man overnight after purportedly finding something during renovations to the church.  The village is perched on a high rocky outcrop and is not the sort of place one would normally expect to make one’s fortune.  Abbé Saunière lived with his housemaid, some twenty years his junior, and spent the rest of his life financing expensive renovations and building projects around the presbytery.  After he died, the housemaid promised to reveal the secret before she too shuffled off her mortal coil.  Tantalisingly, she also said that there was plenty more where that money came from, more than she could ever spend in her lifetime.  Unfortunately, she took ill one day and was left without the ability either to speak or to write.  She died two weeks later.  So stories of lost Cathar treasure, loot from the Crusades, or even of the Holy Grail itself began to circulate and this is where the story links to Dan Brown’s “The Da Vinci Code”.  From the mid-twentieth century treasure hunters and mystics, of which Rat Scabies (the former drummer with The Damned) was just one, began to arrive.  Excavations ensued.  The publication of Dan Brown’s book saw the commercialisation of Rennes-le-Château into what I now call Rennes-le-Château (inc.) where there is a dedicated museum and well-established visitor’s programme.

A word from Abbe Sauniere 1

A word from Abbe Sauniere 2

A word from Abbe Sauniere 3

Introduction to the story

View from Rennes-le-Chateau

From the garden of the Villa Bethany

Berenger Sauniere’s grave

Read this book

St. Mary Magdelene’s Church

Original wallpaper

The story of the vial

The vial

The orangery

Church from the garden of Villa Bethany

In the Magdala Tower

From the orangery

Info leaflet

The church

St. Mary Magdelene

In the Magdala Tower

Chrurch interior St Antony of Egypt

The knave

Rennes le Chateau

The altar

Magdala Tower

The Devil’s Story

The (now headless) Diable Benitier

Inside the Villa Bethany

In the Magdala Tower

Inside the Villa Bethany

Nice stop for lunch here

Reconstruction of the house

I wanted to come here

Xixarella

Marilyn sends us on D roads over the Pyrenees into Andorra.  It is a spectacular drive up the hairpins, along wide, green alpine passes and amongst the clouds: one of those drives where you enter a tunnel and when you come to the other side you hit an entirely different climate.

Finally, we make it to our destination: Xixarella.  Andorra is not part of the European Union; it has “special status”, like Switzerland.  But the border is a relaxed affair and each of the policemen in his booth is sitting intently doing things on his mobile phone.  I actually got the passports out and stopped, only for one of them to look up briefly from his phone and with an irritated wave of his hand send us on our way.  What a job!  Sitting up a mountain in the clouds playing on your phone all day, and then getting paid for it?  That sounds just about as hard as sitting reading over a beer on a sunny café terrace and chatting to some friendly hippies… I mean dog-sitting…

Andorra is clean, prosperous and not the sort of place you can imagine any homeless people.  Everywhere you look, the mountains are breath-taking.  It is the sixth smallest country in the world so it does not take long to get from one side to the other, even though there are no motorways (and no airports).  The campsite could not fail to be in a beautiful spot, however hard it could have tried.  It is also the only country where the official language is Catalan and 80% of the GDP is accounted for by tourism.  In the campsite office, I pick up a leaflet for the tourist bus routes (at 38 euros per person) which is a good start to get out and explore independently, albeit in second gear most of the time.  We drive to the top of a mountain and then to the most elevated capital city in Europe, Andorra La Vella, where I am delighted to find a LeClerc hypermarket.  At tax-free prices the range of foodstuffs is very tempting: mega bottles of olive oil for five euros, enormous blocks of cheese for three fifty, etc…   From there we head back to the town of La Massana where we take the ski lift up the mountain some 700 metres above the town.  In the summer it is a mountain bike resort, rather than a ski resort.  It is a hot mid-August day and the dog is made up to find that there are still small patches of snow up here.  Come to that, the daughter seemed to enjoy it too, although she didn’t roll in it like he did, just took off her shoes.

We got back to camp just as a mountainously monstrous storm hit, its thunderclaps amplified by the terrain.  Time to hunker down and cook up one of the local dishes: cheese fondu.  Hare, wild boar and partridge are also typical fare here.  Forty-eight hours of rain stopped play in Andorra somewhat.  It is a very outdoorsy country anyway but camping out, even in Peaches, has a sell-by date when it is so relentlessly wet.  So we blew out on the last night, even though we had paid for it, opting to go and look for some sun.  It had got to the stage of sitting in a thunderstorm watching a teenager running to the shower block and dropping his pants in the middle of the roadway.  “Oh my goodness!  That teenager has just dropped his pants and they’re Star Wars pants,” Iona declared gleefully.  “How embarrassing!”

“I don’t think a teenager would be wearing Star Wars pants,” was her mama’s reaction.  But the next half hour was spent watching the campers’ reactions on their way to the shower block to a pair of pants in the middle of the road.  Some stopped and did a double take; some side-stepped in revulsion and some sniggered, until one kind lady spoiled our fun by picking them up and hanging them helpfully on the bottom of a lamp-post.

“Eeeew!  I wouldn’t touch those pants,” Iona commented.

I had, shamefully, been enjoying this game, so I went out into the torrent of rain, implanted a stick by the roadside and hung them on there.  In so doing I was also able to confirm that they were indeed Star Wars pants.  I used the stick to pick them up, in case you were wondering.  It really was time to leave rainy Andorra and look for the sun.

Snow up on the mountains, even in August

Peaches under a mountain in the clouds

Peaches’-eye view

Looking down

Tobacco is widely grown here in Andorra

Mountain top Andorra

More mountains Andorra

He was hot, so he rolled in the snow

Summer ski slopes

Xixarella: I’ve had worse breakfast views

From the cockpit

The dog rolled & the child took her shoes off – WHY?

Cablecar over the street in La Massana

From the mountain-top

Rain from the awning

Andorra mountains

Andorra weather

The tunnel out of Andorra

In the thunderstorm

Mountain top halt

Poker evening in the thunderstorm

Pants in the rain

Rain low pole awning set up

A stop on the way up a mountain

Bread from Andorra

Limeuil

Sun-searching involved a drive back up to the Dordogne to a beautiful campsite, right on the river bank under a medieval village at the confluence of the Dordogne and Vézère rivers.  The pitches were huge and the sunny, landscaped pool was set amongst banana and palm trees.  I congratulate Didier, the owner, on the second star on the shirt that France have just won at the World Cup.  He told me that he had already got his French shirt sporting the second star the week before.  It must have taken virtually no time at all to get those made up and out into the shops.  Limeuil is a picturesque village with steep winding streets and narrow alleyways.  There was a small food market and glass-blowers’ workshops, but nowhere to buy basics except at the campsite shop.  No matter: it is hot and sunny, just what was required after Andorra.  So riverside barbeques, floating down the Dordogne using the current on inflatables and doing nothing in particular was the order of the day.

Limeuil from the campsite beach

Limeuil street

Limeuil church

Campsite flyer

Pitch in Limeuil

Evening pitch

Barbeque beach on the Dordogne river

Limeuil pitch

Dordogne in the evening

Where the Dordogne meets the vezere river

Didier put two stars on his flag too

Video from the riverside here.

Omaha Beach

Finally it was a trek back from the Dordogne via Poitiers to a campsite on Omaha Beach in Normandy for a couple of nights – time enough to pay our respects to the fallen and visit a supermarket.

Omaha Beach sculpture

Omaha Beach sculpture explained

Omaha Beach memorial

British cemetery in Bayeux

The average age was about 20

over 4000 graves here

British cemetery memorial

READ: Xixarella

In the end, the goal had been achieved.  But truth be told, it was one of those trips where the travel outshone the final destination; this is the mark of a good road trip.  For it was in the mysterious tale of a once-obscure country priest, in the discovery of a community of hippies beneath the winding hairpins and high passes of the Pyrenees and in a quaint Dordogne village where people played in the river that this travel was birthed… oh, and we also got to Xixarella, Andorra.  Job done.

It was 2002 and I wanted to take my children on holiday.  So I asked them what they would like to do.  Martha (12) said, “I want to go horse-riding,” and Sam (10) grinned devilishly and growled.   “Vampires!” was the word he snarled.  So I did what any sensible father would do and asked Google for horse-riding, vampires and holiday.  And this website came up: http://www.greenmountainholidays.ro, a Dutch-Belgian outfit who ran holidays in Romania, of all places.  Why not, I thought?  I had had a little crush on Nadia Comaneci when she stormed the Olympics as a teenager, but that along with the fall of Ceaucescu was about all I knew about the place.  It turned out that Green Mountain Holidays offered a horse and cart trip, with a driver (I knew nothing about how to even park, let alone drive a horse) through Transylvania.  Well it wasn’t really Transylvania proper, but very close, and it did offer horses.  Something for everyone.  The company was pretty green too.  You paid your money straight into the hands of the owners of the houses you stayed in, so supported the local economy directly and it did not pass through any sticky fingers on the way.  And the Apuseni mountains were a pretty poor rural area of Romania.   At the time £20 bought more than one million lei so I found myself a millionaire overnight.

After a night in Bucharest we flew to the regional capital, Cluj-Napoca, where the office of Green Mountain Holidays was located.  They were to meet us at the airport.  We hung around waiting for them, with me wondering what on earth I had done.  Here we were stuck in a town in an unknown country, with two children and not the faintest idea what to do next.  Eventually I went back to the taxi driver who had offered his services some time earlier and showed him the address.  Yes, he knew it, and yes he would take us there.  After about half an hour driving out of Cluj, I started to worry.  How far was it?  He made some waving motions with his hand and I mimed for him to stop at a phone so we could try to contact them again.  It took about an hour for us to get the office, which was in a small village some sixty kilometres out of the city.  It cost us fifty euros.  The office was closed.  The taxi driver offered to hang around to see that we were ok.  We really were in the middle of nowhere here in the village of  Manastireni.  At least there was a bar next to the shut-up office, so we sat on the terrace while I had a beer and tried to figure out what to do next.

Not long after Raluka, the partner of the owner Johan, turned up.  She had had car troubles and had been late.  Having asked around at the airport she had followed us out here.  Of course, she would pay for the taxi.  How much did we pay?  “Fifty euros!” she screamed and went marching across the road, where her lovely charm disappeared and her fierce side came out as she bawled at the cowering driver.  A lot of shouting ensued and eventually she got the real price and a refund from the fifty we had paid.  I felt a little sorry for the taxi driver who had gallantly waited to see we were all right.  OK, he did rip us off, but taxi drivers everywhere, in my experience, do that.

We had agreed to keep holiday diaries and draw pictures of the places we stayed.

Martha’s diary

Martha’s diary

House by Sam

Plane by Sam

1st house by Sam

1st house by Martha

Pete’s notes

Pressed flowers

Romania View from the house in the valley

Sam’s diary

House 4 by Sam

READ Romania House by Pete

Ludovig’s dog by Sam

Martha: When we got on the plane we had to go to the other end of the runway and that took about 15 minutes.  After that we took off and we went really fast. After 15 minutes we came over water.  I could see the Isle of Wight and there were lots of little clouds and you could see all of their shadows.  After 5 minutes we all had a drink.  Sam had coke, Dad had beer (Stella) and I had water.  After 5 minutes we came over France.  That’s where we are now.  We had dinner on the plane and it wasn’t very nice.  My favourite thing was the pudding.  It was some sort of pie.  We landed at Bucharest at about 10:30pm (Romanian time).  There was a man waiting for us at the airport with a sign that said “Baxter”.  At the hotel a man came and collected our bags and took them to our room.  We were room number 323.  We phoned Mum and then went to bed.  We woke up at 6am and then had breakfast.  I had omelette and Romanian cheese.  We left the hotel at 6:50 and went to the airport.  We checked in and then went straight to a bus which took us straight to the plane.  We were on the plane for about 45 minutes.  Cluj airport was tiny.  We had to put our hand luggage in compartments above us so the flight was really boring.  We had to wait at the airport for about half an hour because our car never turned up.  Then a taxi driver offered us a lift to wherever we wanted to go.  Dad didn’t know where we were supposed to be so he showed the taxi driver the address of the holiday company’s office but what the taxi driver didn’t tell us was that the office was 100KM away from Cluj.  Dad found out about half way there and made the taxi driver stop so he could phone the office but the phone number he had was old, so Dad just had to carry on going.  Dad and the taxi driver managed to have a conversation in French and Dad found out that the taxi would cost about 5o euros.  When we got to the office we had to wait 5 minutes for Raluka.  The taxi driver tried to overcharge her but she wasn’t having it.  Raluka and the taxi driver had a big argument so we only had to pay 1.5 million lei instead of 50 euros which is a lot more.

Sam:   We are at Heathrow in the plane.  It is really exciting.  There are tables that fold up into the back of the seats and there is a drink-holder.  We have just gone over the sea.  We are heading towards France.  We are above the clouds now.  I have just had a coke and a biscuit.  The service on this plane is not too bad.

The first house we were to stay in was about twenty minutes down a track out of the village.   If you sat on the terrace, the lovely old lady rushed out with cushions to sit on.  She could not have been more welcoming.   We drew pictures and then walked across the railway track to the house of the vet, Ludovig, who had the horse and cart we were going to be travelling on.  He had eleven horses, many chickens, a totally bonkers mule and a large pen of  twenty two stray dogs he had rescued from the streets in Cluj.  Every household here seems to have dogs.  We met Aogene (Geno), who was to drive the cart.  He was a young lad and this was his first trip.  He spoke a little English, enough for him to become a good friend over the next few days.  He told us about the houses we would stay in and the preot’s (priest’s) wife.  “Ah, the preot’s wife”, repeated Ludovig, rolling his eyes and giggling.  The vet suggested trying out the horse and cart.  He explained that they could not put up the canopy because that spooked one of the horses.  A little way up the steep muddy track one of the horses tried to turn around, panicked and then slipped and fell into a ditch.  It was tangled in the harness and couldn’t get up.  I can still see its hazel-coloured, wide, staring freaked-out eyes as it lay stock still, too frightened even to attempt to move.  I worried that it had hurt itself seriously.  What the hell have we let ourselves in for, I wondered?  It took a good half hour to go and fetch the vet and disentangle and calm the beast.  In fact I later saw that these people were excellent equestrians and despite the broken yoke on the wagon they had skilfully calmed then extracted the horse with no damage apart from repairs needed to the cart.  The next day we rode out to the blacksmiths in preparation for our trip.  Martha maintained that she was bitten by a “big grasshopper” and Sam wrote that he “found out that I had lots and lots of bites”.  I thought that they were mosquito bites but later learned that they were dog flea bites.  “It’s raining, it’s pouring, Dracula is snoring” Sam wrote as we left the hamlet.

First house

With the vet’s family

Martha Sam & Ludo

More rain

First house

End of day 1 travels

Ludovig & little Ludo

First house

Martha

Sam

Ludovig’s family

Typical house

The road crew

Rollin’

Romania Day 1

First house

We arrived at a farmstead near the tiny village of Scrind on the first stop on our journey.  There we met some Dutch people who were hiking a Green Mountain Holidays route. They were kind to us and removed the tick that Sam had picked up.  They had come prepared.  Two couples, old friends, and one was an unfathomably tall archaeologist.  “I don’t know what this is doing up here,” he said, picking up a stone.  In fact, he explained, it was a coprolite – fossilised poo.  It had come from a shark – he knew that because it was spiral-shaped and the shark is the only animal with a spiral shaped anus.  A long time ago, the sea must have inundated the high mountains here.  I still have this fossil.  We played cards with them to while away the evening and they had pancake-eating competitions with the children.  The other man was slowly going blind, and his friends were determined to help him see as much as he could of the world before he lost his sight.  They were teachers.  The next stop was across a dam over the Iara River, in a small valley near the village Valea Ierii.  The houses here were memorable for the painted decorative ceilings and huge, ceramic wood-burners, ornate and tiered to the full height of the rooms.

Sam: I now have  55  bites.  The next day we set off and I drove the cart for a bit.  It was fun.  When we got to the house our driver got a little bit flirty.  I have 63  bites.  It was the best house by far and we met the Dutch people again.  I had a cake-eating contest with the Dutch people and I won.

Martha: We met a girl called Ramona who’s 12.  She told us her dog was in trouble because he ate all the cheese.  She spoke very good English.  Before dinner we went into the village to look for a phone to phone Mum but there wasn’t one.  I don’t like this house.  The atmosphere isn’t very nice.  The woman here gave us meat for dinner so I didn’t eat it.  After dinner the woman came and tried to get us to buy one of her table cloths.  We bought a blue and white one for Mum.  The woman made it herself.  It cost 35 euros.  On the cart today we were going up the valley to the top of the mountain.  Near the top we picked up a hitchhiker.  He was an old man with a kind face.  Sam didn’t want to pick him up but nobody else minded.  The fourth house is OK.  The only thing is the girls here are obsessed with our driver, who’s called Geno.  Sam drove the cart today.  To make the horses go faster you say “gatonnay” and it didn’t work for Sam so Dad said, “treat them like children, let them know who’s boss”.  So Sam yelled, “Gatonnay NOW”.  House five: the woman here is a doctor and this is just her holiday home.  She had a look at my bites on my shoulder and said they weren’t mosquito bites.  She speaks French so she talked to Dad a lot.  

We had a rest day at the doctor’s house.

In the rain

The house near the dam

Farmhouse

Rain-hairwashing at the doctor’s house

Playing cards with the Dutch

End of day 1 travels

On the cart

The bridge Geno & I built

Geno & Martha

Geno strutting his stuff

With Dutch friends

Horse-riding

The full gang at the vet’s

Horse riding with Ludovig

Ludovig and the horse

Horse-riding

En route

The balcony at the doctor’s

Martha

Doctor’s house

Filling water bottles from a spring

READ: Romania

Village playground

Geno and Sam

En route

Through the forest

A fly agaric in the woods

The tall Dutch archaeologist

At the waterfall

Ducks meet the pigs

She took us into the woods on the hillside and we picked chanterelles which the doctor cooked in butter for our dinner.  The place was a lovely wooden cabin, quite large with  long balconies overlooking the forest and Martha washed her hair in the rain leaning out over the wooden railings here.  Every day she had been picking flowers to put in her hair.  Geno told the doctor we were going to stay with the preot after here.  She rolled her eyes and giggled: “And the preot’s wife”.  I asked Geno what it was about this woman that made everybody do this.  “It’s… it’s… I don’t know how to say… it’s… very big!” was all I could get out of him.  She diagnosed Sam’s bites as flea-bites and gave us some cream to treat them.

When we got to the next house we visited some local caves and waterfalls and built a dam over the river.

Sam: We walked down the valley and got our feet wet and we built a dam.  After that we walked up a hill and saw some caves.  The first one we went in and found some bones.  The second cave we did not go in because it was against the law to go in without permission.  It had freezing cold air coming out of the 30m drop that had a whirlpool at the bottom.  The freezing cold air came out in the form of a cloud.  The air coming out was so strong that all the leaves and the branches of the trees were blowing away for about 5m.  

Martha: For breakfast we had cheese, chips and egg again.  It was delicious..  we went back along the river and stopped.  Sam built two small dams and I found mushroom heaven.  Dad and Geno put a log over the river and made it into a bridge.  Then we walked to another cave and Sam found some bones of an animal.  We don’t know what the animal is though [I was hoping it was a bear having had long talks with Geno about what we would do, and what the horses would do, if we were to come across one].  Geno says that the next person we stay with is a vet so we will ask him [cal –horse- he told us]… Then we walked back to the river and washed the bones.  As we were walking back to the river a bug flew into my nose.  I jumped up and down to try and get it out and I hurt my knee.  Dad had to carry me back… Dad and Sam said there was a massive storm in the night and the lightening was so bright you couldn’t even see but they didn’t even bother to wake me up… on the cart we went past the river (which had flooded) and saw the first dam we had made and it had survived the storm.  The log and the other dams had gone.  There were quite a few fallen down trees in the road… We went home and played cards with Anna-Marie and then had dinner.  I gave Anna-Marie a ring and after dinner I gave her a hair braid.  It was the first one I’d ever done and it turned out really well.

We kept on coming into the same houses as our Dutch friends.  They gave us useful tips about places they had discovered on their hikes, like the mill where we were asked to guess at the purpose of the Heath-Robinson style mousetrap.  Or the graveyard and as Martha wrote: There was one grave outside the grave yard.  Geno said they do that if you commit suicide.  And they say Christians welcome everyone into the church!

I enjoyed Geno’s company and we learnt about each other’s lives.  I explained to him that although I may be a millionaire in Romania I certainly wasn’t at home.  He told me about his family and how the vet was helping him by giving him this work.  He was kind to the children, playing with them, letting them drive the cart and forever watchful when they decided to walk for a bit.  He took us to local stores in villages to buy snacks and drinks for the day ahead.  Everything we bought was shared with him and his English got better and better, as did his indulgence in beer!  I learnt a smattering of Romanian and he told me about the country and the ways of life there.  We laughed a lot.

So finally we got to the eighth house – the preot’s.  But he wasn’t in and neither was his famous wife.  So I played a few songs on the guitar for Geno, then we played in the garden, after that we hit the local bar.

Martha: Dad made me and Sam paper aeroplanes and me and Sam had a competition to see who could get theirs to fly the furthest.  Sam lost and got in a strop.  Then we went back to the priest’s house.

The preot used to be a fireman and his wife was as large as advertised.  She was an effervescent character who asked us about our lives, in what could only be termed a boorish manner.  Her eyes were heavily made-up under her peroxide hair and she wore what looked like multiple layers of foundation, blusher and the like.  Her lips were painted a garish shade of scarlet and she was LOUD.  But kind.

Sam: when we arrived at the priest’s house the priest’s wife met us.  She was big and she had about 15 layers of make-up on but she was friendly.

Martha: The priest’s wife is quite large and a total tart.  After dinner we played poker with the priest and then went to bed.

We went to witness some of the all day service in the church the next day.  It was chanted and sung in an orthodox fashion which Martha described as “weird”.  After one more home-stay we got back to the vet’s where he plied us with his home-made liqueur and arranged for the children to have a ride on horseback the following day.  Raluka came and took us to the nearest big village to a craft shop before driving us back to Cluj where she bought us a slap-up pizza meal before we got on the plane back to the UK via Paris.  Sam’s bath was floating with half-drowned dog fleas once he’d finished.  But a good time was had by all and I got the sense that we’d entered a portal into the everyday life of the people of the Apuseni Mountains.  Their hospitality and efforts to accommodate us were fabulous and I have nothing but fond memories of the country and people we met along the way.  It rained quite a lot and we often got wet without the canopy on the cart, but our spirits were never dampened by this.  Two weeks at a leisurely pace into welcoming homes was just the ticket for a horse-riding-vampires-holiday and I would do it again at the drop of a hat.

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http://www.welcometobratislava.eu/next-apache/

Click the link above and you will understand why I used to pop in there on the way back from work when I got off the tram.  It’s a dusty old second-hand bookshop with lots of literature in English, Starbucks-style sofas and a bar/coffeehouse all rolled into one.  And just opposite is the Backpackers’ – THE place for live music, atmosphere and meeting strangers.

If you want some straight travel tips, I have published an article about getting the most from your stay in Bratislava which can be found here (there is a link of the home page too): http://www.welcometobratislava.eu/seven-hot-tips-for-those-of-an-adventurous-nature-who-visit-bratislava/ 

Of course you will want to wander around the old town, maybe go out to Devin Castle or enjoy a walk up to the castle in the city itself, but this is more of an insider’s view of the city.  For traveler’s tales from Slovakia please see these posts:

https://wheatypetes.world/2016/08/15/bratislava-is-for-life-not-just-christmas-markets/

https://wheatypetes.world/2018/03/22/slovakia/

https://wheatypetes.world/2016/08/15/the-sounds-of-silence/ 

https://wheatypetes.world/2016/08/15/refugees/ 

I always wanted my own bolt hole, man-shed… or whatever.  It works like Michael McIntyre’s brilliant man-drawer stand-up. 

Finally, I got me a man-cave.  The garage was used as a dumping ground.  So I blagged a couple of pallets from the caretaker at work (who said they were the bane of his life), availed myself of the second hand furniture shop and voila: the Man-Cave.  All my “stuff” that my wife doesn’t like has a home now.  Things that were stored but cherished are now outed.  And thanks to the new pallet ceiling, Christmas decorations and camping equipment are now in the new “loft”.  

So we have:

• the football that was kicked into the stands when my team won promotion and it was my 40th Birthday that day;
• a photo from 1960 of my dad with his dad on a pebbly beach sitting in striped deckchairs – my grandad is in a three-piece suit and tie, my dad in a towel and nothing else but skin is visible;
• artistic souvenirs from Zimbabwe and Trinidad;
• original programs from my first footie match (Arsenal-Chelsea in the 70’s) and my first Aldershot match;
• number plates I have found in Romania and Slovakia, one starting with my initials curiously;
• the enamelled street sign from the road I used to live on in Lyon (that’s another story);
• the shisha pipe I was gifted by my colleagues when I left Jordan;
• my grand-parents’ wedding photo from the 1920’s;
• artwork and fabrics bought in India;
• a model beetle gifted for my 50th birthday;
• candle lighting trinkets from North Africa and Jordan;
• a limited-edition watercolour bought by the parents who clubbed together to buy it from my first teaching position;
• 70’s style wicker furniture from the second-hand store (which I also love);
• a hand-painted milk-churn from Slovakia;
• a perfectly rounded oval river-pebble from the Highlands of Scotland;
• a photo of me and my (now grown-up) children at a match;
• as well as one of my (now grown-up) daughter and son on the border between Scotland and England with her one-footed in each country and him behind her about to throw a snowball at her (which he didn’t because he knew he’d have gotten his head kicked in if he did) and most of all –
• an engraved slate sign saying “PETE’S MAN SHED – SMOKING AND JAMMING ALLOWED”.  A mystery colleague somehow found out about my man-shed and how I can do things in there that I am not permitted to do in the house, like make loud raucous jamming sessions or smoke, things which are definitely not allowed indoors with a young child present, and got the most amazing sign made.  Now there is someone who understood.  

I love my man-shed.

So is this what “home“ is?   A collection of memories that are mostly from when you were far from “home”?  I really don’t know.   You will have to decide on that one for yourself.

Fridge magnet from Peachy travels

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Peaches’ fridge magnet scalps

UPDATE: The Man Shed has grown up since I got a job editing online and needed a workspace. She’s been insulated, consolidated and updated since then. Yes, the Man Shed’s chosen pronoun is ‘she’.  How on trend am I?  Wooden ceiling and everything.  In short, she has become an office/jam shed/reading room.  

My earliest and best of football

Jam space

Trinidadian picture carved head and batik from Zimbabwe

Czechoslovakian matchboxes

Romanian and Slovak numberplates

Romanian vase

Scotland England border beach in 1960, Dad in trunks Grandpa in 3-piece suit memory in Italy of Peaches

Classic France

Scotland

Office

Slovak milk churn art

Jordanian – not sure what it’s for

Grandparents’ wedding and corks from ours

Syrian wall-tidy and hanging, family photies

Jordanian lantern and shisha pipe Transylvanian coprolite

Indian painted fabric

Reading room

The street I lived on in France as a student

PS: I think this book goes a long way to explaining: https://wordery.com/third-culture-kids-david-c-pollock-9781473657663?currency=GBP&gtrck=cjI4V1U0NldkNDVvYVBjV0V5ektDWklOaldxK0M2N3VRMFk4aVFKVGphcG4zR2dWT1Jvby9OREg1QWUzUkNaRnFDc0FUcXd6LzNXKzFFSUpkSisyRHc9PQ&gclid=EAIaIQobChMIp_bemLDW2gIVBhwbCh3E-A2cEAkYASABEgJL3PD_BwE

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Essaouira, Morocco

Essaouira is fantastic. A surfer paradise come summer and a step down from the madness of Marrakech.  The people down there were friendly and the old harbour is a pleasure to mill around.  I have travelled through Morocco a few times now, and it never fails to deliver:  the amazing Ait Benhaddou, the film set town of Ouarzazate or driving up across the Atlas mountains to get there. Aït Benhaddou is an ighrem (fortified village in English,  ksar in Arabic), along the former caravan route between the Sahara and Marrakech. Most locals, attracted by the tourist trade, live in rather more ugly modern dwellings in a village on the other side of the river, although there are a few families still living in the ancient site. Inside the walls of the ksar are half a dozen Kasbahs or merchants houses and Aït Benhaddou is touted as “a great example of Moroccan earthen clay architecture”.  It has been a Unesco World Heritage Site since 1987.  The Ouarzazate area is famed as a film-making location, with Morocco’s biggest studios enticing many international companies to work here. Films such as Lawrence of Arabia (1962), The Living Daylights (1987), The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), The Mummy (1999), Gladiator (2000), Kingdom of Heaven (2005), Kundun (1997), Legionnaire (1998), Hanna (2011), The Hills Have Eyes (2006), and Salmon Fishing in the Yemen(2011) were shot here, as was part of the TV series Game of Thrones. 

Once when we had hired a car to drive to these places my brother was arrested before we had even left Marrakech.  He was given a fine for not stopping to give way at a roundabout, and another for driving onto a roundabout without giving way. Confusing?  The same “offence”, but doubly so.  Nevertheless my French came in handy and after enquiring of the arresting officer whether or not he had any children (he did) and whether or not I may give a small monetary “gift” to his children, all fines were swiftly forgotten.  It was a tactic that was successful twice more on that trip.  Not that we drove like Bonny and Clyde or anything (although all three times it was my brother at the wheel), just that a hire car was easy pickings for poorly-paid, invariably polite and affable traffic cops.  Every time we stepped out of our cheap hotel in Marrakech the local Madame tried to sell us one of her girls.  Two middle-aged blokes in a cheap hotel – it had to work didn’t it?  We got to the stage of looking out of our window to make sure she was not there before making a run for it to get out into town.

On another occasion a cousin of our friend Fabrice had a house in Morocco, Essouira to be precise and we all thought it would be lovely to meet up there after Christmas travelling from our homes in Slovakia.  Catch some winter sun and so forth.  A nice break from the seriously-double-digit-minus temperatures and snow.  We thought.  But it was not to be.  Essaouira, the windy city, was not cold, but not overly warm either; the nights were very chilly.  T-shirt weather days, but breezy, and moisture-laden nights.

When we arrived, a contact of the cousin, also a taxi driver and hashish salesman picked us up.  We had spent the previous night in Marrakech in a beautiful guesthouse with a central courtyard and a rooftop terrace for breakfasts.  Then the long drive to Essaouira.  Here we loved the camel rides along the beach, strolling down to the harbour and getting lost in the souq.  The hammams were fabulous.  It was a lot less frenetic than Marrakech.  We collected pebbles, stones of various sizes, shells and other sea-debris along the seafront to use as poker chips to play of an evening.  Polly, Fabrice and Karen’s teenage daughter, cleaned us out, despite her tendency to make a curious sort of squealing noise when she saw her hand.  Bluffing was not her strong point, but she did have some fantastic hands that night.  And had similar things most nights. But it was fun to work out the value of shells, pebbles and other sea-treasures we had collected on the beach.  We all put in an amount of currency which was the pot from this smorgasbord of “chips”.  Fabrice wrote poetry in a mixture of French and English which went in every direction, and quite randomly, on a cafe menu he had picked up.  My daughter rode a camel for the first time in her life: along the beach.

Music teacher Diana and chef Matt, our dear friends, loved the market down there (see post Colle di Tora – An Italian Wedding).  They came back generously laden with presents for everyone, lovely people that they are.  People who had been to Morocco before were not convinced of the “bargains” they had secured in the souq from the friends of the friends of the cousin of Fabrice.  But why pour water on somebody’s fire of friendship?  The house was glistening, even dripping with wet paint when we arrived.  We soon found out why.  In fact this was because it had literally just been decorated.  Minutes before.  They had to do that regularly in the winter.  Within two days the mildew type mould was starting to grow back and the walls were dripping with condensation.  It was a beautiful top story property with rooftop views above a charming little square on one side and a small, rocky bay on the other; however the winter climate there obviously caused a fair amount of problems.  Of a night-time it became very cold and very damp.  The brine carried on the Atlantic sea breeze simply ripped through the windows as if they were not there at all.  We could hear the waves crashing below onto the nearby cove as we were drifting off to sleep.

There are many interesting and beautiful places to discover in this country.  Essaouira is just one of them and holds a special memory because of the friends we shared it with.  Morocco is yet another country I love.