Sunday, November 15, 2009

The End

And now, the end of the 2009 European odyssey.

I am expecting the inevitable question: “Happy to be home?”  If it has to be yes or no, then it’s no.  I could keep going.  I would love to keep going.  Constant travelling is a little taxing, but I haven’t reached exhaustion.

Nevertheless, it will be a relief not to think about language anymore, to speak fluently and be understood.

All things end.  But this is only the end of the second chapter.  Good travel has three phases: the first is planning, when the possibilities excite and the anticipation builds; the second is execution, the trip itself, when plans come to fruition or lead in unexpected directions.

Now begins the synopsis.  Trawling through nine thousand photographs.  Developing.  Discarding.  Revisiting notes and blog entries, and assembling articles.  Digging out an old brochure to check the name of that church in Portugal, or a receipt to report the cost of a beer in Seville.  And beginning work on my next book of photography.

Over the coming months, as I select and develop my best photos, I will post them online.  Updates to this blog will be less frequent than they have been during the trip, but check back now and again to see what new photos are available.

Language

In major cities, it’s easy to get by with English.  Too easy.  Speaking foreign languages is one of the joys of travel.  Too many English-speaking tourists turn up in Venice or Paris and speak English.  You can't.  That's cheating.  Aussies are as guilty of this as Americans or the Brits.  You’ve got to make an effort.

But the effort does become draining, and the language barrier is isolating.  Spaniards are reticent to speak anything other than Spanish, and in provincial Andalucía you won’t get much else.  Luckily, my basis in French gets me by with Spanish, and it is probably my favourite language to try to speak.

In Bruges, English is so widely spoken it could be considered a second language after their Flemish Dutch (the national language of French is equally well-spoken, though pride is at stake due to wars with France).

Portugal and England share the oldest alliance in history, and English is widespread in urban areas of Portugal.  It is sporadic in rural areas.  The elderly, urban or rural, don't speak it at all.

My biggest surprise was Croatia, which easily has the most widespread English of all the countries I toured.  It is taught to children in school from young, and the standard is high.  This was a bit of a relief, because I have no knowledge of any Slavic language.  I was out of luck when I found that just over the border in Montenegro, English is not spoken at all, and I had to depend on my Croatian phrase book (for sensitive cultural and political reasons, Croatian, Montenegrin and Serbian are all officially different languages, but linguistically they are close dialects of the same language).

When I reached France, it was with a mixture of comfort and trepidation.  I actually speak a little bit of French, so I could have simple conversations.  But I also know enough grammar to know I’m getting my conjugation wrong or that I don’t know which participle to use.

Remembrance Day at Villers-Bretonneux

On 25 April 1918, at a cost of over 1,200 of their lives, Australian soldiers repulsed a German force apparently ten times their number at Villers-Bretonneux, the last point of defence before Paris on the Western Front.  The citizens of this little town declared their eternal gratitude to these men in a moving speech by the mayor.  The primary school, rebuilt with money raised by schoolchildren from Victoria—called the Victorian School—has emblazoned above its blackboards, “N’oublions jamais l’Australie”—we will never forget Australia.  And they never have; ANZAC Day is observed religiously to this day.  They dub the town l’Australie en Picardie, and it has been called by Australians the Gallipoli of the Western Front.
Remembrance Day, once known as Armistice Day, the last day of “the Great War,” is a national holiday in France.  This and the last day of The Second World War are of great importance to the French, as so much of their soil was battleground.  On November 11th, we visited the Australian National Memorial outside Villers-Bretonneux.  Several groups of Aussies trod softly past the sombre rows of graves either side of the French and Australian flags to reach the tall, white tower flanked by two chapels and a memorial wall engraved with the names of the Australian fallen in the battles of the First World War.  While we were there a French family with three young ones also paid their respects, the parents gently reprimanding the children when they became too boisterous.  We gave them little koala bears.

Parisian Cinemas

One of the things I really like about Paris is the number of little cinemas, mostly in the Latin Quarter, which play classic films.  Just around the corner from our hotel were playing two films by Sergio Leone, one of my favourite directors: the well-known Clint Eastwood flick “For a Few Dollars More,” and the not-so-well-known “A Fistful of Dynamite” (a.k.a. “Duck, You Sucker,” and a few other confusing titles).

It was very cool to immerse myself in a late screening of “Dollars” on the big screen.  Another cinema was playing several Hitchcock films.  In 1998, I came across one filmhouse which had been playing Casablanca continuously for many years, but I wasn’t able to find it this time.

Paris

Mai Li and I spent the final week of my trip in Paris, where it was averaging 8° or 9° Celsius.  It seems such a short time since I was being scorched by the 40°C Andalusian sun.

We kept warm with plenty of walking.  Paris is made for it.  The famed city planner Baron Haussman laid out broad boulevardes in the 19th century, though not for the enjoyment by the pedestrian masses but rather to suppress them; the narrow medieval bottlenecks they replaced prevented soldiers from effectively responding to the riots which led to the French Revolution.

The Promenade Plantée, a garden footpath slicing through the Bastille elevated on arches, was originally a railway after Napoleon III approved a right of way through the city.  Today it is a favourite spot for locals to jog or stroll.  We walked half of its four-kilometre length.

Another transformed right of way is the Canal Saint-Martin, controlled by a series of locks and once a highway for transporting food and other goods on barges.  It is now used for tourist boats.  A long stretch of it has been enclosed and covered with gardens, and a film on the history of the canal is projected onto the brick walls of the tunnel from the boat.  This and one or two locks are the most interesting; the rest of the two-and-a-half hour trip is frankly a little boring.

Friday, November 13, 2009

Gouffre de Padirac

The Gouffre de Padirac (Padirac Chasm) is a navigable underground river in the Lot départment, east of the Dordogne.  It begins at the bottom of a a 75-metre deep sinkhole, a huge cylindrical shaft which was once a cave before the ceiling fell in eons ago to leave a massive lightwell almost half its height across.  Three separate lifts and a scaffolding of metal stairs have been built against the walls to reach the floor of the chasm.

It was drizzling on the drive there.  It had been raining for days, so we were carrying umbrellas and rain jackets.  By the time we parked the car the rain stopped , but Mai Li asked if we should bring the umbrellas.

"Pff," I mocked. "We're going underground. It doesn't rain underground."

Indeed it does.

After wending us through corridors of limestone on a subterranean passage of water coloured jade with silt, our guide moored the flat-bottomed boat and led us up the corkscrewing ballroom stairway of the enormous Grand Dôme.  Water fell more heavily than the showers outside from the nearly 100-metre ceiling into the Lac de la Pluie, the Lake of Rain, below us, soaking us on the way down.

The 60-metre tall stalactite called the Grande Pendoloque, the Great Pendant, dips down to just two metres above the surface of the lake.  Limestone formations congealed over millennia on the cavern’s tiers look genuinely organic, like broad mushrooms or a Chinese Juniper bonsai, and in the pools that collect on the cascading plateaux smooth natural weirs form, curving so artistically that we debated over whether it was man-made.

The cave complex is vast.  Two journeys by boat, long passages by foot and hundreds of stairs represent only a tiny fraction which is open to the public.

Wednesday, November 11, 2009

Transportation

After a month of ferries, trains and buses through Italy, Croatia and Montenegro, it was nice to pick up a car again upon reaching France – happily another diesel, though unluckily another Ford.  Cars offer freedom and comfort, and are essential for visiting small towns.  The downside is driving in European cities.  It is a trial.  They are also the most expensive travel option, though there are some ways to mitigate the cost.  Diesel is a cheaper fuel than petrol and more economical.  You'll fill the tank less frequently, and for less.  Pre-booked packages through travel agencies will always be a better deal than a walk-in rental, which is extortion (I don't even want to admit how much it cost me to rent that car in Andalucia).  A good, cheap agency I used several times is Holiday AutosDriveaway Holidays was also good.  And I never buy the additional insurance.  The rental companies just sell this to make money, and there is already sufficient coverage on the car.

Trains are great no-brainers—you get on, you get off, and in between you read, nap, and stroll around while somebody else does all the driving.  European trains are comfortable, the system is efficient, and the high speed network is growing all the time.  Overnight trains are even better if you're travelling a long enough distance; the extra cost for a cabin is comparable to a hotel room you'd have to rent anyway, and you save time travelling while you're asleep.  But outside the more major destinations the regional lines can be time-consuming and tedious.

Intercity buses are often fast, frequent, and potentially the cheapest option, but are my least favoured because, like a plane, you’re restricted to your seat.  More than three hours sitting in one place gets uncomfortable, especially if the passenger beside you hasn't showered.

Ferries are a novelty and have even more space to walk around than trains, but are slow, can be pricey, and make limited stops.  And, of course, you need a great bloody body of water.  But again, they make good travelling hotel rooms.

Any metro within a European city is often cheap and convenient.  I love Madrid's modern and extensive network.  The Paris and London metros are also justifiably well-regarded.  And the aged but character-filled Budapest metro also deserves mention.

Trams are even better because you can sightsee en route.  Both Prague's and Lisbon's excellent and extensive tram systems are over a hundred years old, but run both modern rolling stock as well as older, charming carriages. Meanwhile, Seville’s brand new tram "network" is so limited with its single line that it almost makes the Sydney monorail look useful (almost).

My favourite method of transportation?  Hands down, on foot.  I am a walker.  While transport is slow, you are always in control, never miss a stop, and see more of the city than any other way.  It's also free.

Monday, November 09, 2009

The Dordogne

Three hours west of Lyon by train I picked up another car and arrived in the Dordogne départment of France in the full of Autumn.  I haven't had a Northern Autumn in over ten years, and the Périgord Noir county and the Vézère Valley is wooded with oak forests.  The countryside is orange, brown, yellow and red and threaded with bermed, winding roads, perfect for driving a stick shift.  I'm soon slaloming through falling showers of oak leaves.  I've driven into my Windows desktop wallpaper.

It is also home to the medieval city of Sarlat-la-Canéda, a preserved and restored living representation of 14th-century France.  I based myself in an apartment here for a week.  A few days later Mai Li arrived to besiege chateaux, spelunk caves, and indulge in fois gras and confit du canard before idling away the last week of this odyssey in Paris.

The day Mai Li arrived, it rained for the first time in the region for six months.  Scattered Autumn showers pestered every day thereafter, but were a cakewalk after the Adriatic vortex.

Thursday, November 05, 2009

Where there is Man there is art, and where there is art there is graffiti

The Vézère Valley in the Dordogne region of France is littered with limestone caves, 25 of which are decorated with paintings estimated to be up to 20,000 years old, the earliest known example of painting.  The most famous of these is the Lascaux complex of caves, discovered in 1940 by some boys looking for their dog (actually, it was discovered by the dog himself, Robot, who had fallen in).  Comprising nearly 2,000 figures, primarily of horses but also of stags, bison, and aurochs (ancestors of modern cattle), it has been dubbed "the Sistine Chapel of Prehistory" and includes the famous Painted Gallery and the Great Hall of the Bulls.

The only other polychromatic paintings discovered in the valley are in the Font-de-Gaume cave, depicting bison and horses again but also mammoths and, the principle food source of the time, reindeer.  The best known images from this cave are a frieze of five bison and "the sexual parade of the reindeer," where a stag is smelling the head of a kneeling doe.  The natural contours of the cave walls were exploited to emphasise the hump of a bison or the belly of a horse.  (Photography is disallowed, so here's a picture from a government website.)  Sadly, yet again this is artwork defaced by graffiti, this time from the 19th century, where bison paintings at the fore of the cave have had names carved into them.  It's difficult to excuse, but it has to be said that the paintings had not been scientifically observed at the time and there was no comprehension of their age or significance.

Another site, Grotte de Rouffignac, is sometimes called "the cave of a hundred mammoths."  An electric train takes visitors into a ten-kilometre deep complex of painted mammoths, horses, ibex, and even rhinoceros.  I hugely regret that I missed this.  On 30 October, I set out late to see both Font-de-Gaume and Rouffignac, but had to wait for over an hour at Font-de-Gaume because they limit the size of the tours.  This is understandable; when Lascaux was discovered there was no such limitation, and the change in air quality from 1,200 visitors a day caused the development of a green fungus, la malaise vert, and a white calcite crystal, la malaise blanc, to damage the paintings.  This in turn led Lascaux to first limit numbers of visitors, and then to close permanently in 1963.  Indeed, there is suggestion that this may happen with Font-de-Gaume; the tour guide showed us an example of a white fungus growing on the wall.  The only way to appreciate Lascaux today is to visit "Lascaux II," an impressive centimetre by centimetre three-dimensional reproduction of the cave built into the hillside beside the original, with the paintings exactly reproduced using the same pigmentation and techniques.  Of course, knowing it is a facsimile unavoidably detracts from the awe, and the experience becomes a slightly carnivalesque appreciation of the facsimile itself.  Nevertheless, it is sympathetically and tastefully executed.  But with the delay at Font-de-Gaume and the closing for the season of Grotte de Rouffignac on 01 November, it was too late to return another day.

Wednesday, November 04, 2009

Nazi war crimes

In 1944, in the Limousin region of France, was a small village of about 670 people called Oradour-sur-Glane.  On June 10, it ceased to exist.  The village and all but twenty-odd survivors were wiped out by a German Waffen-SS company en route to intercept the Allied advance following the D-Day landings at Normandy.  All the men were rounded up into barns and machine-gunned, and the women and children were corralled into the church, which was then set alight.  The town was then razed.

Today, the Village Martyr has been preserved exactly as it was left that day as a memorial to the victims and the atrocities of war.  A rusted car is parked in the street beside the single disused tram line, power poles still supporting snapped, coiling cables.  Deformed bicycles and Singer sewing machines are strewn inside the collapsing stone shells of houses.  On the tiled floor of a broken boucherie lays the prostrate scale on which the family's evening meals were once weighed by the butcher for the village wives and mothers.  Even with the visiting tourists, the streets have an eerie quiet.

There is some debate over the exact circumstances of the massacre, but it appears that the battalion commander, Adolf Diekmann, believing the kidnapped German Sturmbannführer Helmut Kämpfe was being held by the French Resistance in the town, exceeded his orders to take 30 hostages and instead ordered the population be exterminated as a "just retaliation."  Though his actions prompted protests within the German army, including from Field Marshall Rommel, Diekmann and much of the company which had committed the massacre were never tried; they were killed in action shortly afterward in the Battle of Normandy.

Sunday, November 01, 2009

Lyon

My rule of thumb when travelling is to stay in the old part of town.  By definition it is the most historical, so typically has the highest density of things to see when you walk out of your hotel door.  The average cost of a room is slightly higher, but in almost all European cities cheap accommodation can still be found in the centre.  This remains true of Vieux Lyon, "old Lyon," where the cheap rooms are in bed and breakfasts and auberges, but despite that mid-October is well out of the July-August peak season, all ten or so of the B&Bs I rang were full.  Mai Li and I had similar difficulty finding vacancy when we were in Lyon in April 2007. Despite it being France's third largest city, there must simply be a dearth of accommodation in the old part of town, which would explain the high prices of the hotels, but after three-and-a-half hours of faffing around just to find a bloody place to stay I relented and threw €135 a night at the Collège Hotel.  Included in that was free wi-fi, water and Coke from the refrigerator in the hall.  I don't even drink Coke, but that night a drank my bloody money's worth.