Cathares and Canadairs

Since we've been here we've somehow stumbled into the habit of taking a few days out during the last week of August to explore and get to know our area better - we call it our Ariège holiday. And this year was no exception - we blocked it in the diary many months ago, and then when we found out that the village boulangerie was also taking its hols this week there was really no argument (unless you're one of the people who wanted to stay with us. Sorry).

Having spent a manic two days turning the last few hundred kilos of plums (okay, I exaggerate. But not by much) into ice cream, sorbet, sauce, compôte, jelly and sweet chilli jam, we decided to take Sunday gently, starting with a long slow breakfast reading the papers in Foix before setting off on our first walk, a circular walk around and above the ruined Cathare château of Roquefixade and the village of the same name. This is a great walk and one that many of our guests enjoy - short enough for an afternoon, easy enough for almost anybody yet hugely satisfying and with breathtaking views.

Looking down onto the medieval village

First glimpse of the view south

And it just gets better ...

The château is quite literally 'fixed to the rock'

Back in the village, a lovely gîte d'étape for a beer afterwards

Then it was on to Puivert, just over the border into Aude, and one of our favourite campsites:

'Our' pitch looks right over the lake 

Here's the view - yes, another Cathare château

How do you tear yourself away from that? Well, you don't, really - you have a coffee and pain aux raisins, then a swim, then another coffee ... and then it's midday ... Eventually you decide to spend the afternoon walking the part of the path around Lac Montbel, a few kilometres away, that you haven't yet done.

You could think yourself on the Med ...

And yes, the water really is that colour ...

On our way round, I was struck by a very strange, small cloud in a dip over the mountains to the south - it seemed to be a very strange shape. I put it down to a local storm, hoped it wouldn't make its way north, and thought no more about it. After a very hot walk, with no sign of a break in the weather, we landed back at the wonderful guinguette L'Ecume des Jours (recommended, both for its genuine beach shack atmosphere and for its slightly alternative twice weekly concerts) for a beer, and we were just enjoying the bizarre sense of feeling as though we were on a Greek island when suddenly two big yellow planes flew right over us. "They're Canadairs!" I yelled, as I leapt up to see what was what. A Canadair is a water bomber, or fire fighting plane; they fight inaccessible forest fires by scooping up water from the sea or a lake, and dropping it over burning forest. I first encountered them many years ago in Corsica, and although I've watched them several times since both on the French coast and in Greece I've somehow never lost the thrill of seeing them in action. Half the customers of the guinguette followed me over to the beach to wait for them to come back; we weren't disappointed, and cameras clicked wildly, mine included:

So skillful, the way they scoop up the water

I could almost touch this one

Altogether the Canadairs came back 5 times. After the first time, the local pompiers arrived, blue lights flashing, with several landrovers and a boat, presumably in case someone was unfortunate enough to get in the way of the planes. A siren now announced the Canadairs' arrival and drew an increasing number of spectators from the villages around, and the whole place began to feel like a big party. And then suddenly, it struck me. The odd looking 'cloud' that I'd seen nearly 4 hours earlier had been smoke; great chimneys of it were now rising from the exact same spot.

Later, I discovered that the fire had been a reprise of an earlier fire at L'Hospitalet: the one that Margaret wrote about in her blog just a few days ago. Scarier than that, I learned that the new outbreak had been discovered at around 4pm. I'd seen the smoke - although I hadn't realised that was what it was - two hours before that. I shuddered.

I did a lot more than shudder the next day, though you'll have to wait until the next post to find out why. In the meantime, enjoy a couple more of the Cathare châteaux we took in on the trip:

This is Usson, in Donezan, one of my new favourite places

Montaillou, made famous by the author Le Roy Ladurie

Lac Mondély, superstar ...

Some eighteen months ago I blogged, in passing really, about our local lake, the Lac de Mondély. Now much as I love it, it's hardly a world class tourist attraction - it's a small, homespun, local lake mainly used by local people and all the better for it. For some reason presumably best known to themselves, my blog article immediately hit Google's first page, where it has resolutely stayed ever since, ahead of all the 'official' tourist sites, and bizarrely nearly half of all the casual visitors to this blog now come as a result of searching for Lac Mondély!

But while that's all very pleasing and flattering and all that, it's hardly superstar status. Last Sunday, however, the UK Sunday Times ran an article entitled The 20 hottest European beaches for 2010. Lac Mondély was - are you ready for this? - placed number two, behind Page Conguel in Brittany and just ahead of Collioure (which is listed as being 'best for highbrow holiday makers', whoever they may be, and actually barely has a beach at all ...). Look, if you're one of the 561 people who've visited this blog in the last three days just to read about Lac Mondély, I need to explain something to you. Mondély is in the Ariège (something that the writer strangely failed to mention). Ariège is in the Pyrénées, which are mountains. It's almost as far south as you can go and still be in France, green, wild, small, sparsely populated, rugged and incredibly beautiful, but it's not The Beach. To get to Mondély you have to schlep along a rutted one track road for half an hour and hope you've still got your exhaust when you get there. Actually, come to think of it you have to do quite a lot of that anywhere in the Ariège.

Don't get me wrong; I'm truly delighted you're all interested in our wonderful département, and if you're moved to come and explore it for yourself so much the better (yes, well, clearly I would say that, wouldn't I ...?). But I'm just having ever-so-slight flashbacks to the days in our small village in north Norfolk when it was just beginning to become a bit Sunday-supplement-ish cool, and when people would stop me as they swayed precariously down our cobbled loke in kitten heels to ask where the town centre was. (Er - you're in it ...).

However. While Lac Mondély is definitely not Europe's hottest beach holiday for 2010 (unless you happen to earn your living writing for the Sunday Times) it's still pretty special. Don't you think?

Lac de Mondély

So while spring decided to give itself a miss this year, summer has suddenly arrived with a vengeance. No messing about - at lunchtime last Wednesday, exactly as predicted nearly 2 weeks previously by Metéo France, the long-awaited sun came out and the temperature shot up to a much more Midi-like 32 degrees. In the shade. Now it's not a lot of fun doing hard graft in the garden when your body just wants to lie around with a book and a cold beer. So we didn't.

But what we did do (grammar?) was indulge for the first time this year in one of my all-time favourite things. We went lake swimming. I used to be a fully-fledged, paid-up member of the sea swimming fan club, preferably in the Aegean, but over the last couple of years I've become even more addicted to swimming in lakes. And I'm certainly living in the right place - France has hundreds of the things, Midi-Pyrénées has scores of them and Ariège has some real beauties, the best of which is less than half an hour from Grillou (beware - shameless marketing plug coming up).

Here it is:

... the Lac de Mondély. It's in the middle of unaffected nature, as the French like to say, and is a genuinely idyllic and unspoilt place, never over-run, often almost empty even in August. To get there, you drive from either La Bastide de Sérou or Le Mas d'Azil for several kilometres over single-track rutted roads, wondering whether you've got lost, whether your exhaust is going to fall off and what you'll do if you meet a car coming the other way. Then suddenly you're there, and no matter how many times you've been before there's always that same sharp intake of breath.

There's a sand beach, lots of private grassy banks plus trees for shade; if you're feeling energetic there's a lovely walk all the way around, about 8 kilometres; and there's a little summer buvette where you can sit with a cold beer. Oh, and did I mention the swimming? It's fantastic. I like to swim over to the other shore and watch the dragonflies; often there are great crested and little grebes as well, and swallows swooping down to catch insects. There are no windsurfers or sailors, nothing to disturb the peace. You can swim with your eyes closed, just feeling the sensations, without worrying about hitting anything. The water in summer is always warm - around 25 degrees yesterday, with warmer to come - and there are no cold eddies to shock you, no waves to batter you around and no currents to drag you miles offshore.

It's quite simply wonderful. Did I mention that?