Mussels, flamingos and sheer desperation

Last Sunday was John's birthday. Why he has to have a birthday three days after Christmas I don't know - wouldn't you think that his parents could have stopped in mid - er - conception and spared him all those years of not getting proper presents ("We've bought you an Extra Large Christmas Pressie this year, dear"), not to mention spared me the vexed question of how to celebrate this year's Big One? Well, yes, they could have, but they didn't. Mean, eh?

We don't usually bother very much with birthdays, it has to be said - best not to notice the years rolling by - but this was one of those milestone birthdays that you really can't ignore. So a short sharp surprise trip was in order. In typical Libran fashion I ummed and aaahed for several weeks trying to decide where to go, but in the end three things made the decision for me: mussels, flamingos and sheer desperation. So it was off to the Aude coast and the villages of Bages and Peyriac sur Mer, two of the most atmospheric (and photogenic) places I know.



Yes, this is the same Languedoc coast that was developed into resortland in the 1960s when the government decided that the working classes should be able to afford to go to the beach too - though not, heaven forfend, to the Côte d'Azur where they went themselves. So they sprayed the beaches to get rid of the mosquitos (as they still do every year, though it doesn't work), created a number of purpose-built resorts for the mass market ... and the mass market duly came, and still comes, in ever-increasing droves. Don't get me wrong, it's not as gross as it sounds - we even go there ourselves (!) ... some of the beaches are more reminiscent of Australia than France, many of the resorts have been decently laid out with lots of space and greenery, and it is more egalitarian and, I think, more welcoming than the celebrity sands of the Côte d'Azur. And here and there you can still find pockets that remain much as they have been for centuries, like the snappily titled Parc Naturel Régional de la Narbonnaise en Méditerranée, of which Bages and Peyriac form a part.




Both villages are right on the edge of saltwater lagoons, which means that the light is just dreamy, and the bird life fantastic.



I poddled round with my camera, getting seriously stuck in the mud at one point, although it was worth it to get shots like these:



And of course we saw these:



and ate these:



What more could you want? Well, actually, some decent weather would have been nice: we drove there through blizzards and howling gales which were the subject of an Alerte Orange (severe weather warning), and although the snow melted fast the skies remained resolutely grey and menacing until Monday, when they opened and promptly dropped several centimetres of rain in a few hours. When we got home, we discovered that it had been warm and sunny here in Ariège all the time ... so much for the bloody Med.

Farewell to summer

Unlike the last couple of years, when wall-to-wall sun and warm temperatures in Ariège have lasted pretty much through to November (I swam in Lac Mondély in October last year), Metéo France's prognosis for this autumn is - well, autumnal. So when we spotted a miniature grey-free gap last week, we threw the tent into the car and within an hour were gone, this time towards Banyuls sur Mer in Roussillon for a couple of days coastal walking.

Banyuls is an old wine town just 12 kilometres from the Spanish border, where the last vestiges of the Pyrénées meet the Mediterranean. It has great character, a kind of faded elegance and a very cheap municipal campsite! I'd hate to be there in August, but outside la belle saison it's a charming place - laid back but still very much alive, unlike some of the big purpose built resorts where the shutters go down on the first day of September. People go there to taste and buy wine, to eat fish, to swim and snorkel, to walk the coast path that winds its way in and out and up and down amongst the criques and most of all, it seems, just to stroll around, watching everyone else do the same thing. We did all of those things, and managed to fit in a trip to Cadaqués as well.


Cadaqués

Cadaqués was once a small shabbyish fishing village in a setting of spectacular natural beauty on the Costa Brava, close to the Cap de Creus; it was immortalised by Salvador Dalí, who had a house there, and during the 60s and 70s became a remarkable arty-hippy hangout where happenings happened. Until, that is, it got discovered by Barcelona's beautiful people, and Americans, and became chic. Cadaqués is undeniably attractive, but to be honest I found it to be just a teensy bit up itself and I would, I think, have much preferred it in its shabby-but-not-chic days. It's also the only place I've ever been where you're required by municipal decree to pay for parking by the minute (it's 0.03567 euros per minute or part thereof. I'm not kidding). We didn't though, because I'm mean and because I have a fully functioning built-in rip-off detector; instead we found a dingy kind of disused wide alleyway thing that was full of old French cars and the kind of travellers' vans that have tipi poles on the top, so we parked there. For free. And in a back street restaurant that was heaving with local workers and French visitors, we managed to find some affordable salad and sardines, along with a lively debate about the sorry state of the Parti Socialiste with a couple from the Auvergne. So all was not lost.

Being a lover of simple things, though, perhaps the best bit of the trip for me was on Cap Béar, close to Banyuls, watching a Bonelli's Eagle circling and hovering on the air currents for almost an hour - a truly lovely sight. The same night, a storm of mammoth proportions regaled us with almost continuous thunder and lightning for over four hours; in its wake rose the tramontane. The tramontane is the local wind, the Languedoc version of the Mistral, which erupts every so often and gusts at anything up to 90 km an hour, usually for at least four days. It's not pleasant, and is said to drive the locals mad. Which makes daily life, not to mention camping, a constant battle and is one reason why we chose not to live there. So with some sadness (and not a little hilarity, given the manic-ness of the wind) we packed up and came home.


Looking south from Cap Béar

And arrived back here to a different season. There are fallen leaves everywhere, there's snow on Mont Valier and the evenings seem shorter, somehow. Last night we drew the curtains for the first time since March.

Grillou goes to the seaside

Yes, we've been on holiday. We decided to make the most of the fantastic weather (not to mention the fact that it was the last week before Les Grandes Vacances), packed the tent, and drove the 150km to our 'local' seaside village, Gruissan, for a few days of R&R.

Gruissan is a pretty good mix of fishing village, huge nature reserves, modern port/marina/resort and wine-lovers' paradise.




Apart from having five huge beaches (and I mean huge. I mean driveable-along. I mean ones where you get your car stuck in the sand and have to be towed out, after half an hour of hot but fruitless digging, by a fortuitously passing 4x4. But that's another story), Gruissan has several étangs, or salt water lagoons. In the winter, masses of pink flamingos, egrets, avocets and other waders take up residence (the bird list runs to over 200 species); in the summer you have to be content with countless species of butterflies and a richness of plant life that puts even Blakeney Point into the shade. Apparently it's one of the only areas in France where garrigue meets saltmarsh head-on, hence lots of rare plants and every ecological protection label going. One plant is so rare that it's almost on the edge of extinction: centaurea corymbosa only (and that's as in nowhere else in the world) grows in a 3 square kilometre area here, and less than 500 individual plants reproduce each year. Isn't that extraordinary? And scary? Here it is:




Wine lovers will need no introduction to La Clape, the 15000 hectare massif between Gruissan and Narbonne, where we spent a couple of days wandering in the garrigue - some of Languedoc's best wines are produced from around 30 small and passionately run wineries here. La Clape was an island until the eleventh century, when the rivers silted up. It's been inhabited since Neolithic times (several dolmens, but they're not easy to find!); later on Roman centurions from the 10th legion, who were given land to build villas on the massif, planted the first vineyards. The herby smells of the garrigue, shimmering light of the water and the ubiquitous chirping of the cicadas combine to make it a very sensuous, as well as strangely beautiful, place in high summer.



Parts of Gruissan give me a sense of déja vu; walking by the saltmarshes, with the sea in the distance and the avocets calling, I can almost feel myself to be back in north Norfolk, on the coast path from Cley to Blakeney:



Except of course that Cley doesn't have these:



Yet.