PART 1
Our latest adventure started out as visit to floral France but it became slightly more than that in the end. It turned into a ‘dot-to-dot’ sort of trip. Essentially if a place we wanted to visit was within a 1000km radius of somewhere else we wanted to visit, we made an itinerary that took in the various destinations and set off to ‘join-the-dots’ so to speak.
This trip was going to be different because we were taking Black Betty (Bam-a-lam) to Europe for the first time. We wondered how driving on the wrong side of the car on the right side of the road (or the right side of the car on the wrong side of the road) would work but everything we googled seemed to suggest that it was a reasonably simple transition. And so it was. Much easier than either of us anticipated and dear Betty went like a rocket. We took Le Shuttle from Folkestone to Calais which entails driving your car onto a train where you stay, perhaps eating a picnic tea of sandwiches and cake and drinking flasks of coffee, until you emerge from a tunnel under the English Channel just 35 minutes later and so begins our dot-to-dot adventure.
We had heard about the beauty of Claude Monet’s Garden and been dazzled by the beautiful 360° displays of Monet’s Water Lilies in the two oval galleries in Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris so we were keen to visit the garden where so many of the Impressionist’s masterpieces were inspired and created. Summer in Europe can be crowded but to see the gardens at their best we decided that July would give us a good chance to, both avoid the worst of August’s crowds and to see the gardens in all their summery glory. Giverny is a very pretty little village in Normandy and once upon a time it must have been a delightful place to live. It is a tourist mecca as the site of Monet’s house and gardens and while the visitors bring bums on seats at the local cafes and restaurants, they also wander aimlessly about the narrow streets and crowd the tiny village. Such is the lot of “tourist destinations” the world over. We were actually first in line as the doors opened which we would highly recommend as the line to enter stretched for several hundred metres when we emerged several hours later.
The gardens were stunning, bursting with colour, and infiltrated with countless bees, butterflies and birds. They are essentially organised chaos with an apparent lack of design but actually beautifully planted with different heights, colours and textures making a wonderful harmony. Volunteers come from the world over to work in these gardens. The amazing water lily pond is bigger than I expected, crossed by several bridges including the famous wisteria covered Japanese Bridge and was overlaid with water lilies and their gorgeous pink and white blooms. The light, the reflections, the colours were just beautiful. I wanted to take up a paintbrush immediately and start producing two metre high canvases!
Monet’s pink house in the gardens is beautiful too. It includes much of the original furnishings and many artworks, some by him and some by fellow artists including reproductions of works housed in museums around the world plus a collection of Japanese woodblock prints. Monet’s studio is a special place with a huge north facing window. The bright yellow dining room leads to the blue and white tiled kitchen complete with a dazzling collection of copper pots and pans. The total experience was beautiful in a way I hadn’t anticipated. The place was busy but for the most part we didn’t feel crowded as there are many paths to choose. We found that our photos didn’t really capture the riot of colour on display. Best if you go visit really J, you won’t be disappointed.
Our next destination was Bilbao in Spain, but a quick look at Google maps will tell you that Giverny to Bilbao is not an afternoon’s drive so, after our leisurely stroll around Giverny we set off for Poitiers on the Clain River in West-Central France. Chosen for its strategic position mid-way between a) Giverny and b) Bilbao it was a lovely surprise. The town centre is picturesque and its streets include predominantly historical architecture including Europe’s oldest Romanesque church, rebuilt in the latter half of the 11th century. It has an incredibly ornate carved stone façade.
In the Place de la Liberté one can find a replica Statue of Liberty, all be it on a much smaller scale, (she is about as tall as one of the original Libby’s sandals is long!) Our Airbnb host didn’t know she existed despite being a local! We had a delicious meal in one of the many restaurants in one of the several town squares.
The next day we crossed the border into the Basque country in north-west Spain. We were visiting Bilbao to marvel at the architectural wonder that is the Guggenheim Bilbao Museum and marvel we did! Any way you look at it, the building is an amazing architectural and engineering achievement. Essentially a steel framework covered with titanium sheets, the organic shapes are mesmerising from every angle. The titanium panels shift colour according to the changing light they reflect. Inside, the strange flowing contours form a towering atrium with loads of natural light through several glass walls. It is unlike anything I have ever seen.
The architecture is unmistakably Frank Gehry who enjoys disrupting the very notion of how a building should look. It is bold and beautiful and hard to turn your back on. Outside there are several major contemporary art works including a Jeff Koons’s ‘Puppy’ (a 12 metre tall living plant sculpture of a dog – we had one in Sydney a few years back) and Louise Bourgeois’s ‘Maman’ a 9 metre tall bronze spider. Inside we were lucky to chance upon a temporary Chagall exhibition which included the sublime ‘Birthday’ which I have always loved and was very excited to see. Plus the amazing work by Lisbon artist Joana Vasconcelos which included a huge “chandelier” made of tampons, an enormous pair of high-heel shoes made from shiny saucepans and their lids, a giant masquerade mask made of ornate wall mirrors plus the vast ‘Egeria’ installation that hangs in the atrium.
During our stay in Bilbao we took the metro out of town to The Vizcaya Transporter Bridge. 164 metres long, it takes cars and pedestrians (including us) across an inlet of the Bay of Biscay on a hanging gondola, to link the towns of Portugalete and Las Arenas. It is possible to take the lift 45 metres up and walk across the flimsy looking walkway back across the bay but unfortunately it was not open when we were there (phew! she adds).
Back in town we ascended Mount Artxanda by way of the funicular railway to see the unique perspective of Bilbao from above which was stunning. Bilbao is in Basque Country. The local language is not Spanish but Catalan. The local cuisine is Pintxos which is the Basque take on Spanish tapas. Honestly THE BEST WAY TO EAT (in my opinion). The bars each have displays of many tasty snack size morsels. You grab a plate and help yourself or ask the bartender to serve them up. Two of those, and two of those and two of those and a glass of this and a glass of that. Chow down, groan and lip-smack with delight move to the next bar and repeat. And move on and repeat. And move on and repeat. You get the picture. English is not widely spoken (and we don’t speak Catalan, Spanish, Portuguese, French or Italian – hopeless really) so you take a bit of a guess sometimes but everything we tasted was awesomely delicious. The wine was excellent and the G&T I imbibed was epic – no measure required just a very generous glug glug from the gin bottle into a glass the size of a fishbowl. Yum. The Neoclassical columned Plaza Nueva was lovely and a pintxos sampler’s delight as we imbibed and consumed with tourists and locals alike. The evenings were long and warm and the whole experience was marvellous. Dinner might take a few hours but that’s all part of the fun.
We said farewell to Bilbao and headed across country into the Pyrenees which rose in the distance in formidable rocky peaks. We took a side trip down a beautiful valley to an almost deserted ski resort where we found a great pub for some local beer and comestibles. Luckily there was a local visiting who also spoke English who was able to translate the menu for us. When it came to ‘gulas’ however, he struggled. We went with it anyway because, you know, when in Catalonia and all that. Turns out it is actually, no word of a lie, fake baby eels. The real baby eels are worth about €1000/kilo so the fake ones are a popular alternative. They tasted exactly like you would expect a fake baby eel to taste. While we ate our fake baby eels and other tasty dishes, a rain storm hit as only they can in mountainous areas. The temperature plummeted from 28° to 14° in a matter of minutes. Back on the road after a soggy dash to our car and an hour’s drive away the car temperature gauge was reading 39°. Crazy weather!
Our next destination was Andorra, the tiny independent principality situated high in the Pyrenees. Landlocked, the 6th smallest nation in Europe, with a population of about 77,000 people whose national language is again Catalan. An estimated 10.2 million tourists visit the tiny country each year. It has both the highest cigarette consumption and the longest life expectancy in the world (now there is a curious set of stats!) It is very strange to see huge billboards on the roads advertising cigarettes. Not surprisingly 80% of Andorra’s GDP comes from tourism, (mostly skiers in the winter), 19% from financial sector activity and 1% other. It is a parliamentary co-principality with, get this, the President of France (currently Emmanuel Macron) and the Catholic Bishop of Urgell in Catalonia, Spain, (currently Joan Enric Vives I Sicília) as the joint reigning Princes which is peculiar as it means they have an elected reigning monarch in monsieur Macron. It is a spectacular place consisting primarily of rugged mountains cut through by three narrow valleys that roughly form a ‘Y’ shape.
We decided to do an easy walk in the Incles Valley along the valley floor to a lake and back. Comfortable rambling and a trail suitable for families i.e. children. Well that is what I intended however we got our map and a recommendation from a guide at the head of the valley and set off on another trail that was billed as ‘medium difficulty’ and ‘very nice’. Well it most certainly was ‘very nice’ but they have a different understanding to this middle-aged, pudgy lady of the term ‘medium difficulty’. Look, to be fair the gradient at the beginning was ridiculously steep and unbeknownst to me we reached an elevation of about 2,700 metres so sucking O2 into my lungs was proving to be quite the challenge mainly because it was a bit scarce (the O2 that is). Once I slowed down, took more breaks and eventually relinquished my bag full of heavy camera lenses to the man who didn’t look like he was going to succumb to an altitude-sickness collapse with every second step, things improved markedly. (I’ve mentioned before how much I love my husband. I’ll just mention it again here. I love my husband. He is a good man). The trail was wild with wild flowers. It was an alpine garden and simply stunning with the steep rising mountains, the ‘V’-shaped valleys and the brilliant aqua blue/green mountain lake near the summit surrounded on three sides by steep snow-spotted rocky walls. Worth every lung-busting moment.
Our Andorran accommodation was a timber-lined ski lodge in one of the long valleys and we ate at the local restaurant while reruns of the Running of the Bulls in Pamplona played on a telly in the corner complete with slow-motion analysis of the worst injuries. We’d stopped at a truck stop on our trip through Spain and watched the horror on several screens there too while we devoured a bocadillo and a café. While in Spain we saw several fellows sporting the “I nearly got gored by a bull” kerchiefs the ‘runners’ wear to boast of their involvement. I just think they are stark raving looney and the poor bulls don’t look all that happy. Can’t say I shed any tears for the dudes being trampled by frightened, angry bovines.
Andorra is a duty free nation so grog (and presumably tobacco products) are cheap. It was a handy time to have a car and no pesky carry-on luggage restrictions to worry about ;)
We saw quite a few cable cars and chairlifts taking people, and in one case, bicycles strapped onto the outside of a cable car, up the mountains. I assume the hardy cycle crowd were going to ride those bikes down those steep, rocky mountains.
Our departure from Andorra bordered on terrifying. Three-quarters of the way through a three kilometre tunnel a vague mist appeared. By the time we exited the tunnel it was the thickest fog I have ever seen. A switch backed, two way road down the side of a mountain ensconced in a thick white cloud with maybe half a metre visibility. Did we survive this perilous journey? Tune in to Part 2 of Join-the-Dots Adventure and find out.