Jealousy antidote

People sometimes express envy of my wanderings. Not surprising, I mainly write about the good things. Here's a bad day. It includes:

Biking through what used to be malarial wetlands, transformed by the order of Napoleon III to boringly spooky pine plantations.

Finding the 'piste cyclable' (cyclable road) is a cracked pavement, littered with branches that break two of my spokes.

Knocking over the camp stove and tipping hot stew onto my sock. Without access to running water, this results in a burnt ankle.

So, for me, please sleep snug in your cosy little homes.

This is probably the....

Coolest. Bridge. Ever.




(Me and William tried to bike to Peche Merle to see more prehistoric cave wonders, but didn't make it. Instead, we stopped at Cahors with the featured Pont Valentre. It was built in the 14th Century and was never attacked. C'est normal. (thats not that suprising))

Traveller to settle.... Press Release

Ewan Kingston, 27, professional traveller, has recently decided to make the UK his home for a while. Speaking from a friends house in Cadillac, Southwest France, Ewan expressed both a weariness of travel and excitement at spending time in the isle where his extended family live.

"Including within Aotearoa, Ive been travelling for almost a year. Its time to let the soul be settled and with luck, recharge the bank account. I'll hopefully be working quite hard for a lot of my time in the UK to save up money, but I should be able to see a lot of the Rennie clan as well at some point"

Ewan said he was about to head north towards the English channel by bicycle, despite the approaching winter. "Ive had enough of searching for that endless summer."

Ewan also added that he would most like to work and live in Scotland, where his maternal Grandparents came from but would also be happy to be based anywhere if the right job was available, especially if family were close to hand. The areas he will be optimistically looking to work in will be research, library work, and perhaps communications and publishing. He is prepared for the fact he will probably do some hospitality or retail work at some point.

Asked about his experience of the grape harvest, Ewan said. "The work was boring, but the conditions were ok and the people were very friendly and helpful, some exceptionally so. It also turned out to be a great way to meet interesting people and learn French. At the end of the vendange, we threw the foreman into a trailer full of grapes."

ENDS

Vendange poems (drafts)

Vendange (grape harvest) number 1 - Landiras

Team of twenty
walking ranges of Merlot
secateurs - snip, snip
graps fall to les paniers
the porteur, straining in sud-ouest sun
grapes on his back,
loaded heavy as a beast


Dix-sept a la table pour dejenuer
Parlons francais, francais, francais
Lo espagnole et moi sommes silencieux

(seventeen at the table for lunch
they speak french, french, french
me and the spanish girl are silent)

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Vendange #2 - Sauterne

We are working for unknowns
pas nourri ni lodgè*

we harvest grapes with mould as grey as the mist°
that rises every morning

as a porteur climbs to empty his hotte
the ladder slides from under his legs
his chest bears the weight of the grapes
and presses against the steel edge of the trailer

Now he groans alone on the grass
we keep working.

*without food or lodging: the new convention for vendange work
°Sauterne wine made from grapes, harvested late with 'the noble rot' which is meant to concentrate the sugars. It is a very sweet wine.

Ancient

Seeing the prehistoric cave art was worth a hundred bike rides up the Dordogne River, it was even worth the risk of 'feeling like a man who has been a tourist too long'. This is where words fall short, and all the pictures I see of the cave painting totally fail to convey the wonder, mystery and the sheer power of these artworks. Artworks they definitely are, beautiful forms made with masterful techniques using the contours of the cave walls. One painting of a bison in Font de Gaume uses a sort of fractured perspective. Apparently when Picasso saw it he said, "I did not invent cubism, then"




At the time of the cave paintings, about 15 000 BCE, the population of 'France' was probably around 10 000 people.

Font de Gaume is interesting for another reason. People were wandering in and out of the cave for years last century before anyone realsied there were faded pictures on the walls. There is even graffiti on the backs of one of the 80-odd bison

More impressive though, than the the beautiful paintings is the feeling of real history. There is evidence that this area has been lived in by Homo erectus, the Neanderthals as well as the Cro Magnon. It was the Cro Magnon though, who, over a few millenia, decorated a dozen or so deep caves, some rock shelters and perhaps countless other places.

Meeting Petr the Czech with perfect English (Dundee accent) helps me understand a bit more context, as well as sharing a homely dinner in the rain at the Les Eysies campground. Petr has been "flint knapping" - making tools from stone - for years, and, like Ronald Wright, sees the shift from these hunter-gatherer cultures to those based on farming as a bit of a backward step. He also worries about the future of our fossil fuel-intensive civilisation. 'We should be turning oil into foodstuffs' he says, 'instead of burning it'.

I ration myself to a couple of caves, and spend the rest of my time biking around the limestone valleys, passing the locked archaeological sites, imagining this landscape: stripped bare of trees with glacial cold, and peopled twenty thousand generations ago.