Escape to the Charante

The events and dramas of the past three weeks had left everyone feeling mildly traumatized and quite exhausted. We had turned Nicky’s relatively quiet rural life completely on its head with our endless need for phone calls or a ‘taxi service’, but she really came up trumps! Thanks to her insistence, Neels is now well again and keen to continue with the holiday after a short recuperative break.

So, having said our very inadequate ‘thank you’s, we finally left Aignan on Thursday of last week and made our way to Montguyon, where some friends from England have a house which they have kindly lent to us for a week or so. Before we left the area around Aignan, known as the Gers, I made sure to get a photograph of the wonderful sunflowers which are just now coming into flower. What a spectacular sight!

Montguyon is a smallish town due south of Angouleme and a little bit east and north of Bordeaux in the area known as the Charante. We spent a night here on the way south with Jenny, and it was then that this very kind offer was made, which at the time, we could not know we would appreciate so much. The house, which was fairly recently built, stands back a bit on its plot beside a quiet road, on a slight rise. From the front verandah, which is covered, one gets a lovely view over fields and trees and it is where we have had all our meals so far. Apart from the occasional car, the only sounds are birds calling and the barking of dogs some way off. It is very definitely just what the doctor would have ordered had he known about it!

On Friday, Pieter came down to spend the weekend with us. How thrilled we were to have one of the children with us. I know that Neels has felt the separation from the family keenly, and has really needed some sort of contact after his trials and tribulations, so he was probably even more thrilled to see Pieter than I was. The weekend’s activities were hardly of the order to make the jet-set drool, but we did manage a trip to Blaye and a visit to the ancient citadel there. Blaye is a little north of Bordeaux, but whereas Bordeaux is on the Garonne Estuary, Blaye is on the Dordogne Estuary and the two estuaries merge before joining the Atlantic Ocean. The site of the citadel was a mediaeval fort, but during the reign of Louis XIV, there were fears that Bordeaux would be attacked by the British and the architect Vauban was commissioned to design fortifications to protect the city. So he built a citadel on the old fort at Blaye; another fort on an island in the river, which he called Fort Paté; then another on the far bank of the River Dordogne which he called Fort Medoc. I haven’t yet been able to establish whether the English were even interested in attacking, but it certainly kept the stone-masons busy for quite some time!

On Saturday night, Pieter wanted to take us out to dinner, and although we would have happily settled for the local pizza parlour, he wanted something with a little more class, so after getting recommendations from our absentee hosts, we set off for the village of Chalais and for Chateau Chalais in particular. What a simply majestic place! The restaurant is inside the chateau, which one enters over an ancient but still-working draw-bridge. From the courtyard, where a drink can be enjoyed before the meal, one goes through into a relatively small room with arched windows and a low vaulted ceiling. There were eight tables the night that we were there (although two of them had been set to accommodate eight people) and the restaurant was full. As we were to discover, this is silver service at its very best. I have no idea how many people were slaving away in the kitchens out of sight, but in the dining area were only the owner and one waitress. They were obviously being rushed off their feet, but still remained pleasant and smiling, unobtrusively checking on their guests and making sure that plates were removed at the right time; glasses refilled and dropped table napkins whisked away after being replaced with clean ones. Small toasty nibbles were served before our starters arrived; palate-cleansing sorbet between the courses and cheese with fruit mince before the dessert. The food was delicious and beautifully served. In fact the overall effect was make each and every diner feel like a king or queen, and we haven’t had that in a long while.

All too soon the weekend was over and we had to put Pieter back on the train. Fortunately the TGV (the very fast French train) to Paris stops at a station not far away, but it was real wrench to have to say goodbye again so soon. However, we will see him again in a little over a month, so we won’t grieve too much.

A quiet week

The week started on a fairly upbeat note. The medication prescribed for Neels seemed to be having the desired effect and we were full of hope that the twice-daily injections would be the end of the story. However, when the District Nurse came to give the last injection she also took some blood which was sent off for analysis. The results were back the same afternoon and we got a phone call from the doctor saying that Neels should go to hospital immediately and that she was sending an ambulance/taxi to take him to Briancon, 30 kms away. When I asked how he would get back again, she assured me that the taxi would also return him safely.
The following day, after he had been x-rayed, ultra-sound scanned, poked, prodded and injected with a cocktail of medications, they said he could come home again, but unfortunately there was not an ambulance/taxi to bring him back, so could he please ask a friend to fetch him. This was a bit of a shock after the local doctor’s assurances, but all I could do was to go and ask someone to organize a regular taxi for us. Mr Barberoux Jnr wouldn’t hear of it and volunteered to take me through to Briancon himself, to fetch Neels. This family was amazingly kind, and their kindness had seemingly no limits.
There were more prescriptions to be filled, but this time, Neels felt fit enough to drive the short distance into town, although he waited in the car while I did some shopping. A strange aspect of prescribed medicines here, is that no dosage instructions are put onto the individual boxes. Instead, a copy of the prescription is returned to the patient. This seems just a little hit-or-miss to us, being used to a clear label which tells one to ‘Take two tablets with water after meals three times a day’. How many people, I wonder, take the wrong dosages because they don’t understand the doctor’s shorthand, or can’t read his writing. Ooh! Scary!
By now, although neither of us had seen anything much of what appeared to be a delightful little town, or the surroundings, we were both keen to get away. Neels was feeling stronger now and thought we should go straight across country back to Aignan and the security of having my cousin and her fluent French close at hand. So, on Saturday the 12th July, we set off. We had been told that Monday was a holiday, making this a long weekend, but somehow, stupidly, we failed to realize the significance of this. Of course, Monday was Bastille Day, France’s National Day and the biggest and most important holiday on the calendar. To celebrate this, it seemed that every French family had decided to be somewhere else and the roads were really busy. However, we chugged along at our 80 kms per hour quite steadily and the distance lessened at a reasonable rate. Although some people say that French drivers are terrible, we found them to be well-disciplined and courteous, with no evidence of the road rage which is so prevalent in South Africa.
Our aim was to break the back of the 700 odd kilometers that we intended to drive and with this in mind, we aimed for a tiny place called Homps, not far from Lezignan-Corbieres, on the banks of the Canal du Midi. When we pulled in there in the late afternoon, we both heaved a sigh of relief that the long drive had gone so smoothly. It had not been a leisurely sight-seeing drive, but along the way we had had some quite unusual views. The beautiful lake Serre-Poncon with it’s strange blue-green water; extraordinary rock formations near a place called Les Mees which looked just like a row of nuns walking along; the wild flowers which are still blooming well and in such abundance and then, further west, the fields of sunflowers more brilliantly yellow than the fields of rape which we had seen earlier in the holiday.
Finally we reached Aignan and a lovely campsite on the side of the hill at the edge of town, which is run by warm, friendly Dutch people. It is very peaceful and is a perfect place for Neels to recuperate.

Ancient rocks and modern stones

Having decided to confine ourselves to the pleasures of France, and not to visit Italy after all, we turned southwards from Bourg d’Oisans to a little place called Les Vigneaux just south of Briancon. This was quite a hard decision to make as we both wanted to see Italy, or at least part of it, but the problem was where to go and where not to go. Once on the road, it is very difficult to say ’So far and no further’, because the view from the top of the next hill is always beckoning. But the distances are great, and we are now starting to look at just how far it is to get back to our starting point. So far we have covered about 7000 kilometres which is a fair amount of countryside!

So there we were, on the way to Les Vigneaux. First, though we had to negotiate the mountain pass of Col du Lautaret. This rises up to 2058 metres above sea level and one is certainly aware of the thinness of the air when walking around there. Just to make us realise how weak and unfit we are, a group of cyclists appeared just as I was taking o photograph of the notice board giving the height of the pass!

Further along the way, we stopped at Briancon as we had read that the ‘Old Town’, dating from the time of Louis XIV, was pretty much still intact. And so it is, with it’s lovely tall, old-fashioned houses cosily leaning towards each other like children sharing secrets. A stream still runs down the centre of the very steep main street, but is a lot cleaner than it probably was in time gone by. The street is so steep, that there are notices posted at the entrance to the town advising against running. No doubt a tumble could end up as a crumpled heap at the bottom of the hill! But for all its age, the little town was not particularly picturesque, and we felt that possibly more could have been made of it. But perhaps we are being too critical. Possibly villages in the Middle Ages were drab, dark and dank and it is only the modern tourist who demands flower boxes bright with geraniums to liven the scene.

On leaving our campsite the following morning, we stopped in a tiny town called L’Argentieres, where silver was mined many centuries ago, to buy a tube of silicon sealer. We had discovered that our ‘grey water’ tank (the one that holds washing-up and hand-basin water) was leaking and needed to fix it. However ‘silicon sealer’ is not the sort of phrase one finds in a tourist phrase book, but, armed only with self-confidence we went into this tiny hardware shop. Well, tiny it may have been, but the amount of stock would have made any giant hardware chain-store proud. It was packed so tight one could hardly get to the shelves. There was already one person in the shop and with the two of us and the owner behind the counter, it was really full! The other person turned out to be a supplier’s representative and readily joined in the conversation, supplying odd words here and there when our French failed us and the owner’s English couldn’t keep up. It took about half an hour but when we left, having been first mistaken for English and then being welcomed with open arms because we are South African (you know – rugby, Mandela and ‘Le Cap’), not only did we have something which we think may work but we also had made some new friends.

Our next adventure was not of the pleasant variety and is certainly one which I wouldn’t want to repeat in a hurry. Neels suddenly developed agonising pain in his lower back and nothing that we had available was helping. By now we had realised that the campsite that we were now in had only French-speakers in it, including the management, except for one young fellow who was sometimes on duty in reception. Aware that we would have to summon a doctor, and fairly quickly too, I went to reception and was thankful to discover that the one English speaker was on duty. That’s not to say he is fluent, but between his English and my French, I managed to get the message across. However, when he asked what I thought the problem was, I was completely stumped but eventually came out with ‘un Pierre du rien’ (a rock of the kidney). He quickly translated that into more acceptable French and passed the message on. A doctor was soon on the scene, but seemed unable or unwilling to make up mind as to what the problem was, gave Neels an injection and left again, with the traditional doctor’s maxim of ‘If it isn’t better in three days call me again’. Well, it certainly wasn’t better and after a very disturbed night, I returned to reception to ask them to call the doctor again. Perhaps it was a good thing that his offices were closed and the campsite owner, who had now also got into the act, called her own doctor, bundled us into her car and rushed us into town. There a very pleasant and efficient lady doctor did a number of rapid tests and confirmed that it was, indeed, a ‘rock in the kidney’ and gave Neels another injection. This one, though had an almost instantaneous effect and within hours he was more comfortable. Meanwhile, the owner continued to go out of her way to help us. She later drove me back into town to fetch the medicines which had been prescribed; she phoned the District Nurse and arranged for her to come and give the rest of the course of injections over the next two days; and took me to the supermarket to get some much needed groceries, insisting that it was something she also needed to do, although I noticed that all she bought was some bread and a box of tissues! They have all been kindness itself and we are immensely grateful to them. Having a serious health problem is never fun but having it when you are almost unable to communicate is extremely stressful. They say though that every cloud has a silver lining and how right they are. I have a whole lot more words to add to my French vocabulary including the word for ‘kidney stone’!