Resident Australian Jane de Teliga drives (not very well) around the South of France with her daughter – but finds her reward at the Chateau d’Esparron.
Running away to live in France this year (following a lifelong dream to live in Paris) was so scary that I had to ease into it by pretending I was on holiday. And where does everybody in Paris go (the city is so strangely closed during August) but the South.
Before I had even become a Parisienne (does anyone ever become one or are you only born to it?) I headed down to the South. Not to the glamorous Cote d’Azur. I had no desire, nor the tan and definitely not the bank balance to be hanging around Saint Tropez with dodgy squillionaires in big boats.
Instead I went to a rocky mountaintop in the Cevennes in the province of Languedoc Rousillon to a tiny village where my sister, her husband and two boys hide out in their ruin for months during the summer. And to ease into French life I took my youngest daughter Madeleine, 23, an ideal travelling companion, as she is a delightful and very funny human being. (This is an unbiased mother’s opinion). Also she speaks French. (Pragmatic mother’s decision). This is a major step up from my pigeon French which mines the remnants of schoolgirl instruction, and is overlaid with years of tourist terms and a good dash of Italian when words fail me.
We caught the very fast train (TGV), which takes so much less time than driving, from Paris to Nimes. After about three-and-a-half hours of very comfortable rocketing through the countryside you find yourself in the heart of one of the best preserved Roman towns in France. (You must book as it is all assigned seating. Economy is fine but go easy on the luggage because it is a struggle to find space for it.)
In Nimes you find an absolute jewel of a Roman temple, right in the main square, directly opposite a very snappy contemporary building designed by British architect Sir Norman Foster that houses the city’s art museum. Nimes also boats one of the most intact Roman amphitheatres that has been in constant use for centuries. One hot summer night, we all went to see Bjork sing her crazy magical songs in the arched amphitheatre where gladiators once fought to the death. A bit of fashion trivia too – Nimes is also the town where label Cacharel originated.
The Cevennes hasn’t changed much since Robert Louis Stevenson that intrepid traveller and writer rode through on donkey in the 19th century. Mountains as far as the eye can see are covered with forests and dotted with little villages. The resistance fighters were known to hide out in the mountains of the Cevennes too. Les Cevennes is also the place for walking and the French have hundreds of randonnees (trails) marked throughout the region. The randonnee are marked by tiny slashes of bright paint across tree trunks in a clever and simple system that guides you to take the right turning on the right path.
Proper walkers /randonneurs wear sturdy hiking boots and multi-pocketed camping gear in sludgy colours. They carry long high tech folding walking sticks and slung around their necks they have big maps in plastic sleeves, which makes them look like giant kindergarten kids on a kindy excursion.
My sister Sarah, when walking, wears her unique boho artist’s attire of white 19th century cotton petticoats, striped jackets or pants and ancient Prada Mary-Janes with a beaten-up sunhat. She looks like something from a Monet painting as she nimbly picks her way along dappled paths, with me panting behind her in a more pedestrian combo of velour tracksuit pants, long sleeved shirt, baseball cap and pumas. (And I’m the fashion writer!)
After the healthy life of the mountains, Madeleine and I picked up a rental car in Nimes (right inside the station) and drove off into the hills of Provence, the neighbouring province. French rental cars seemed only to come in manual, though, so not only was I driving on the wrong side of the road – but also driving a manual.
For a week I bunny-hopped, stalled or stopped dead (as some local driver heartstoppingly hurtled straight towards me) and constantly veered alarmingly to the wrong side of the road. – all of which sorely tested my daughter’s normal good humour. She took to shrieking “MUM you’re driving on the wrong side of the road!” or “You’re too close to my kerb!”
Gradually we worked out a code whereby she squeaked a little sound to warn me of my driving transgressions. And so I drove in my alarming fashion and she issued bat-like squeaks, across the hills of Provence.
First stop for a lunch break (or fright break) for both of us was the idyllic town of St-Remy-de-Provence (every well heeled Mosman housewife’s dream… Native Sydney dwellers know this as the suburb where French provincial style reigns supreme). Saint Remy was just as you imagine a Provencal village to be – picturesque and very hot with avenues of plane trees and charming shops full of Provencal textiles and embroidered lavender sachets.
Our destination in the Alpes of Haute Provence was a chateau near the Gorges du Verdon (a sort of French Grand Canyon) I had once read about in Travel and Leisure. It sounded completely unmodern and unpretentious (in a chateau kind of a way) and just what I was looking for. Getting closer though I was starting to get worried after driving through a spa town (Greoux-les-Bains) full of tourist buses and then through deforested hills that look like they had recently been napalmed. So turning over the final hill into the little town of Esparron de Verdon beside a clear unnaturally blue lake was something of a relief.
It was love at first sight at the Chateau d’Esparron. A monolithic oblong of a building punctuated by rows of 18th century windows and shutters, attached to a medieval tower fluttering a flag. A water trough and running fountain sat beside the huge wrought iron gates. Entering through grand doors, huge polished flagstones wound up to our room, which looked out over huge plane trees onto a hot field with a grazing white horse. Just a few rooms are rented out in, the warmer months, by a branch of the de Castellane family, who have lived in the Chateau since the 13th century.
In the baronial breakfast room sunflowers, real rather than fake, sit in a vase on a table by the window that faces an enormous fireplace. Lunches and dinners have to be taken in the village of Esparron de Verdon in a few little cafes and restaurants filled with French holiday makers.
There we rented a wonderfully silent little electric boat and took it out into the middle of the lake and dove into the crystal clear water freezing but fabulous. (As an Australian however you never escape that niggling and totally irrational fear of a shark coming up to tear you limb from limb.) Apparently the vast lake is manmade rather than natural, the result of damming, which may account for the eerie colour.
In the chateaux we climbed to the top of the tower and looked out over the village or lay in the hammock and read or did nothing but watch the chickens peck their desultory way around the garden. If this is your idea of a holiday then go to website www.esparron.com or www.provenceweb.fr and look up Chateau d’Esparron. (Reluctant as I am to pass on this information).
France is a story to be continued…I’ll write more for Holiday Goddess next time.
