Through pine and paths to Pyla
What do you eat at Christmas where you are? In France, it's oysters. That surprises Anglo-Saxons used to turkey and roast potatoes and mounds of green vegetables, doused in gravy and followed by dark, rich, custard-covered pudding so typical of Christmas that it's simply Christmas Pudding.
French meals are rarely heavy. In fact, for all they take a long time, they don't involve much at all. In quantity, that is. Quality is more important. And so for weeks before the end of the year you'll hear people discuss the quality of the winter's oysters.
Most of those oysters come from the Arcachon basin, my destination for the last day. It's a permanently shifting estuary, bent parallel to the sea, in which sand banks and small islands have been protected for oyster beds and wildlife. Rickety wooden huts stand on spiky poles in shallow waters, home for the traditional arts of oyster-breeding.
Across from the beds, on the mainland, is a huge sand dune, the largest in Europe. It reaches 500 metres inland from the beach and runs almost three kilometres north to south. People come
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from all over to pant their way up it. I'm assured it contains 60 million cubic metres of sand, although you'll understand I have never verified the point.
It is just inland from there that Steph has been playing golf with the rest of her coven. They are in a couple of chalets on a huge camp site that spreads between the beach and the main road north.
The coast is sandy all the way, planted with pines. I came into the edge of the forest just after Mimizan, a small town where I spotted three cyclists in vivid yellow jackets in the courtyard of a restaurant. I waved and one called "bonjaw" in an accent that could only be anglais. That isn't derogatory, by the way: just as a French accent in English sounds sexy, so an English accent sounds pretty good in French. If you're French, that is.
"We've got a gîte just up the road," they said in strong northern accents. "Last year we rode round the D-Day beaches. Next year we want to do the first world war battlefields, in May. But right now we're here to see our friend."
They waved at the restaurant.
"Jane's only just opened. It's so new that she hasn't got a licence to serve beer except with a meal," one said. I undertook to have both a meal and make an impression on the beer.
Jane was slim, tanned, deeply brown-eyed with near-black hair cut Cleopatra-style. In her late 30s, maybe, maybe more, but looking younger. She'd lived in France for eight years, she said. For much of that time she'd run a concession on the beach but it had nowhere to live. Not that that stopped her sleeping in the cellar. The restaurant was her first venture on a bigger scale. Her waitress had come with her and today the clients included her parents, freshly arrived in France to see her.
The English cyclists left with a wave and smiles, I sat and read the paper as I ate, then rode on beside the main road, my front wheel swishing through and over shallow heaps of pine needles. It was easy, nothing special, removed from the growing traffic of the road beside me. Because of that, when the path zigged across the road at Parentis, I zigged with it instead of zagging direct into the town.
I instantly wondered if it was the right choice. There is a habit among planners of bike paths to assume that everyone is local and knows where it leads. So there are no signs, no hints. This one snaked through pines, the trees hiding each hundred metres from the next, the bends disconnecting the mental compass. The birds sang and small animals rustled but where I was and where I was going, I had no idea.
At one moment the path sneaked beside the fence of one of the several small oil wells of France's western coast. Like the others, it produces three buckets a year. France has no energy resources worth mentioning, there being no gas, barely more oil than it takes to stain a handkerchief, and the mines having run out a decade back. Something like 80 per cent of the country's needs come from nuclear power. I was interested in the oil centre but even more interested in knowing if I was going the right way.
It was at that moment that fate sent me a cyclist. He came from Biscarosse, where I was heading, and he was riding there. And he knew the short cuts, the back roads and the paths. We were the same age, we discovered. He'd lived all his life in the area - "I'm not much of a man for leaving my home ground," he smiled - and had trained as a butcher before being taken into the chemical industry by a friend.
"My wife tried cycling," he lamented. "She liked it, too, when we were riding with the wind. She didn't know about the wind. Then we turned round to ride home and she hasn't ridden since." He shrugged as much as you can on
a bike and said she liked watching television, that she could be persuaded to go walking locally, but that her sloth - my word, not his - let him to get out on his bike. He liked riding alone, he said. Or, at any rate, he preferred not to ride with a club. "They're always so competitive, whether they mean to be or not. And you have to ride at everybody else's speed, whereas I'm happy rolling along at my own pace, fast sometimes, slow other times, just looking around me."
He led me into Biscarosse, I took the broad shoulder beside the busy road to Biscarosse-Plage rather than the separate bike route, which he warned me was in bad state, and from there with some difficulty I picked up the delightful bike path that runs through the forest towards Arcachon, the dune at Pyla, and the north.
There's not much to say about simple, uncomplicated pleasure. And that's what the path was, a genial roadway open only
to cyclists and walkers that moved with just a few snaking bends through rustling trees, the afternoon light reaching from the sea. I stopped for a moment, thinking myself alone. I so often do. Then along came one cyclist and a few moments another, followed by a third, each hidden from the other, each doubtless thinking like me that he was the only bikie there that afternoon. In its way, the voie verte was a little highway of its own.
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And that, with a stretching climb to finish the week, was the end of the road. I turned into the camp site - or, rather, a site of chalets, mobile homes and camper vans - and rode out of place between families struggling to
light barbecues, rearrange their aluminium camping furniture or open another bottle of beer. It was a contrast but I'm not going to be hypocritical: in a few minutes, after a shower, I wouldn't be doing that much different myself!
Had I learned more about my home ground? I think so. Nothing of Nobel depth, naturally, but it's hard to ride a bike without gaining just a little more experience of the world. If I'm pretentious, I say that's why I do it. The truth is more simple:
I just like riding a bike!
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