July 29, 2013
Officially Beautiful roads: St-Laurent-des-Hommes - Breville
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I DON'T KNOW if you use Michelin maps. But if you do, you'll know some roads are edged in green. They are Officially Beautiful. This doesn't seem any official qualification, and indeed how could it be? But still less is it consistent. We've been on green-edged roads that are stunning, we've been on green-edged roads which were unremarkable, and we've been on gorgeous roads that nobody at Michelin had noticed.
It's as though jolly old Bibendum sits with a quota of green ink for each map and uses what's left on any road that takes his fancy.
Today we left St-Laurent-des-Hommes before most of its Bibendum-like campers were up. The valley was kind to us in those critical first minutes. A white pigeon flew across our path with a twig in its beak, just as Noah must have seen it long ago. We were to be Officially at Peace.
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But we weren't. Well, OK, we were hardly distressed and nothing happened that we didn't inflict on ourselves. We just took the wrong road. We turned off one road too soon because we saw one of those little wooden signs for hikers that pointed that way. It didn't occur to us that others later would send walkers across fields, cutting off a corner, where we would have to continue on the road and go kilometres out of our way.
And why? Because Michelin has another rating system. It gives stars to villages and towns, just as it does to restaurants, according to how far Bibendum reckons you should go out of your way to go there. Aubeterre had two stars and it wasn't far off my pencilled line and so we headed there. Except that having gone wrong once, we took every inviting and often green-edged road that went anywhere. We hadn't just abandoned our sense of direction; we had abandoned our senses.
And now you're going to ask if it was worth it. And the answer is that, yes, riding through woods and over undemanding hills was fun, albeit time-consuming. But Aubeterre was a mixed blessing. It was good that it was there, because we were hungry and we were beginning to wonder if it existed at all. But it had become so swollen-headed about its Michelin stars that it had cleaned itself of character. It was so scrubbed, renovated and dedicated to tourists that whatever had been there before had become Disney-bland.
The village is at the top of a short but steep hill. We left our bikes padlocked outside a grocery, exchanged a few words with cyclists also determined they weren't going to ride up, and set off past the houses of people for whom this was home and not a tourist trap.
We sit on the single public bench and Steph makes sandwiches. There are restaurants on both sides with outdoor tables. Both have English waitresses, one of whom has to take an order, then wait for a gap in the traffic to get to the kitchen on the other side of the road.
Behind us I hear people staring into the window of an estate agent's. A voice is saying, in English: "Is that the sort of property you were looking for or would something else suit you better?" I look round. The potential buyers are a man in cream shorts and a Panama hat and a woman in a floral dress and sandals.
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I expect, to be honest, that they and everyone else looked at us with equal curiosity and even contempt. And it doesn't pay to be superior because we, too, after all, were tourists. And the tourists, we noted, at least kept the post office open with their postcards. In summer, anyway. In winter the post office hibernates, which seemed sad: tourists got their stamps but those who lived there had to go elsewhere once the tourists had gone home.
It wasn't all bad. I don't want you to think that. It was more that everything sparkled as though it had been not just renovated but rebuilt. The château was as delightfully old and world-weary as it ought to be but the folk who lived there weren't keen on the mob outside either, for they had strung ropes across the roadway and hung a PRIVATE notice to repel visitors.
Once whoever lived there must have owned all the village. The estate agent's, the restaurants and the knick-knack shops would all have been dark and unhygienic homes for those who worked at or for the château. His lordship would have had a splendid lunch of ox, or a pig with an apple in its mouth, but what must life have been like for the underlings?
Maybe living off tourists rather than depending on the aristocracy isn't such a bad trade after all.
The countryside after Aubeterre became increasingly deserted. For a while we were on a road driven almost entirely by British cars, as though a rush had started to get to that estate agent before she sold out. There were three foreign cars for every French, which I know because I passed the time on that safe if unpleasant road by counting them.
We begin seeing vineyards and Steph says they will be used for brandy. The town of Cognac is just ahead of us.
We ride and we ride. It is hot and the kilometres pass without any sensation of progress. Michelin never did show all the campgrounds in an area but now it shows none. We decide to camp wild and look for water.
"On holiday here?" we ask four men playing pétanque behind the garden gate of one of two houses down an unmade road. We go there because we hear their voices.
They look up and smile, more than you'd expect.
"No," one says. "We're working."
They all laugh, four mildly, overweight men in shorts, their bare chests slightly sweaty.
"That's the boss," one of them says. He points to the shortest man in the group. "It's his house and he doesn't want to work any more."
More laughter.
We ride on, freewheel down a slope and over a small bridge with stone walls. Just beyond it, an unsurfaced track runs to the right. I walk down it to explore, leaving the bikes with Steph by the roadside. Soon I return like Noah's pigeon but without a twig in my mouth. I bring the good news: there's an idyllic spot in a clearing at the end of the path. And there we put up our tent and wash and eat and then sleep the peaceful sleep that comes only from camping where you're not supposed to camp.
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