That four course lunch I spoke about earlier, we were on to something there. In fact, we have grown to like them. This is how we usually eat now: before setting off, breakfast with (preferably crispy fresh) croissants, raisin buns, chocolate buns, and coffee. Lunch: one of those set lunches that every little restaurant offers. Always good value. Often a buffet of first courses, then a main course that may be a local favourite (such as tête de veau sauce gribiche: meaty bits from a calf’s head, simmered in stock and served with a cold emulsion sauce with gherkins) or a national classic such as roast pork or Bask chicken, then cheese and/or desert. Of course wine to help flush all of this down, and coffee. Bread is brought to the table as a matter of course, as is a carafe of water – unlike in Dutch restaurants, where you ask for it, and they bring you a tiny bottle that is added to the bill for a perfectly unreasonable price. Dinner, finally: French bread, cheese, ham; enough to fill the stomach, simple but excellent provided you buy good ingredients, no preparation necessary, and it’s light enough to fall asleep as soon as the meal is finished.
Lunch in Lacanau, where, surprisingly, life goes on still during the off-season
We spent some time on the Atlantic coast, in villages and cities that had one thing in common: they were eerily empty. Of course, it’s November. Who wants to spend time in a beach resort in November? Royan is a city of 18000 inhabitants that has an infrastructure suitable for a city of 100.000, and on really (really!) busy days can have up to 400.000 people staying within its city limits. Imagine. The result: when schools begin in September and people who have holiday homes here begin a mass exodus to the cities they make a living in, whole stretches of beach property lie deserted, shutters closed until the following summer. Shops close. Restaurants close. Hotels close.
Royan, November
But Royan at least has a basic year-round population that keeps the lights on. Further down the coast, there are towns like Hourtins-Plage and Carcans-Plage, beach towns spawned by older villages slightly further inland that turn into ghost towns once summer is over. Not even a door that creaks in the wind disturbs the silence, everything is solidly sealed shut. An occasional dude parks his converted ambulance by the seaside and casually prepares his surfboard for the waves that continue to be formed by the November winds. This, for him, must be the good season.
We turn back inland and ride through the forest of Les Landes, the biggest forest of Western Europe, almost entirely man-made. Few people live here, not because of the seasons, but there is not much to live for. The occasional small village is populated by government employees: mayors, postal workers, school teachers, park officials.
People on stilts in the Landes, by Jean Louis Gintrac, Musée des Beaux Arts, Bordeaux. Found via Wikimedia Commons.
Les Landes used to be a desolate country. The sandy soil did not yield consistent crops, the combination of the nearby ocean, humid weather and higher terrain all around created an unhealthy climate, and poverty was widespread. Shepherds would typically walk around on stilts to keep their feet warm and dry, stay above poisonous prickly bushes and rapidly walk around their flocks.
In the nineteenth century, most of this desolate country was turned into pine forest by massive efforts to plant an already endemic species of pine. The flocks of sheep disappeared, and jobs were created by the turpentine industry, which relied on the resin of these pine trees. Eventually, this too was abandoned when the manual labor that was involved in this process became too costly to compete with foreign countries where labor was still cheap. Today, it is lumber that keeps Les Landes going, and we saw stack after stack of tree trunks, waiting to be shipped to a sawmill or paper plant.
The language of this region is a dialect of the Occitan language, and once again, I am struck by the diversity of this country. Occitan only very remotely resembles French, but is related to Catalan and other Iberic languages. It was a major literary language until maybe a century ago, when it was gradually surpassed by the French that was taught in schools and used by the government. But it is still spoken, and very much defines the identity of southern French peoples. Bask, of course, although geographically near, is an entirely different story. Fascinating stuff.
We are in Dax. Part Gascogne, part French Bask Country, but in any case not far from Spain and the mountains that form the border. We have seen the silhouette of the Pyrenees on the horizon, jagged peaks, forbidding country. We will soon cross the mountains. I hope.
