Found an old travel journal - the pictures and text were created while on the road, then scanned, co
Found an old travel journal - the pictures and text were created while on the road, then scanned, colourised and transcribed when I got home.Friday 3rd August 2001Planned to cycle to Lascaux (25 km North East of Les Eyzies) but after 2 km of fraught and exhausting pedalling we discovered that the bike I had hired had 2 flat tyres, and that I hadn’t been supplied with the correct cycle-pump adapter. It took me 2 km to realise my bike was faulty as its been so long since I last used a bike. We returned to Les Eyzies - tout suite - and dumped the bikes in favour of hitch hiking……it took some time to get our first ride - a nice couple that took us half-way there, but spoke no english so conversation was sparse.The second ride was much more fun - with an ex-fireman working for one of the many canoe hire operations, driving an old banger of a Peugeot. He knew about as much english as I know french and we managed a reasonable level of dialogue between the two.We stood in line to purchase our tickets for the Lascaux-II cave painting tour, then wandered out of Montagnac town for 2 km to the site of the caves, found a midwife toad and a clutch of reptile eggs under a stone near there.The cave paintings were beautiful - and more, rather than less, fascinating for being a simulacrum of the actual caves (closed to the public to aid preservation.)We back-tracked to Montagnac and set forth on the longest, busiest, narrowest, hottest, dullest 5 km stretch of road I have ever encountered (or so it seemed) and eventually arrived at Le Thot - which contained the best of the museums of prehistory that we saw - it also had a rather less impressive (but still nice) animal park attached, we loitered there ‘til closing time (7pm) then, in a fit of bravado we decided that we could walk the 20 km back to Les Eyzies - easy!On leaving Le Thot we found ourselves once more on the GR36 and we followed this reassuringly well marked trackway’s meandering course along cart tracks and back roads until dusk, stopping occasionally to admire pine cones, watch tadpoles or despoil fruit trees planted too near the public thoroughfare.Dinner was remarkable not for the food itself, but for the location: we sat down to eat in a fortified village of caves halfway up a west-facing cliff with the dying embers of sunset overhead - only 10 km to Les Eyzies (and our tents) now.And so we walked on into a night filled with the various chirrups of crickets, grasshoppers and cicadas, lit by the occasional glow worm, finally reaching our tents and respite for our much abused feet some time after midnight. -- source link
#lascaux#journal#sumi-e#holiday