Part 1: The Journey South
by Steve Wells
We left Reading at 5:00 o'clock in the morning of a Saturday in May; far earlier than my sleepy brain is normally prepared to acknowledge.
At that time the sun was a deep red, low on the horizon. It looked larger than it normally does, and much duller, There would have been interesting pictures to be taken with a telephoto lens, silhouetting trees against the sun. We, however, wanted to get to Dover. As we turned from the M4 onto the M25, the sun was getting higher in the sky and turning yellow. No-one, not even my still sleepy brain, could doubt that morning had arrived.
At that time in the morning there is very little traffic on the roads and, as is usual with us, we had allowed too much tine. He arrived at Dover early - very early. He were booked on the 9:00 o'clock ferry, but arrived in time for the 7:30 sailing. P&0 were happy to transfer us to the earlier boat so we arrived in Calais far earlier than expected. On the boat there seemed to be a lot of those tourists who, while wanting to go to France, did not want entirely to leave England. The cafeteria was packed with Englishmen and Englishwomen frantically enjoying their last English breakfast for a week or more. For my own part, the attractions of a cooked English breakfast were far outweighed by the length of the queue.
North East France is flat agricultural land. You can travel for miles seeing nothing more than a few farmhouses. The emptiness of the land explains why the French were able to build a railway to the Channel Tunnel without objections, while on the English side the route is not yet fixed, let alone the work completed. Now, in theory it is possible to travel south missing Paris entirely. In practice there is some form of attraction which forces all cars onto the Paris ring road, known as the Peripherique. This passes close to the city centre; much closer than the M25 does to London. It does share one feature with the M25; there is a lot of traffic with frequent traffic jams, To add to the confusion, the exits are not clearly marked. Everything is fine until a few hundred yards before the junction... and then nothing to show where the junction actually is!
Of course we got lost! It was just as well we had arrived in France an hour and a half earlier than planned. As you travel south of Paris the countryside begins to change. Hills appear, often with isolated villages crowning them. There is a clear boundary round these villages; not like Britain where villages seem to fade away with larger and larger gaps between houses until maybe a field appears or, more likely the next village arrives. These French villages turn their backs on the outside world. The medieval fortified walls are still in evidence and all that is important is hidden by them as we drive past.
Our second campsite is within sight of the Alps. But our route continues south along the Rhone valley. The Rhone has been a major north-south trading route for centuries. When Julius Caesar travelled north to Britain, he did so along the Rhone. As we travel south, closer to the Mediterranean, the fields are filled with red poppies. I had always associated poppies with the battle fields of northern France, but here were poppies in far greater abundance than I have ever seen further north.
We did, however, find a more recent link with the north, As we left the campsite we found notices nailed to trees which read "TGV Non!". The TGV (pronounced Tay Jay Vay) is the French high speed train, Here in the south someone's opinion of the progress of railways was clearly the same as those of the people of Kent faced with the link to the Channel Tunnel.
Our first "main" site, where we were to spend four nights, was not distant so, at last, we could "potter" rather than use the Autoroutes. Soon we found the first of many ways in France to waste a lot of film! We found a Bird park. There were five of us in the party; only one remaining aloof from photography. The three youngest were clearly the main devotees. Alan (nearly 8) was using a point and shoot Hanimex, The latter day equivalent of the old Box Brownie, Despite the fact that the birds were often small in the frame, he managed to finish a film before we were half way round. Mike (9) was using his own Practica LTL with a 35-70 zoom! An excellent camera, if there ever was one, on which to learn about the basics of shutters and apertures. Finally, Mary (11) was sporting a Canon FTb with 70-150 zoom. Despite having bought what I thought was a rather excessive quantity of film, we weren't too many days into the holiday before I had to buy more.
The Ardeche is a tributary of the Rhone, Over thousands of years it has cut its way deep through the limestone plateau. The road is perched on the edge of what is often a sheer drop of hundreds of feet to the river. Below, canoeists paddle their way more that thirty miles along the gorge. Photographically the main problem is one of scale. It is difficult to photograph something as large as this without the picture looking disappointing. One option is to abandon convention. The theory says that what you want is a wide angle lens in order to get everything in, The alternative is to use a long focus lens and look for details. The canoes help, They are brightly coloured and, can provide that touch of scale needed to make the picture. If you must use a wide angle lens, use it held vertically and make sure you get some foreground detail into the bottom of the frame.
So, we arrived in Provence. In the next article I want to look at Roman Provence; the bridges and amphitheatre,., and the roof tiles.
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