return to paris

samedi 30 juillet

Cats, silent as stolen kisses, slink home before light cracks the night sky. A gorgeous day is about to break over the Pyrénées, but not yet. And not for me.

No light shines inside or outside Gare Luchon, but two couples with cases huddle in the dark under the station verandah when The Iceman drops me off. The bike pod and my backpack hold up a wall. A deserted bus squats on the forecourt.

A droog approaches from the left, the town: shaved head, black denims, mohawk slicked back in a lank ponytail. He opens the rear bus-hatch, peers at the mechanicals inside, pokes something. He’s our driver, this bus the train.

At 6:22 it begins its mazy journey on empty roads and village streets narrow as right-wing opinions. Hamlets sleep on after the rigours of the week.

An hour later the seven passengers who embark in Luchon—a mother and teenage son with a kitten in a basket, an age-spotted couple, a young woman, a solid woman who rode in on an old bike, breathless, just in time, and me—disembark at Gare Montréjeau.

Another hour later we disembark into the horded subway and sprawling waiting-hall at Gare Matabiau in Toulouse. Ninety minutes to kill before my slow train to Paris Austerlitz. I buy a baguette stuffed with Brie and a packet of cheap butter biscuits for my seven hours on the non-TGV.

The train grande vitesse rockets through the countryside, but the 10:22 TEOZ service is the TPV—the train petite vitesse. It burrows through the endless tunnels of the Massif Central at worm rather than warp speed. The French have a Freudian thing for tunnels.

French trains are comfortable, practical, and punctual—when they don’t run over and kill people en route. But the right to travel comes at a cost: last-minute platform information; subways like the gory alleys of Pamplona; a crushing human funnel at each carriage door.

Non-TGV French trains are scaled rather than stepped into: it’s a claustrophobic uphill tug-of-war, backwards, lugging awkwardnesses, like a bike pod. (The verb to lug: hence, lugging, lugged, luggage.)

There are trains with living-room-sized luggage compartments. There are trains with luggage racks, baggage bays, and elasticised nets for small items. There are trains with special accommodation for bikes. And there are trains in which a bike pod might as well be a giraffe.

Seating comes in every conceivable configuration: pairs in line, pairs facing, and raised and lowered seats. Most have tables for food, books, computers or maps, and individual bins for wrappers, cans, and personal effluvia. Hooks and handles are thoughtfully located, the toilets clean and functional at departure.

I have a cheap last-minute first-class couchette, number 91, that turns out to be a velour-covered mattress. It has no backrest, no cushion and no table, so you can lie down or you can lie down, which is fine if you require seven hours sleep in the middle of the day.

The compartment is comprised of four couchettes, two up—95 and 96, and two down—91 and 92. The whereabouts of 93 and 94 are a mystery. They are not in the adjoining compartment.

The pod occupies half a skinny corridor. The conductor points to the space under my couchette. My French is not up to this: I shrug and say in English that I tried. He shrugs. I study the mechanics of the couchette and try again, folding it to 60 degrees while juggling the pod and ladder to the upper couchettes. In it goes.

The trip is long and tedious. My companions, a 20 year-old boy with a smartphone and ear-buds and a girl upstairs reading a book titled The men who don’t like the women, if my translation stands up, utter not one word. They sleep while I wake and wake while I sleep.

At Gare Austerlitz a little boy slides on a dog turd in the tiled corridor setting off a stink still clinging to me in the fresh air of the taxi rank. Fifteen minutes later I’m in the Hotel Diana. The fresh young Jewish concierge hands me the key to the room I left 22 days ago, room 32. It feels like home.

port de balès

vendredi 29 juillet

My final ride in France, this trip, maybe forever. The ascent of the Port de Balès reminds me—as if I didn’t need it—that big boys shouldn’t climb hills. They can, slowly, but mountains are for skinny young men. My legs are knackered after weeks of clambering up incredibly steep slopes.

The Iceman and I saunter down the main road from Luchon, first along the valley of le Pique, the valley of la Garonne. At Salanche-Siridan we hang a left up the valley of the Ourse to Mauléon-Barousse. We have 19.7kms to climb: the sign says so.

I have no computer today—it’s on my bed, left behind in my haste to be on the road. I am naked without it: no gradients (maybe a good thing), no distance to the top (ditto), no temperature changes as we hit the clouds (ditto, ditto).

The beauty of this climb eases its agony. From Mauléon-Barousse we sidle up the Ferrère valley, idyllic scenery and a glorious river burbling right beside the bitumen. The gradient is benign enough for me to enjoy every second.

After six point five kilometres of three and four percent, the road crosses the river, the valley narrows to gorge, and the real stuff begins, the river further and further below in deep shade. No village, no house, no wayside shelter relieves the solitude and the final bleakness of this climb that tops out at 1755 metres.

The perilous descent south into the Oueil valley is goat-track narrow with the tightest chicanes. The final 5.88kms to the top was only sealed in 2005 so le Tour could come over here for the first time. Only way down in the lower reaches dare I release the brakes and flash through the corners.

 And then it’s done. I open the iron gate at Le Poujastou, our chambres d’hôtes, and lean the Cervélo against a wooden garden table. I remove my wrap-arounds with prescription inserts, my blood-red helmet, a dripping bandana, and unpeel two sticky mitts.

After trudging up four flights and stripping off my Alpe d’Huez jersey, my best bib-nicks and new socks on honour of the occasion, I lie down for a few minutes. My next task is to wheel the pod from the garage, unfurl my multi-tool’s Allen keys, and disassemble my machine.

There it lies, in pieces in a black box—wheels, seat-post, handlebars, derailleur—at strange angles, incapable, Alpe d’Huez, the Croix de Fer, the Glandon, the Télégraphe, the Galibier, the Izoard, the Portillon, Superbagnères, and the Balès behind it. Before them, the Tourmalet, the Peyresourde, the Aspin, the Agnes and the Aubisque.

There are a million mountains to climb: they’re everywhere, every day. In France only one remains for me: the Ventoux. It stands alone in a place I have not been.

superbangers

After lunch—salad Italienne for Mick and a crepe for me—and a siesta—thirty minutes with one eye shut, we tog up and assault Superbagnères. It’s not a mountain so much as a ski-field. But at 1800 metres it’s a major ascent.

No easy climbs in France, and Superbangers as I christen it, is no exception. It’s warm and I ride sans casquette, wrapping my helmet straps round the handlebars. In no time sweat drips of the peak of my cap, streams down the lenses of my glasses, and makes a shimmering lake of the face of my computer.

It’s an 18-kilometre ascent, the last three into cloud so heavy I can see only five metres ahead. Cows with bells clanging fade into tiers above the road. The bike wants to keel over; it seems as tired of this heavy haulage as I am. It’s twelve degrees at the summit.

Unfortunately the cloud lowers itself into the valley of the Lys and the descent is as cool as the climb was the opposite. The final ten kays snakes back into Luchon: it’s high-speed exhilaration all the way.

[73.81kms @ 18.8kph. Montage 1757m, Max alt 1800m, max climb 16%]

stairway to heaven

jeudi 28 juillet

The Iceman takes the car to do research for the 2012 trip so I pedal to Gare Luchon, then ride to Gouaux de Luchon via Bagnères de Luchon, Montauban de Luchon and Juzet de Luchon. Cier de Luchon is over the road but I don’t go there.

Gouaux de Luchon village perches on the side of the mountain up a hammy-twanging five-kilometre climb. The usual thoughts assail me: how do people live up here? They can’t all be farmers: what do they do for a living? A small, but new, car sits in a nook outside every house: how do they make an income?

The village at first seems dead. I sit at the well. The road outside is littered with free range barkers' eggs. Fat ones. An old woman emerges from a doorway and totters down the chemin with a plastic bag of garbage in her hand. The shutters on a doorway fold back, the door opens and a sleepy young bloke steps out as though half past ten on a bright sunny day is simply too much for him.

A woman is chatting garrulously to a neighbour over a stone wall. Two blokes are working in the cimitière in the churchyard. Bright flowers clutter every grave. A walled garden is full of beans, tomotoes, herbs and other legumes. A sage older man strolls down the road, decides all is as it should be at the village boundary, then strolls back.

As I wheel the bike along a narrow lane the garrulous woman’s whippet rushes the fence to warn me off. She coos at it, bonjours me. In the yard of every house is a perfectly stacked woodpile ready for the snowy months to come.

I can’t help but think that life here might be slow and sleepy, but it’s good.

the portillon

mercredi 27 juillet

Every river—la Garonne, le Salat, le Pique—gushes furiously. But finally after three days the rain gives up its relentless descent. But first …

Monday we travel all day, by car and train and car again. It’s a nightmare. The train kills two people, the hire car is sequestered in an impenetrable dungeon at Gare Matabiau, and Toulouse is one grand bouchon—a monster traffic jam. It rains, and keeps right on raining into Tuesday.

We abandon the bikes, wander the streets of St Girons, encounter the slowest postal worker in France, motor over the Col de Portet d’Aspet, dash from dripping shop canopy to dripping shop canopy in Aspet, and return to the gîte.

We sneak out from Figarol in the late afternoon between downpours for a 31km jaunt along the Garonne valley, up through Aspet, and back to the gîte, black clouds circling like vultures. We’re almost back when the sky opens and we take refuge in a bus shelter.

We quit Figarol early this morning and drive across to Luchon, poking our noses up various roads out of various towns to occupy the time. Rain falls. Luchon’s main street teems with piétons (pedestrians). At 12:30 on the dot every rack of cheap clothing, and postcards is hauled in, doors are bolted and it’s a ghost town.

Le Poujastou, our chambres d’hôtes in the adjacent village of Juzet de Luchon only accepts its guests from four till seven. Ringing the gate-bell at two proves pointless. So at two thirty The Iceman and I extract our bikes from the hire car on the roadside near Luchon.

On the climb to the Col du Portillon we figure the rain is over, we have time, so we go over the top and just keep going into Espagne. The nine-kilometre climb features a nasty ramp at 16 per cent and plenty of hard slog.

We wind down a broken road into Spain to the touristy town of Bossost. Traffic is not enjoyable along the valley of la Garona (the Garonne). In a blink we’re back in France and cruise into St Béat. A fast 20km ever-so-slightly uphill drag with a tailwind sees us back in Luchon.

[61.15kms @ 22.5kph. Montage 920m, Max alt 1320m, max climb 16%]

a tragedy

lundi 25 juillet

Our plodding Rhône-Alpes regional service from Grenoble connects with the TGV at Valence, which rockets through the French countryside toward Toulouse.

Earlier. A throng of apprehensive travellers gathers under the information board in Gare Grenoble; un accident personel means trains to Lyon are delayed. The platform for our service to Valence appears late and we scoot our bike pods to Quai F with little time to spare. Our train departs a minute or two late.

Gazing unfixedly out the window I wonder what constitutes un accident personel and whether the obvious translation is accurate. We are about to find out. About fifteen minutes before we are due in Toulouse our high-speed juggernaut judders to an unnatural halt.

“Well, that’s that,” I venture. It’s a flip remark but its underpinning premonition is uncanny. Passengers look at each other for any sign that someone knows more then they do about our unexpected stop.

My father has been on a train that struck and killed a schoolboy on Melbourne’s outskirts. A friend of a friend threw herself under a train at her local station in the throes of a deep depression. Watching someone leap out of bushes into the path of a train approaching Croydon Station traumatised a student I taught.

Only yesterday driving to Briancon, The Viking, a train driver for 30 years, regales us with train driving stories. He says matter-of-factly that trains strike and run over people; the implication is that if you drive the things, you’d better get used to it.

The announcement comes over the PA: there has been un accident personel. We will be delayed. Men in orange jackets walk the length of the train. People peer our the upper level windows though its more likely if someone was hit that the lower level is a better vantage point.

A helicopter woop-woops overhead then puts down in a field beside the train. SNCF staff come into the carriage to inform us of a two-hour delay. No one knows exactly what has happened. Two people hit has currency. A gendarme wanders along the adjacent tracks.

Passengers mingle and chat; the toilet does good service. The bar re-opens as the afternoon drags on. Straight grey rain descends and a thousand droplets trickle down my window. Two hours later it’s over and the train rolls silently to speed and rockets through the soggy French countryside.

Things that should happen don’t when I travel with The Iceman. And things that shouldn’t happen do.

a night on the town

We pile into the VW and the Black Maria and snake up the D526 to Le Riviere d’Allemond to a bar-restaurant of cuious renown. Mine host reputedly dresses in dresses and the entertainment is duelling accordions.

Les Favets looks pretty. The village itself nestles into a crook at the top of the D526 before it plunges ominously into the Defile de Maupas. We also are about to plunge, deep into the Valley of Gastronomic Despond.

Sixteen of us present ourselves at table, a long narrow plastic-covered plank, otherwise bare in all respects—no cutlery, flowers, glasses, water, or condiments. Ominous indeed. Our moustachioed host, sports a floral dress and an appalling black rug, his wife a garish pink mat, slightly askew.

A girl with bunny ears graces the bar. So too do fifteen thirsty cyclists after a big day in the saddle. Throats are wetted, stomachs rumble.

Wig slipping, our host deposits three desultory platters of cold meats before us, followed by salads, strange globs of shredded carrot, something that could be diced beets, some savagely sliced cucumbers, and hacked up tomatoes. Yesterday’s bread gets a second chance.

As a vegetarian I am presented with ten cigarellos of seafood extender on a small plate. They’re as slippery as butchers’ cocks and about as appealing. The meat and salad platters are emptied rapidly but not enthusiastically.

The duelling accordians start up a racket, the loudspeaker blocking the toilet door at the end of our table drowning out all social intercourse. We sit glumly, a bunch of famished Olivers, hoping for more, while the local villagers take to the boards for some slow dancing.

When it becomes obvious that dinner is over, our party either drowns its sorrows at the bar or slinks outside so the murmurs of discontent don’t spoil the music for the locals.

A bottle of Evian costs four times a round of reds for those not prostrate on the road outside hoping that passing motorists might take pity and deliver them elsewhere, while fifty metres up the hill a spigot belches gallons of free fresh spring water into a horse-trough. We should be so lucky.

Even with half of us outdoors, the place is chockers. As the English say: “There’s nowt as strange as folk.”

samedi 17 juillet

First morning. We gather unbidden in the dining room between six and seven. Laptops are all over the big table. Dave is on Facebook, Hans retreats to the stairwell seeking a better connection.

Mick briefs us over breakfast and issues ‘call signs’. He is The Iceman, Kath is Doc, Peter is Hoags, Frank is Robocop. There’s Virgil, Hulk, Rambo, Dutch, Wingnut, Percy, Crash, Scarface, Mrs Tourette’s, Ink, and The Pirate. I am Legs.

At 9:30 we roll out of Le Verney in two groups. The slow group heads for Bourg d’Oisins, the main town and the gateway to Alpe d’Huez. Our ride today is a steady 12km climb at six per cent to the Col d’Ornon.

A section of the road is tacked onto the side of the mountain; at certain angles you can see the struts holding it onto the cliff-face. Flip over the low concrete barrier on a fast descent and there’s no return.

Vertical walls of rock thousands of metres high line every narrow valley. Surely no road can find its way out of such places, but they do, and we ride them, swarming ant-lines of cyclisti from everywhere on the planet. They ride to the col and back, or over the pass into the next impossible-to-exit valley.

On my slow steady way to the col I say bonjour to Germans, Niederlander, and a woman from Grenoble with strong brown legs and a twelve year-old son she is shepherding up the climb. The fast boys come past—Frank (Robocop), Stuart (Virgil), and Adrian (Rambo)—having set out 20 minutes after the rest of us.

We top out at 1371 metres. Coming rides will lift us at to the Col de la Croix de Fer (2067m), Alpe h’Huez (1860), and the Galibier (2645). Bourg d’Oisins sits in the valley at 730 metres, our chalet at Le Verney is at 825.

After lunch in Bourg d’Oisins the fast boys motor up to Villard-Reculas and the village of Huez. I set off solo to the ski staion at Oz-en-Oisins, seven and a half kilometres in double figures—gradient—and single figures—speed.

Second  morning. From tentative hellos in a bar at Grenoble station we form friendships and alliances. On the road we sort into compatible bunches, and by our second breakfast we banter raucously and reach across each other for rolls, pains chocolade, and plates of ham and salami.

Sunday’s forecast rain arrives straight after breakfast. Cycling gear is peeled off expectant bodies, the cloud thickens over the lake, rain spills out of gutters and the thunder is brontosaurian. Only Hans, HansSolo, mounts a cycle. The Shot Properties Group hop in a car and head for the Alpe.

The rest of us peer into the mist, read tour mags, and watch German Eurosports.

[ 73.01kms @ 21.2kph. Montage 1495m, Max alt 1371m, max climb 12%]

gypsy day

The train whistles towards Grenoble and the Rhone-Alpes. The day begins at seven in the squalid Hotel Moderne in the Avenue Charras in Clermont. I eat a peach and two stale chunks of sourdough bread for breakfast.


I’m killing time in my sour squat, stretching and doing push-ups while batteries charge—camera, phone, Macbook—and the minutes crawl by like anaesthetised ants, thousands of them.

I’m sure Clermont has its good side but I get to see none of it. Scum, bums and gutters full of butts is it for this gypsy boy. At 8:10 I can stand the place no longer. I lug the bike pod down four flights of sticky stairs and wobble it to the station.

Bon chance! The clean comfortable train for Lyon already stands at platform H and platform H is directly in front of me. No stairs to negotiate. It departs to the second and arrives in time in Lyon, giving me time to buy a proper breakfast—sandwich, pain des raisins, and Orangina.

I’m living on sandwiches. This one goes under the pseudonym Classic Atlantique because it allegedly contains tuna, but somewhere in the Atlantic is as close as a fish ever got to my sandwich.

Train 17625 from Lyon to Grenoble departs on time. This train has a piper, a coffee-coloured youth with in a white singlet with Sideshow-Bob hair. He is swaying in the bike compartment, next to the pod, amusing himself with a bamboo flute while outside the Alpes hove into hazy view.

At Voiron a man walks up the platform with his ginger tabby in a pink plastic cat-cage. The other day I saw a bloke scamper across a Paris intersection with his cat in a wicker basket. Meanwhile the Alpes loom—instead of looking at them as a horizon, now I must look up to see their bald rocky summits.

Holy shit. I have to ride a flimsy piece of two-wheeled carbon fibre up these suckers. Sacre bleu!

travel travail

My good woman says that sometimes when travelling you must be the gypsy. When things go wrong, sit under a tree and watch the world roll on by, or blow with the wind. Today is my gypsy day.

Madame drives me to the station just before five. She and Daniel and I have just had a cuppa together and a wonderful cake she has made in my honour. My French has deserted me today, but we converse well enough for forty minutes till it is time for me to load the bike pod and backpack into her car.

At the station I thank her profusely for her hospitality; she thanks me for staying in her chambre d’hôtes. Real affection flows between us. She is a lovely woman, beautiful face, a kind and pleasant nature. I tell her Vera calls me her good man and she says “D’accord. You are a gentleman!”

As the train whooshes us through the Massif Central to Clermont I reflect that the first part of my journey, mon voyage, is over. Tomorrow I join 16 people from a bike shop in Melbourne’s eastern suburbs. We’ll speak Orstralian in broad accents and Langeac will recede into memory.

And suddenly, having left my private oasis in Langeac, the world turns and I feel its sullen weight upon me. Once more I push the bike pod before me. Clermont station has no ramps so I must lug the bastard up and down stairs.

Three young people are at the guichet when I enter to sort out a ticket problem. The automatic ticket machine will not issue my ticket for Grenoble because the credit card I paid with is no more, cancelled because of fraud. I did not, of course, commit the fraud, but I am about to pay for it.

“I cannot give you a ticket,” he tells me. “You will have to buy a new one.” The SNCF print-out I hand him has my reference number and surname on it. I suggest he need only look it up on his computer.

“And I can tell you the 16-digit number of the cancelled credit card, if that helps.” He consults the beautiful, delicate, slender young woman working with him. They agree that it is not possible. I must buy a new ticket. I will get a refund for the ticket I cannot use—minus 10 per cent.

The new ticket will cost more than the old ticket. Their hands are firmly round my remaining testicle and squeezing. I surrender; I have no choice.

My carefully chosen hotel and already booked room are 100 metres from the station in dirty, seedy Avenue Charras. A sign on the hotel door tells me it is closed—not the door, the whole hotel. And not for ten minutes till someone returns from having a fag, but closed indefinitely for ‘work’.

No way am I lugging the pod around this town that is treating me badly looking for another hotel. Across the Avenue Charras is the entrance to the Hotel Moderne. It looks rough as guts. Reception is up a dingy staircase on the first floor. A ravaged dowager emerges and slides open a hatch.

It’s €25 for a room without bath or shower. No way would I take a bath or shower in this place so I save sixpence and take a room without. The key is brass and big enough to knock the door down with, but I use the lock.

I expect the worst. No surprises, unless it’s the basin and toilet at the far end of the room. Like in a prison cell. But is it a toilet? It’s definitely not a bidet, or a bath. It had both hot and cold taps, and a plug. Perhaps it’s basin for midgets.

I throw my pack on the floor and go back down and haul the pod up four flights of stairs then step out immediately to get out of the place and to hunt up some food. I risk leaving my pack and the pod but dare not leave any money, the Macbook or my passport in the room.

I walk the length of Avenue Charras but greasy spoons are the only eateries on offer and sinister-looking dudes in tight sweaty tee-shirts with fags dangling from the corners of their down-turned gobs populate each dive.

The better part of town is only better because the gangsters up there have fat tattooed molls with them and the grease is higher octane. Eventually I retreat to the station foyer were a bright young thing sells me a stale sandwich, a muffin and an Orangina at inflated prices. I open my wallet and let her take whatever she pleases.   

I’m typing this over the high basin because there’s a small fluorescent globe supplementing the seven and a half watt ceiling globe. I think I’ll lie on the bed under a couple of paper napkins rather than get in it.

The 8:58 for Lyon and Grenoble leaves in ten hours. Rock on!

Oh, by the way, I rode 76kms this morning through St-Georges, St-Margueride, and Fix-St-Geneys. France has too many fucking saints if you ask me. But you didn’t, did you?

The 15% über-grunt up to the chateau ruins in Allègre is well worth the major effort involved.

french women: les belles femmes

Are they sexy? Chic? Slim? Exotic? Erotic?

Are they haughty bitches who think they’re god’s gift to mankind?

Yes. And no. But mostly yes. They are all this, and then some. They are a force to be reckoned with. They bully their men.

As a casual (oh, all right, highly engaged) observer of all women, I can only offer a superficial and generalised opinion of French women.

Everything is relative: what yardstick should apply? To compare French girls with the heifers lolling about in Bendigo’s Hargreaves Street mall is a disservice to everyone concerned.

I have not been to Italy, Japan, Sweden or anywhere else. Should this stop me offering my superficial, generalised, subjective take on French women? Don’t be silly.

I observe the other half of my species with unceasing rapture wherever she is on Earth. The belles of north Queensland, for example, despite the heat and humidity, are far less liklely to display any décolletage than women south of the thirtieth meridian.

Are French women sexy? Probably no more nor less than any women anywhere. It’s the language—la langue—the tongue. And the moment a Frenchwoman opens her mouth those silky phrases like the warm, moist velvet of a wet cunt make you want to do exactly what you’d expect.

The disembodied female voice of a train guide over the loudspeaker pronouncing town names like Chapeauroux, Alleyras and Monistrol, leaves me tumescent for hours after disembarkation. (She could be 70 with a goitre.)

Are they chic? You betcha. It’s not that a Frenchwoman dresses differently, although she does; it’s that she carries herself with a certain elegance. It’s not about fashion, but savoir-faire—a knowingness of the impression she is making.

Is she slim? I don’t know. French women, like Western women, come in all shapes and sizes. There is a type, though. She is slender rather than slim, an impression created by her lack of breasts, a grand irony given that breasts so often attract men’s attention first.

My theory here goes back to French farmers. French women have natural breasts not artificially pumped up by the growth hormones fed to farm animals in Australia and America where bosoms of increasingly pneumatic dimensions flourish.

Are French women exotic—unusual, strange, mysterious, exceptional, out of the ordinary? Not as a rule, not the white Gallic Frenchwoman anyway. But France is populated more and more by women from France’s former northern and central African colonies. Dusky mulatto Afro-French women drive me to distraction. I can neither look nor look away.  A quiver bolts through my being.

I step into the corridor of the train from Clermont to Langeac to check on my bicycle. And there she is, leaning on the window frame peering into the passing countryside. Her luscious bum points upwards, the black sheath of dress clings all over her like I want to. Her breasts are everywhere; her legs are polished teak and extend all the way from her high heels to her glorious arse and beyond.  Come-fuck-me oozes from every pore.

Nowhere but France have I seen this woman, and I have seen her several times. She is exotic, chic and sexy. More than that: she is high-voltage eroticism, her sex worn with savoir-faire, not hidden within.

God’s gift to mankind, to man, to this man? Mais, oui!

mercredi 13 juillet

Last night on France 3, Le Météo, the French Bureau of Meteorology, informs me that rain will sweep across the Haute-Loire all morning. Some sun might interrupt the precipitation during the afternoon. It’s an accurate, but unfortunate call, for cyclists planning a big day out.

Rain wakes me several times during an unsettled night of strange dreaming. I eat le petit déjeuner at seven. Madame prepares crépes in honour of my big ride, the 110km route of La Pierre Chany: south to Saugues and Esplantas on the D585; north-east through Croisances and Alleyras to Bains on the D34; then north-west via St-Jean-de-Nay and Vissac to Langeac mostly on the D590.

We both know I might just as well eat breakfast at 3 pm today. Heavy showers drench the morning. Daniel, Madame’s partner, but I suspect not the father of her three adult children, waddles out and retreats. On the road there is no retreat, so I bide my time.

The sky lightens, gives hope of something better, then darkens again and rain resumes. I study the map, drink tea, and consider my fate. Can I ride La Pierre Chany 110 tomorrow and be back in time to dismantle the Cervélo and be on the 5:09 train to Clermont?

All morning I write: about the French language, French women. Having exhausted those words, I write down French preposotions and pronouns, the keys that unlock my ability to communicate here.

In the afternoon the rain intensifies and nothing relieves the sound of it on the canopy over my door. My consolation for not being on the road should be to watch stage 12 of le Tour but the weather is killing the signal and both picture and sound disintegrate—pas ou mauvais signal.

No more words today, no pictures, no sound, no winners. Pleuvoir et plus de pleuvoir.

french fried

You have to love the French. And laugh at them. Mostly I think I love them. They get a lot right.

This morning I ride le train touristiques from Langeac to Langogne through the gorges of the Allier, et retour. It departs just after nine, and returns at 1:33. Unfortunate timing. I am hungry, but not much is open.

I hurry into the centre ville from la gare. The maison de la presse (newsagent) is fermé (closed). So is my little épicerie (grocery), and the 7-eleven equivalent, the 8-a-huit, or eight-to-eight (much more civilised).

This is bad for me; I can’t get what I want: a back-up bottle of Orangina and a spicy supplement for the Camembert I will bung in my baguette. Camembert is cheap enough to whack hefty slices into your sandwich, but it lacks a little oomph. Hence the need for chutney, or relish, or salsa, or Serbian pista.

[A sandwich isn’t a sandwich in France: a baguette on its own is a baguette, but when filled with ham or salad or chicken or Camembert, it’s a sandwich. Our sandwich—two slices of bread with filling—doesn’t exist here.

Orangina is my drink of choice in France, given that I’m teetotal, hate coffee, and am not to keen on water either. Orangina is not too gassy, not too sweet, isn’t the colour of a Dutch football jersey, and the pulp is left in the drink. It’s orange soft drink as it should be.]

Despite not getting my Orangina or a nice chutney, I love that the shops are shut. You have to admire the good sense of having a rest in the middle of the day. And the even better sense of having time to enjoy your déjeuner, your lunch.

We’re crazy in Australia: we eat on the run, we eat at our desks, we eat hastily and barge back into the office. The French indulge themselves: they prepare lunch; they savour lunch; they relax and let it settle gently in their stomachs.

I suspect if there’s a little time left before re-opening the shop a bit after two, they probably enjoy a quick fuck as well. Good on them. All hail!

french farmers

You have to love French farmers. Woe betide you if you don’t.

I suspect French farmers run France, rather like the hydro-electricity commission or Gunns ran Tasmania during different decades.

The male of the species is un agriculteur, the female une agricultrice.

The simple fact is that France has a lot of them, whereas only 26 farmers can be found on the land in Australia. The average Aussie ‘farmer’ is a mega-conglomerate lording it over an area the size of a European country. You need a mighty powerful telescope to see from one farmhouse to the next.

France is an endless patchwork of small farms and even smaller village holdings that produce the extraordinary variety of high quality gastronomic delicacies France is famous for. If you’re not un agriculteur in France, you’re being a fool to yourself and a burden to others.

The popular argument, d’accord, runs the other way. It purports that the French farmer is a burden to everyone (except himself) via the enormous subsidies his political clout enables him to wring from the European economy.

He launches his farm vehicles into traffic at will and marches on Paris armed with plenty of fertiliser if he’s a smidge less than completely gruntled.

The other popular theory—it’s been going around for decades—is that the French economy is cactus and well go belly-up at any moment. It never happens, never will.

Being a well-known economist, I’m prepared to offer my utterly simplistic view of all this agri-business. All hail the scowling, irascible French farmer, I say.

Because farms are small and don’t rely on one crop or herd, they’re bomb-proof when commodity prices nose-dive. Because French farms produce fresh food for local people, local economies thrive even if the nation’s economy is on the blink, or the brink.

And all this local produce generates the 70 million gourmands who populate this verdant place, shut it down so they can lunch in peace, and get on with business only when they’re good and ready to.

Vive la France!

french letters

If you thought only the Chinese and other Asians translated English literally into unreadable Manglish, from risible warnings—“Do not iron with the clothes on”—to infuriatingly incomprehensible instructions for using a camera, think again. The French, who should know better, do it too.

The publicity brochure for the train ride I take today reads:

Le Train Touristique des Gorges de l’Allier: voyage sur la mythique ligne des Cevennes, au cœur de gorges sauvages et spectaculaires.

Perfectly good French, to be sure. A sensible translation might read:

The Gorges of the Allier Tourist Train: travel the legendary Cevennes line in the heart of wild spectacular gorges.

Instead we have this stitled literal account:

The Touristic Train of the Gorges of the Allier: voyage on the mythic line of the Cevennes in the heart of gorges wild and spectacular.

It gets it wrong right from the off: touristic is not an English word according to my library of English dictionaries.

The extended guide for travellers on the train gets no better. One village is described as “entirely restored, reconverted in a broke up hotel”.  The Allier is “a river of Canadian type, with plane zones followed by zones on stronger activity”. (What could be stronger than an A380 Airbus putting down in a precipitous gorge?)

There’s bad spelling—emmergency, allowes—and plenty of sentence fragments—no verbs, and sometimes no subjects.

Asians can probably be forgiven for their execrable English; after all, they live a million miles from its origin on the other side of the planet. The French, however, live next to the source; indeed, they are the source of some 65 per cent of English words.

A good translator could fix this shit in five minutes. Perhaps it’s just that mythic Gallic arrogance: they’d rather wave a fist at English than make a better fist of it. They’re farting in our general English direction.

lundi 11 juillet

I’m already sluggish when I roll north out of Langeac on the D590 across the two-arched bridge over the Allier. My previous two rides started west and south.

It’s three in the apres-midi; my thermometer says 32 degrees; the traffic volume is greater than on any other road ridden so far.

I can hear the tar, sticky in the heat, sucking at my tyres. I seem to be sinking into treacly ooze, shifting to lower and yet lower gears. Four clicks out the 590 heads east to Le Puy and the road surface of D114 to Chavaniac-Lafayette is fine. My legs begin to find some rhythm.

Chavaniac-Lafayette is shuttered against the heat for mid-afternoon siesta. I top up my bidon at the spigot in the town centre: most towns have fresh water from a pipe somewhere, if you look for it.

The rest of the ride is forgetable; the panoramas of previous days are absent as I stay closer to the valley of the Allier. There’s a pleasant descent to Lavoute-Chilhac, but the town seems less romantically ancient than it did the other day: not less ancient, but less romantic, full of canoeists and yellow polystyrene craft.

This day certainly has panoramas: I begin it by walking up the Chemin de Malsan to Volmadet, high avove Langeac. At the top I am treated to 360-degree views over vast hazy distances.

Every square metre of France has a name; every farm, every road, street, chemin (path) and goat-track is sign-posted. With a reasonable map, and a Michelin is more than reasonable, any reasonable man can land himself reasonably exactly on the spot he set out for.

The day is warm early and I’m sweating bullets at the top of Volmadet. And I continue sweating when I descend and walk into the centre ville. My little epicerie is closed today; there’s no knowing when any particular shop in France will be open or shut.

It’s time to check my travel money card at the retrait—the ATM. The first choice the screen offers is five languages. Imagine such a thing in multicultural Australia. I ask for €150 and the machine delivers, apologising if I’m not satisfied with the note denominations, two 50s, two 20s and a ten.

I buy two postcards and L’equipe at the maison de la presse (newsagent) and tomorrow’s ticket for the scenic train ride.

Voila.

[51.3kms @ 22.5 kph. Montage 607m, MxA 728m, max grade 7%]

cut-price flight

You cannot underestimate Jetstar: they under-perform in every way. This is a cut-price airline.

On the drive to the airport I tell my good woman how I loathe long-haul flights. She is confident a huge range of movies will entertain me via my personal seat-back screen.

In fact the aircraft boasts four overhead screens, the nearest to row 41 being six rows distant with on-screen information in Thai despite the white Anglo audience on board. Random episodes of old sitcoms grace the screen but I have no ear-phones.

I have purchased a special Apple plug so I can plug the Macbook into the special socket on long-haul planes and entertain myself by writing and reading Kindle books without concern for battery life. No such socket exists on this plane.

Row 41 backs onto the central toilet. Full but loosening bowels and bladders generate a procession to my door. Our entertainment is the jet-roar of turds being sucked into outer space and the endless banging of dunny doors.

Now that’s cut-price and no mistake.

anticipation and waiting

Months of anticipation shrink to weeks, days and finally last hours. The Cervélo is strapped into the bike pod, padded with stuff sacks of bike clothing, and the assembled paraphernalia in the spare room jigsawed into the 32 litre backpack.

My good woman puts a sandwich together while I shower then drives me to Tullamarine. Now the anticipation dissolves into waiting and apprehension; protracted pauses while uniformed officials protect their territories and their livelihoods.

The Jetstar check-in guy looks suspiciously at my reservation, phones someone, then checks me in. Having established his power over me, he ignores the fact that the bike box is 1.2 kgs over the specified weight.

The departure board in gate lounge 6 tells me I must wait an extra hour there because the plane is late coming in from Sydney. So be it; I have a sandwich made by my good woman, always a treat after the predictability of my own sangers.

The misery of nine hours in a cramped seat to Bangkok is leavened by new fears: my connection time has shrunk. Will I make the cut?

A petite Thai Air France employee rescues five of us, but she and the other four disappear while security force me to unpack my bag. In gate lounge 1A the small Thai gate-keeper is forcing a long line of us to sweat while he makes a big man of himself.

Five hundred potential passengers wait on the tarmac for the Air France airbus to be given clearance. And the waiting is complete with ticking off by the second nine hours and 35 miserable minutes stuck in a window seat next a squat Cambodian whose body oozes the stale smell of the heavy smoker.

Neither anticipation nor waiting lasts forever. After 29 pretty much sleepless hours I wheel the bike pod into the Hotel Diana in Rue St-Jacques and all that anticipation, waiting and apprehension blossoms into a grey Paris day.

back to basics

In 2002 I rode from Bourke to Bourke Street, over 1000kms in nine days. In 2003 it was Adelaide to Melbourne; same stats.

In 2004, five and six I endured three tough rides around Tasmania, up the east coast, across the central plateau, defying the weather on the west coast, and up Mount Wellington to round things off. Each time over 1000kms in nine days.

In 2007 I went to France and rode the Tourmalet and the d’Aubisque. In 2009 in was the Tourmalet, Peyresourde, Aspin, Agnes and Plateau de Beille.

I trained harder for the earlier rides than for the later ones. Form and fitness kicked in pretty rapidly once I got serious. Which leaves me wondering why I feel so crappy this time.

Yes, I just had a week’s respiratory infection and head cold. Yes, I didn’t keep up the k’s last year. Yes, I’m closing on 60 and maybe it’s just much harder to find form and fitness as the body ages … and, dare it be said, deteriorates.

Perhaps I am not paying enough attention to what’s required. Which is why The Lance Armstrong performance program is no longer on the good bike books shelf but on my bedside table instead.

Lance didn’t write this one; his coach Chris Carmichael is responsible and it’s an emetic  paean to The Boss—Lance does this and Lance does that—and a shameless promotion of the CTS (Carmichael Training System). But … it also has a powerful message for me: it’s back to basics, and in my case that’s “a decent aerobic base”.

The one time I did the training regime—seven weeks to the perfect ride—I bought a heart rate monitor and got into the zone: I worked hard at the cardio stuff before (or while) banging the hell out of my legs with lots of kilometre-based drudgery.

So-o-o-o-o-o … I am determined on a new course of action. Seven weeks with the HRM. This time I start as a Beginner, not an Intermediate. Even before reading the book I wonder about being on a bike in every Cycle class at the gym.

So this morning I’m at Cycle for 45 minutes, spinning and grinding my way up imaginary hills. It makes Pump straight after harder than usual.  

As soon as I get home I wash the old bike I took from behind someone’s shed years ago and set up as a training machine. I harness it to the Tacx trainer and pump up the tyres. I hunt down the HRM paraphernalia. Batteries needed. The HRM and me.    

one-legged king pigeon

Cycling is great for the legs. It’s not bad for the rest of the body—remember Oppy’s fabulously strong thumbs?—but it’s not likely to sculpt an eye-catching torso.

Although the arms are connected to the bike, they, and the back, and the abs, do bugger all. In fact, above the waist, only the brain does anything much. And so it should: it should be abuzz, assessing traffic, and solving all of life’s problems.

Someone asked Lance what he thinks about on long training rides. Pedalling, he replied. Indeed, the brain needs to focus on pedalling.

Anyway, for 18 months I’ve been visiting the gym. I’m not sculpting the upper body so much as firming it up. I do nothing there that I can’t do outside with a dog. I don’t get on a treadmill and watch television when I can walk the dog and look at trees.

I prefer the classes. I tried body balance—an hour of tai chi, Pilates and yoga—but my inflexible body isn’t even on the grid for exercises called Downward-facing Dog and One-legged King Pigeon. Zumba is all the rage but I’m too old for public sexy dance. The pacifist in me can’t deal with classes called Combat or Attack.

Pump is my thing—repetitive exercises using light weights on a barbell that build strength and endurance. Each set of muscles gets a five- to six-minute workout and Katie, Kirsten and Sim, my gym’s lovely instructors, keep me motivated. I would do anything for any of them … but they never ask.

The warm-up is gentle. Next is squats. My cycling legs aren’t sure what to make of the 80 to 100 squats involved. Should I ride before or after Pump, or not at all on gym days?

The tracks I concentrate on are chest, back, triceps and biceps. Lunges are the killer exercise for me, and for most men, Katie tells me, and women hate the biceps routine. I jump on a stationary bike during the shoulder track to honour the motorbike I wrote off—along with my left shoulder—on 3 February 1983. Abs and stretches end the session.

As one of my training aims is weight reduction, I climb onto the scales every Tuesday after pump. Last week I registered 93.8kgs and this morning my weight comes in at 92.2kgs. I don’t feel any difference on the bike, but this new figure is good.

The afternoon becomes evening becomes night becomes dawn and I ride 33kms around the northern fringe of town at 26.9kph. I wash bike clothes, reorganise the laundry, and arrive at work at 9:05.