Mouscardes - a one bullring town!

A story of a couple of kiwi cyclists racing the etape de tour in France 2008.

We get to the Pyrenees mountains and after some seriously good map reading we find our ‘place to stay’ now this is a uniquely kiwi term, in fact the whole ‘staying’ situation is oddly kiwi, so loose and informal. No other country does the informal hospitality like us. We are staying with Jay, neither Andrew or I know Jay and he doesn’t know us. Jay is a friend of Glen’s, who is a friend of Nigel’s who is a friend of mine! We are hoping that he is a nice bloke, and I guess he is hoping we are nice blokes too!

It sort of always works out, when we kiwis travel the world we tend to look out for one another, besides when there is only 4 million of us it is not too onerous, like I said it is a kiwi thing, as kiwis we don’t do 7 degrees of separation, we’re lucky if we do 2 degrees! 

Jay has lived in France for the last 15 years, he is from Petone, I am from Wainuiomata, we probably drank at the same pub as young men, he came to France to play rugby I came to France to ride bikes.

Mouscardes is Jay’s village it is made up of 6 houses and a bullring! Now you have to admit that is cool, having your own bullring.

The satnav had long since given up but we find Jay’s ‘house’ eventually. Actually it isn’t Jay’s house it’s Manu’s (Emmanuel’s) and it isn’t a house it’s a bloody great mansion. The house is extraordinary, beautifully restored, we meet Jay, he is an ex-Petone rugby player who made his way to the UK, then France to play rugby, he is Manu’s flatmate. Manu is a farmer whose family have owned the farm and house for generations. Manu farms dairy and kiwifruit, he spent some time in New Zealand learning the kiwifruit trade. Manu’s girlfriend and her son as well as a huge pitbull dog complete the household.

So here we are in deepest rural France and we get down to a classic kiwi BBQ – half a 44-gallon drum is the actual BBQ - not 1 hour after arriving.

Andrew owns a company that makes the worlds best domestic coffee machines www.rocket-espresso.it so good coffee is his thing, Jay offers Andrew a ‘special’ coffee which he accepts, only to receive a large mug of the instant stuff, the look on Andrew’s face was priceless!

Stuff Reviewed: San Marco Magma Titanox 245

Beautiful seat, probably not for clydesdales
By Nigel Dalton


Most people seem to find a seat that fits their bum and stick with it for life. If there were seat tribes, I am a Selle Italia Flite Titanium tribal elder, having had one of the very first of these aerospace looking devices in New Zealand in the 1990s. So it was with trepidation that I mounted the San Marco Magma to my Cannondale. This could mean serious pain in the arse, despite its obvious beauty.

I had already tried the world's saddle du jour - the Fizik Arione. No luck - as much as I yearned to have this new projectile design on my bike, there was no denying the sit bones. Being 100kg probably was the fatal flaw - putting the 'flex' in wingflex like the designers never anticipated.

The beautiful white leather Magma saddle arrived by post with a note from the R+R Director Sportif saying 'that blue piece of shit on your bike must go - happy birthday!' I'd recently submitted a polite request to the Style Council at R+R for some fettling of the new Cannondale System 6, already lurid in Team Liquigas's phosphorescent green and black.

Delighted to join the ranks of europhiles with their white seats, it was quickly fitted. San Marco holds great reverence for me in the history of cycling. When Slim once sold me his red Guercuiotti it came with his trademark San Marco Rolls, an impossibly uncomfortable platform that only 50,000km of hard riding would break in properly. Rolls feature on 2 of my restored bikes - a Merckx and a Bianchi.

I noted the Magma to be quite a sophisticated piece of engineering - the '2-4-5' after the name refers to the width of the sit-bones and general scale of the seat. It goes up to 255, but in all my time I've not seen one of those actually for sale. And to my delight the flat platform was at least as good as the long-used Flites.

And so I was happy camper #1, until about 500km worth of Melburnian flat-land later there was the hugest cracking sound accompanied by a distinct sagging feeling, and assuming I'd managed to do the unthinkable (break a Campy Record carbon seat post) Glen and I ground to a halt in West Williamstown.

The incident wasn't without precedent - riding with Glen on one visit to Melbourne we'd been far up the Maribyrnong River when I'd injudiciously forgotten to lift off the saddle for a speed hump and snapped the brand new Giant hire bike's Taiwanese carbon post. Long ride home standing up, and some explaining to do to the good people at Bike Now.

You don't really appreciate how much your seat contributes to your riding until you have to do 20km home with no platform to support you. The Magma had busted right through the middle.

The Wellington LBS did the decent thing and sought a warranty replacement, which was duly despatched. Scuttlebut on the net suggests I'm not the only rider to suffer a Magma meltdown, and I'll be philosophical when it inevitably happens again. The replacement sadly was black, so has to go ... though, I do wonder what the R+R Style Council would say about some white lever hoods over black tape?

Review Score:

Function: 5+ (8 while it works, 0 when it doesn't)
Form: 10 (sexy, plus bonus points for not hanging with the crowds of Fizik Freds either)
Price: 3 North of $240 RRP is a shocking amount of money to pay for a saddle, but I may be being over-harsh here as you don't see anything much under $200 in the desirable classes of Fizik or Selle Italia these days.

The Gallic Shrug – the essence of France

A story of a couple of kiwi cyclists racing the etape de tour in France 2008.

It’s been 25 years since I last lived in France, back then I got to know and love the place and after 6 months I had mastered the most important French cultural lesson of all - the ‘Gallic shrug’. This can only be learnt properly if you are living in the country, as a tourist you can have a Gallic shrug experience such as – “…non monsieur, the hotel room you booked from New Zealand is no longer available (Gallic shrug), we have no other rooms (Gallic shrug), non there are no other rooms in the town (Gallic shrug), and I cannot help you further (Gallic shrug), please leave (Gallic shrug)…”

This experience is what France is famous for, but to deploy the shrug you have to live there. A couple of kiwis have explained it quite well in a video on Lonely Planet's travel site.

Once the shrug is learned, the situation changes completely, the shrugger knows that the shruggee will not be put off and so miraculously finds your room reservation. So I dusted off the shrug but the language was lost in my brain somewhere, this was somewhat of a concern for me as we drove into France, Andrew had taken care of the Italian language (after a fashion), it was now my turn to take care of the French language – remembering more than a word or two would help – I was hoping the language would magically pop back into my head but every last vowel and syllable had disappeared.

Driving across the south of France was spectacular for sure, bloody awful cities like Nice stuffed into narrow valleys between huge gnarly mountains.

We needed lunch and rather than stopping in one of the autoroute café’s we went for the real deal, lunch in a small French village. Les Baux was the smallest town we could find on the map, no-one was likely to speak English, Andrew was confident I could manage any language issues - it would be the real deal. We got off the autoroute and quickly found our small and peaceful Provencal village. It was peaceful alright, just the one café open, full of workmen and locals having their 3 hour lunch, perfect!

The café owner was big sweaty and hairy and the husband was much the same, I ordered lunch using my best sign language, my actual French language still non-existent. The food was great in the most basic French working class way, Jambon sandwich (ham roll) for me, steak and chips for Andrew. A glass of local red wine for effect.

An aged English speaking French biker and his 14 year old girlfriend were summoned to assist with our next food/wine ordering efforts, more food and more wine arrived - things could not get any better.

My friend Nigel works for Lonely Planet. We often talk about travel – what is travel really all about? Why travel at all nowadays? You can Google Street-view anywhere, find reviews on any venue in the world, YouTube a video of everything, so why go to the trouble and discomfort of actually traveling yourself?

In my view travel is less about visiting ruins or old castles (although that is still good) but it’s about having the chance to experience how your fellow man lives in a completely different country. That is the ‘real’ travel experience, you get to compare and contrast his life with your own.

That afternoon at the café in the small town of Les Baux, eating the simple food, talking to the local people, all done slowly in ‘local’ time, it was brilliant, it was one of my favourite travel experiences ever.