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.
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.
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.
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