Saintes Maries De La Mer was a nice jaunt. I set the satnav to avoid tolls and we traversed the countryside on a series of D roads, single lane roads of good quality with hard shoulders, and a speed limit of 80kms/hr. The roads were quiet at around 1pm on Easter Sunday and we were in a relaxed frame of existence as we enjoyed the Christian sun and cranked up the climate control. We passed through the heart of one or was it two sleepy towns. One lane roads and sidewalk cafes, and above all, beautiful sandstone buildings, those ubiquitous and sumptuously characteristic emblems of the people, place and climate. It was a trip for just that kind of idle musing. After we skirted around Arles, a name I knew from somewhere, we were on flat, low lying, short tree growing estuary driving. Heading towards the sea. At the numerous roundabouts, I exited to the sig that read, St Ma De La Mer or some similar abbreviation cos, as you can see, it’s a long name for a sign.
I’d seen a documentary about the Carmarque and I’d read an internet tourist article or two, but basically I knew nothing about where we were or where we were going. I remembered, I thought, white horses from the documentary, and the internet had talked of Flamingos, and I remembered too from the documentary bullfighting. Well, lo and behold over the course of that afternoon I was to find that all 3 of my half-remembered factoids about the Carmarque turned out fact. Bullseye! Something else I learned later was the rather odd at first glance name of the town is due to there being 3 Saint Marys to be celebrated. Les Saintes is the plural, Saints.
As the layers of land life between us and the sea became thinner, and the horizons widened and the blue sky bathed by the sun filled a greater chunk of my windscreen vision, I felt that little primordial tingle of getting close to the sea, the boundary. We came across lines of parked cars alongside horse stables housing the famed white steeds of the Camarque. They were not as white as they had seemed in the documentary but white they were. We drove into Saintes Maries De La Mer to find a seaside town heaving with visitors. Extensive car parks ringed the town. I was post-trip, when wrong way round I often do my most diligent research, to learn that the population of the town swells from a couple of thousand year round to half-a-million in peak tourist season. Now the insane number of car parks made sense, said I to myself. We drove around and found a spot. The free parking in most places is nice, and in contrast to Ireland. We walked along the waterfront with the beach to our right. The restaurants were heaving and the footpaths were throbbing. Day trippers, campervanners and dogs abounding. I’d read that further along to the left, beyond the busiest part of the beach, we would come to a beach area where dogs were allowed. The beach and the sand dunes and the ponds of inland water ran for a long distance, to a light house kilometres further on.
We traipsed to the dog welcoming part of the beach, looking for a less crowded spot suitable for ball flinging for hounds. There was a stump of a tree lying invitingly above the water line and that’s where we made camp. Giuseppe we keep on a leash joking that he has a restraining order on five continents. Gertie had free rein and played nice returning with the ball each time I flung it towards the water. The crowds there were looked less well to do than those where we are staying. The inverse relationship between weight and wealth was relatively apparent; though, by Irish standards, the number of fat people was small. I went for a brief swim, one of the few, and my first time in the Med since doing something similar the year before off the Lido near Venice. Wait until it gets warmer! It was my first time to observe the French, and the plain Joe Soaps at that, at play at the beach in their own country. It’s always been something that I struggled to imagine, due, I think, to the crap I absorbed as a youngster about French sophistication and the glorious Med influenced as I was by the communal shame of Ireland’s relative poverty vis-a-vis our European neighbours, a national shame heightened by the particular poverty of our family. What strikes me now that I am in France is how large the country is, a sensibility that is accentuated by my ignorance of the geography, its regions and towns, making France for me this big unknown in every direction. A disorientation accentuated further by our location north of the Med coast, a coast I see as to the east but here it is to the south, making our next domicile which lies south-west of here is closer to the Med that where we are now.
The Mistral wind has been blowing for the last couple of days. It is a cold north-westerly wind blowing from the Bay of Biscay in the Atlantic, across this narrowed expanse of waist land to the Med in the south-west of France and the north-west of Italy. It is caused by high pressure on the Atlantic side and low pressure on the Med, as air is displaced eastwards and funnelled southward down the Rhone valley, between the Massif Central and the Alps. It blows the cobwebs from the air and makes for superb seeing and exceptional star watching.The locals do not seem to like it, seemingly treating it like an inherited disability, a cross to be born. These localised climatic behaviours, products of geography, will when combined with climate change, result in extreme weather patterns that will be an omni present reality for inhabitants. Climate change, like all change, will manifest its own winners and losers.
Prix du Jour
Parking in Saintes Maries De La Mer Free on Easter Sunday