Update covering Sat 22 to Fri 28 August 2009

A week at Belezy


Saturday 22 August 2009

There isn't much to write about today as we just relaxed at Belezy and enjoyed the sunshine. We confirmed our decision to stay here until next Saturday (29th) rather than leave on Monday (24th) as orginally planned. There was a cooling breeze, most helpful in the fierce heat. All roads and footpaths ascending Mont Ventoux have been closed because of fire risk - obviously any wind is much stronger on the mountain and a fire there would spread very quickly. Our relaxation included the predictable elements - swimming, blogging, reading, M's embroidery (now making good progress) and the usual picnic lunch. In the late afternoon we had drinks at the cafe-bar as Johan was playing piano medleys there; we told him he was going to be saddled with us for another week in the Belezy choir and he was clearly pleased we'd extended our stay! He promises an entirely different concert programme in this next week. M mentioned solo numbers (well, we're trying to increase the English content in the programme) and he said he'd welcome us doing anything we feel confident about!

Our very good friends who are spending some time at our house and had just arrived there phoned in the evening to say that all was well and to have a chat.


Sunday 23 August 2009

Our days here are becoming very similar - we are not at all bored by this stress-free life but we fear that blog readers may soon be, hence the shorter entries. There were three events of any note in our diary today: Sunday lunch at the Belezy restaurant on the shaded terrace - very good indeed, but this time we avoided puddings entirely; a mini-market staged by local producers on the site - we bought some lavender honey and a box of 15 fabulous peaches - probably the best we have ever tasted; finally we turned up at the weekly "welcome drink" - this happens every Sunday at 6pm and although we've been here for six days now, we had not arrived last Sunday so decided we were entitled! They do a good job at this session by introducing all the people who run or help with activities, or who teach various groups in sports, arts and crafts. It's mostly in French though occasionally they try to translate the more important things into English, and if anyone asked for anything to be explained in English we're sure they would do their very best. After you've listened to all of this you get a glass of Kir (or 2 if you're greedy like M).

Johan stood up to explain about the music at Belezy - the choir and the band. He pointed to us and said we had enjoyed the choir so much we had extended our stay to sing for a second week! Oh and he did say "and to enjoy the life at Belezy of course"! Over the Kirs, with Johan, solo numbers came up again and R volunteered two English folk songs (he's not sure which ones yet); M then suggested Rossini's Cat Duet for two sopranos - Johan has the music for this and thinks it's a great idea to do it, but of course he has to find another soprano to sing it with M which may or may not be possible.

In between all this, swimming, siestas and more drinks at the bar somehow worked their way into the day.


Monday 24 August 2009

The weekly street market at Bedoin is between 8am and - well, it depends who you talk to and which traders you mean - but let's just say around lunchtime. The first signs of packing up appear at about noon. Of course we know about Bedoin's Monday market already from the incident that dented our motorhome last Monday! There is a nice path through a wood and over a small hill to Bedoin from the campsite - it's about a mile:



We walked across after breakfast and stayed until about 12.15pm, enjoying the market very much and buying more than we intended, including some very tasty local cheese, a variety of herbs and spices, fruit, vegetables, lamb, pork, sardines and mackerel.

Views of Bedoin's Monday Market:



M also bought a clever little device for turning various vegetables such as potatoes and carrots into curly spirals; in the case of potatoes you can then fry the result and create curly spiral chips! The man demonstrating this ingenious little tool let M try it out before buying and it certainly works. We walked back over the hill and nothing of note happened for the rest of the day. Bedoin looks worth exploring further and we will do that before we leave next weekend:



R has chosen two songs he will offer to sing at Friday's concert - one very poetic and traditional called "Drink to me only with thine eyes" and the other more fun and very slightly naughty (though definitely not bawdy) called "The Foggy, Foggy Dew". He wants Johan to accompany the first of these and manged to download a free score from the web; the second he will sing unaccompanied. They are both mercifully short. As he's going to sing them in English he thinks they need short spoken introductions in French so there's at least a chance that French listeners will understand something. He spent the greater part of the afternoon learning the first song (he knows the second by heart already) and writing these intros - he is more worried about the latter than the songs!

Apart from that it was more swimming and a nice fish barbecue of the sardines and mackerel which made a change from meat! Nothing else to report!


Tuesday 25 August 2009

The first choir rehearsal of this week's sessions was at 10am. Sadly Johan is ill (some sort of 'flu we think as we are told he has a temperature of 40C!). The rehearsal was taken by a Dutch lady called Ankije who was very good and even included a warm-up; the piano was played by Karl's wife Anna (Karl is the conductor of the instrumental players - see our previous blog entry for last week in which we somehow got his name entirely wrong as "Colin"!). We started getting to grips with Mozart's "Ave Verum" and a jolly Viennese waltz-time number "Wien, du Stadt meiner traume" (Vienna, the town of my dreams). We also got the score for an Irish air but didn't get on to that. Because Johan wasn't there, M didn't get the music for the cat's duet, and if he stays out of action (as he may well, because what he has caught sounds nasty) our pieces probably won't happen anyway, as we had made the arrangement with him.

We actually decided to go out in the Smart today to take a look at Sault some 30Km East of here and a centre for distillation of oils and scents made from plants of the area, including lavender of course. Before this we relaxed on our pitch, reading and blog writing and had what is now our standard lunch of fruit and cheese. The fruit included delicious pears and some of those wonderful peaches bought on Sunday at the campsite mini-market.

We decided to use the small D217 East of Flassan on our drive to Sault as it is edged in green throughout its length on the Michelin road atlas. In the centre of Flassan (a small village about 7Km SE of Bedoin) the D217 was blocked by a barrier and a large yellow "Route Barree" sign; there was no prior warning at all and it was far from easy to turn around and make our way back out of the village. We stopped long enough for M to have a look at a whole series of closely typed A4 sheets encased in polythene and pinned to the barrier. They contained an enormously complex screed referring to a fete (starting tomorrow and lasting 2 days) and were signed by an impressive army of officials quite possibly including the French president. Suitably impressed we banished all thought of driving round the barrier (there were lots of people about and we were in an English Smart) and headed for the familiar D1 over the Col Notre-Dame des Abeilles towards Sault. The barred D217 emerges at its other end on to the D1 and there was no barrier to driving along it in the other direction but there was a scruffy, hand-scrawled sign saying "Route Barree a Flassan". R insisted on driving back along it to see what was going on, and as he suspected it was open all the way to within about 300m of where we had found it barred at Flassan! So they had prevented effective access to 10Km of useful road (since you couldn't use it as a through route in either direction) for two whole days just because of the village fete! We turned around again and drove once more in the other direction, continuing on the D1 into Sault.

Sault is a pleasant place with many small shops selling all things Lavender - soaps, oils, pot-pourri, room sprays, eau-de-toilette, perfume and so on. It seemed unremarkable though, and we stayed just long enough to have a walk around the older part of the town and admire the views across the valley towards Mont Ventoux.

Sault:



We returned to Bedoin using the Eastern road (D164) up Mont Ventoux and turning left at "Le Chalet Reynard" to follow the Tour De France ascent route in reverse (downhill), getting back to the campsite with plenty of time to enjoy lamb kebabs on the barbecue and have a much-needed early night.


Wednesday 26 August 2009

Johann is still in bed ill - we couldn't get as much information as we'd have liked but we assume he has been stabilised and his temperature got under control as he is at home and not in hospital. They are still unsure exactly what he has and we understand he is having some blood tests. It's all sad, and worrying! The rehearsal was taken by Ankije again and once more was fun, with more pieces being put on the programme including a traditional Irish air with French words which talk about the troubles in Northern Ireland; also a fun jazz piece to be sung as a three-cycle canon.

We packed up fruit, cheese and bread for a picnic and set off in the Smart to Carpentras to have a look round. We were disappointed in Carpentras, finding it rather run-down and even grubby in places - this doesn't refer to outlying areas but to the centre and the older, supposedly more picturesque quarters. Even the Hotel de Ville is in bad need of a facelift. There is quite a lot of graffiti and more than a few dubious looking characters hanging around street corners. There is an air of relative poverty and lack of well-being. As far as we could see (we may have missed something) they have made little of the aqueduct - it's some way from the centre and surrounded by tat. The only surviving medieval city gate is potentially impressive but could be better preserved and presented:



We also found an interesting glass-roofed arcade and the Cathedral:



But on balance, we'd recommend giving Carpentras a miss. Unless, perhaps, it's market day, for we are told the Carpentras market is terrific with an amazing selection of truffles. So visit then if you can.

Heading South towards Ile-sur-la-Sorgue we found a pleasant "aire-de-picnique" with stone tables, none of them occupied, and had our lunch in the shade of trees:



We noticed large clouds, some with black centres, forming towards the south-east over the Luberon hills. We had decided our next destination would be the well-known tourist magnet of Fontaine-de-Vaucluse where the River Sorgue emerges through caves from its underground course beneath the Luberon plateau. As we approached on the D25 the first heavy drops of rain splashed onto the windscreen, the sky darkened further and thunder rumbled. We closed the Smart's roof but ever the optimists, we continued into the village and paid our 3 euros to park (all parking here is "payant") - the rain fell in large, heavy but infrequent drops as we walked through the village centre:

Fontaine-de-Vaucluse - the church and the bridge:



The rain became torrential as we ascended the riverside track leading to the Resurgence of the Sorgue. We took shelter under the parasols of an ice-cream vendor and bought two Magnum Classics to ensure he let us stay there. Eventually the rain eased enough for us to continue with the help of R's small umbrella which is tiny when folded and which he always carries with him in his shoulder bag. We managed to find enough poly bags to protect our shoulder bags and the camera. We reached the viewpoint overlooking the water-filled cave from which the river emerges but the rain was still too heavy to take pictures and thunder was still rumbling around. The storm was not ready to give up yet. We sheltered under an overhanging cliff nearby and eventually the rain stopped completely, so we returned to the viewpoint, carefully scrambled down the rocky slope above the cave and got our photo; this wasn't easy because of the number of people with similar ideas:



As we walked back towards the village the rain restarted but it was quite light and we were able to take photos by whipping the camera out of its poly bag for the minimum time required:

The River:

Immediately below the cave:



500 metres below the cave:



The river has created an impressive gorge:



and here it is again, just above the village:



We visited the very effective reconstruction of an early paper mill; driven by a water-wheel:



The mill actually makes paper by the original hand processes and is interesting:



The visit is free although you are taken through a shop at the end, and indeed, after that, an entire arcade of shops before you emerge beside the river once more just before the village. Heavier rain was threatening again by now so we quickly retrieved the Smart and drove back to Bedoin via Ile-sur-la-Sorgue, Le Thor (with its interesting medieval tower at the centre) and a cross-country route deliberately avoiding the dreaded Carpentras. Both Ile-sur-la-Sorgue and Le Thor look worthy of another visit and a walk around so we shall try to return to them before we leave Provence. We would have stopped today but both places were heaving with people and cars with nowhere in sight to park - not even with a Smart.

Back at Belezy we spoke to Ruth, our daughter, and Joshua, our grandson, on the phone as it had been Joshua's first day at his new school which had gone very well.

After our barbecue we went to the bar for a quick drink, sat a table but no-one came to serve us in twenty minutes so we just listened to the music duo who were performing pop standards from mainly the 50s and 60s. Lots of the songs were French (and so mostly unknown to us), and even many of the others they sang in French which sounded bizarre at times. Still they weren't bad and at least they were actually playing their guitars and singing. We didn't mind missing our intended drink as in fact we had had quite enough today!


Thursday 27 August 2009

There was another surprise at the choir rehearsal as Anna has become ill overnight (coughing, sore throat, sickness); Karl was up half the night because of that (although he is OK at the moment) and so neither of them came along.

The illness quotient here is getting a bit worrying - Johan is not getting better as his temperature went up again overnight in spite of the antibiotics he is on. Of course it is difficult to get good information about what is going on, but a lot of people seem to have been affected to the point of needing medical help and all of them appear to be on antibiotics - however their symptoms seem to be rather variable, the common one being a sore throat but there are lots of differences between individuals from what we hear.

On the music side, we feel sorry for Ankije who did her very best today but must be worried about the concert tomorrow evening. A Dutch couple, Jon and Jenni, pitched opposite us in a caravan, who are singing, said that they have come here several times and can remember nothing similar ever happening. Of course a campsite with lots of collective activities is hardly an ideal environment for preventing the spread of an aggressive infection whether a bacterium or a virus is the root cause. And naturally there's some talk of Swine Flu (which the Dutch call Mexican Flu, the French call Grippe A and the Germans, with typical precision, call H1N1). Yet some of the sickness has not involved flu-like symptoms of any sort; some afflicted with the throat and chest infections have not run temperatures, yet other cases could certainly be flu and Johan's temperature is still high enough to cause concern. Perhaps a range of different bugs are involved. The rehearsal went surprisingly well in these circumstances. Gunter reappeared (he was there on Tuesday but not yesterday) so that helped in the tenor line.

We are washing our hands a lot and keeping our fingers crossed, though not at the same time!

In the afternoon we drove in the Smart via the very posh hilltop Crillon-le-Brave with it's Relais-et-Chateau hotel in the centre and another four star hotel next door - R describes this place as "hotels with village attached". It's too perfect - not a thing is out of place and everything looks polished and manicured; even the Cotswold-like stone of the buildings is spotless:



Equally spotless waiters and waitresses in starched white uniforms flit between the buildings, ensuring that their no-doubt unimaginably rich clients do not lack even the smallest thing.

Many will find Crillon beautiful but we found it artificial and thus disappointing in an entirely different way from the streets of Carpentras. Crillon-le-Brave is about 12Km from Carpentras but it exists in a different world.

We continued through Caromb where we stopped for a walk around - this is a more normal French village or small town and we liked it:



Then to Beaumes-de-Venise which gives its name to the famous sweet wine made with the Muscat grape. From here we headed towards the impressive rock spires of the Dentelles de Montmirail, approaching them from the south-east using the D90. In Lafare we turned left and followed the side road across the Col du Cayron until it eventually became too rough to make more progress - the dirt roads in the vicinity of the Dentelles call for a decent 4x4 and are folly in a normal car, though we do recall taking our Midget along some of them in the 90s - we were younger and madder then!



We made a similar foray from Suzette towards Seguret using a small road actually edged with green in the Michelin road atlas - this usually means the roads are not only pretty but passable, but not so in this case! Indeed this was even worse as the signposted track to Seguret was not only 4x4 terrain but also marked DFCI (French Forestry) "Prive". We turned round, but we got some good shots of the Dentelles from unusual viewpoints:



To return to Belezy we continued on the D90 to Malaucene (with a well-deserved green edge from Michelin and decent tarmac) and then on the D19 to Bedoin. Back at the campsite, after a cooling swim, the Dutch couple opposite our pitch, Jon and Jenni, came across for a glass of wine and looked round our motorhome - they have a Swift caravan with very similar accommodation and fittings. After a nice, sociable hour's chatting they returned to have dinner with their friends (they are all camping together here on adjacent pitches) and we got our barbecue going yet again!


Friday 28 August 2009

After the final choir rehearsal before this evening's concert, which didn't go too badly, Jon and Jenni invited us to look round their Swift caravan and we did so, finding it interesting - it is a lovely 'van.

Then we put on our clothes and walked over the hill to Bedoin using the footpath through the forest. We had a very good lunch at a restaurant called Portail de l'Olivier:



We thought this meal was excellent value for money at 62 euros for 3 courses, wine (a good local rose consuming 19 of the 62 euros - yes wine is very expensive at restaurants in France) and coffee/ tea. When M asked for two tea-bags ("sachets") to make her tea (she told them she likes it strong but what she really meant was that she didn't want it as weak as dishwater "comme d'habitude en France"!), they brought no less than eight different types of tea in eight big jars full of tea-bags so she could choose the brew and have as many "sachets" as she wanted! And when she asked for cold, fresh milk, they brought it. As she said - a decent cup of tea for a change! Lunch over, we walked up the hill above the church with good views of Bedoin and, of course, Mont Ventoux:



It was nice to stroll around the village when there was no market to fill the streets. The walk back to Belezy was hard work in the heat (32C this afternoon).

The concert in the evening was amzingly good, especially considering the difficulties that had been caused by illness this week. Once again the music making was great fun and clearly enjoyed by the sizeable audience.

Tomorrow we move on to Bonnieux in the Luberon and to a campsite recommended by one of our friends in England and where we shall have to get used to wearing clothes again! We will leave Belezy with some sadness as we have enjoyed it so much and have made new friends here including our Dutch neighbours Jenni and Jon; also Ellen and Nick from Lymington in England (Ellen sings with the Romsey singers - she and Marian hope perhaps to do that "Cats' Duet" here next year!); also many of the "regulars" at Belezy, such as Anna and Karl, and especially Johan who we would certainly like to work with next year making music! We will certainly come back here in 2010.

Our next update should be in about 5 days time covering the Luberon and our stay at Bonnieux.