The good, the bad and the ugly

It’s been a bit of a week. We left the city and our beautiful bright apartment in the old centre of Montpellier, arrived in the Pyrenees ready for our rustic, rural retreat and things have not gone entirely smoothly.

We had lots of plans to farewell Montpellier. We loved it there so much. We envisioned something romantic, like champagne in the park or wandering soulfully around the Antique Quarter, or perhaps a glass of rose on the Place du Marches Aux Fleurs. We end up carousing instead, late into the night with four new French friends we met by accident after stopping for a quick one at a local bar a thirty-second walk from our flat. They were generous with their company and their wine. And they loved Jimmy Barnes so were delighted to meet Australians and bond over pub rock. We staggered home around two in the morning after doing shots and singing Working Class Man and other classic Cold Chisel hits loud enough to rattle the shutters all up the Rue L’ecole. So our last day in Montpellier was not spent wafting wistfully around favourite haunts. It was spent lying in bed, holding our heads, emerging gingerly in the late afternoon to stuff four months of accumulated belongings into two suitcases and clean.

Still, when we left we were looking ahead, not behind. We had eight weeks booked in the Pyrenees, in a rustic gite perched on the side of a mountain near Sarrance, about an hour’s drive from the Spanish border. No plans except walking, reading and watching the day go by on the terrace. After four months of work and travel, we are both happily exhausted and ready for a big shift in lifestyle. This is why we came away, it’s all been leading to this. When we left Fremantle, we were heavy with grief after the death of our beloved labrador, Huey, burnt out, and excited to travel, explore and have a proper break at the end of it. Glynn’s work has been fantastically successful, we have been to Scotland, Norway, Germany and France and had an incredible time. But now we needed to switch off, rest and let the views and the mountain air soothe our ragged souls before we leave for home and get back into the usual routines of life.

We arrived in the Pyrenees slightly bug-eyed with tension from the six-hour drive there. Glynn is yet to get completely comfortable with driving on the wrong side of the road and I am yet to get completely comfortable with watching him learn. Especially when it involves skidding precariously around vast drops on mountain passes so narrow and steep even the goats look nervous. Or squeezing through tiny roads that wouldn’t pass as laneways at home, trying to avoid cars, trucks, and the occasional tractor careening gaily around with the easy insouciance of those who grew up in these parts. All right for some. I left some of my heart in Montpellier and the rest of it was now in my throat. Full marks to the bloke for taking on the driving. If I were behind the wheel, I’d still be curled up in a ball by the side of a lonely French road in the middle of nowhere, crying for my mother.

It was still a beautiful drive, we stopped along the way to stock up on wine and cheese at the biggest supermarket I’ve ever been lost in and we were feeling pretty set to chuck our bags in a corner in our new home, crack open a red and settle in just in time for sunset over the peaks. The bloke, who has been clinging on to sanity by what’s left of his fingernails for some time now is beside himself with anticipation of a glorious and restful mountain retreat. He instructs me to video our entrance into the property so we can record this glorious moment as a highlight to look back upon fondly in our old age. To remind us of simple times, when life was easy, the days were gentle and the air was pure and fresh and as clean as only mountain air can be.

And so it was. Outside. Inside, things were a little more rustic than we planned. We opened the door and were thrown back several paces from the force of the thick cloud of dust that billowed out. We clasped our shirts to our mouths and noses in a vague effort at self-preservation, coughed and peered tentatively inside to be knocked sideways again by wave after wave of a deep and vicious must that screamed from within like a host of trapped banshees, released at last. This place had clearly been shut up since last summer, if not longer.

I opened a cupboard and was showered in a rain of mouse droppings, also alarmingly evident in the ancient toaster. No sign of anything like it in the kettle, because there was no kettle. The ancient oven was coated in thick grime. Every surface was jammed with a motley array of cheap knick-knacks, covered in thick layers of dust and the odd dead spider. We clutched each other in horror and started composing our message to the owner demanding our money back and wondering how we are going to scratch together the energy to find a hotel for the night in the middle of nowhere, let alone somewhere else to stay for two months.

We washed two glasses and dried them on our t-shirts to be safe, poured ourselves two large glasses of wine and escaped to the safety of the terrace.

And we step into the most glorious view. Breathtaking. We see snow-capped peaks crowding the skyline all around us. We are in the heart of the Pyrenees. We hear the river flowing below and the trees that line the lower reaches of the ranges are all colours; dusky purples, palest greens and soft browns. Granite rocks and the winter skeletons of the deciduous trees that line our long driveway are smothered in lichens and mosses. Bright yellow buttercups and riots of small white daisies speckle the grasses outside. Early songbirds are calling and the sound of windchimes turns out to be two belled cows that wander the pastures of the farm below us. Our tired hearts lift.

We decide to sleep on it and see how things look in the morning.

What I’m reading

I’m reading Jenny Colgan, Sunrise by the Sea. This is peak Colgan. It’s about a young woman, Marissa Rossi, who is struggling with grief that won’t heal after her grandfather dies. She moves to a remote island off the coast of Cornwall to recuperate, and meets Polly, who lives in a lighthouse, runs a bakery and has been adopted by an injured puffin called Neil. Marissa’s next-door neighbour is a piano teacher and a huge bear of a Russian who is also running from grief, in the form of a ballet dancer who rejected him in favour of someone more exciting. They bond over Italian food and music. It’s light, charming and easy. A perfect book if you’re looking for something gentle and engaging without being in any way challenging. I love you Jenny.

Switching off

Books. Coffee. Saucepan. Grater. Playing cards.

I’m going through my list of essentials to pack ahead of eight weeks in the Pyrenees in the south of France, where we plan to be mostly offline and almost completely isolated.

It will be the final two months of our six months away and I am ready for some quiet time. We have rented a small, rustic cottage about 40 minutes walk from the nearest village, in the heart of the mountains. We won’t have internet, and at this stage, we’re not even sure we will be able to access wifi in the village.

I’m not going to lie, I’m a little nervous. This part of our trip is mostly about unwinding for Glynn, he’s on long service leave and needs a good break and he’s keen to get back to work refreshed. So the offline bit was his idea. I want to support him, I think it would be so much harder for him to manage if I were constantly ducking off to post or scroll. But I think I need it too.

Even two years out from working in the media full time, I think I am still de-stressing from burnout and online addiction. I still find myself reaching for my phone to check newspapers at least twice a day. My morning ritual is two coffees and four newspapers. My evening ritual is herbal tea and four newspapers. In between that, I check Twitter, Instagram and my beloved Facebook reading page, Reading Between the Wines, email, Whatsapp and my other Facebook pages. I think it’s fair to say it will be good for my brain and my heart to try and have a decent break.

We are only three hour’s drive from Bilbao in Spain, so we do plan to nip over to see the Guggenheim, ( I am just going to pause here and say THAT aloud a few times to let it sink in) but otherwise, we plan to read, hike, amble, talk, play cards and stare at the scenery. I also have grand plans to make bread so if anyone has any recipes, feel free to share them. Especially if you have a recipe for bread in a cast iron pot. I have also bought a box grater so I can make potato rosti, (I just can’t get my head around those flat ones) and I have happy visions of red wine and rosti in front of the fire or on the deck watching the sunset. It’s funny the tiny plans you make when you have visions of a different life.

We have to get ourselves from our flat in Montpellier to the car hire at the airport so not sure the large book stack is a good idea in terms of weight but we don’t want to be caught short and I think I’d rather read hard copy books than my e-book for this trip. We have tried to choose a good range but we were a little limited by the offerings at the local English bookshop. It’s pretty good though! They got me in the new Margaret Atwood in only a few days.

I will miss Montpellier more than I thought was possible. I never thought I’d miss anywhere that isn’t Fremantle. Which I suppose translates to thinking I would never feel at home anywhere other than Fremantle. This is the first time I have ever ‘lived’ outside my city. Well, there was an uncomfortable few months in a squat in Saint Kilda when I was 18 and rebellious but I mostly sat indoors sulking and refusing to admit I missed my mum so I don’t think it counts. I didn’t travel more than that when I was young, because I had a baby at 20 and I worked. So this is new. And wonderful. Challenging, exhilarating and deeply, deeply interesting. Even when I have been homesick or desperately missing my family or tired or a little over trying to make myself understood in another language, I have still been really fascinated by the process. There is so much freedom to be had in curiosity. And the difficult moments have been so rare. Mostly, I’ve been having enormous fun.

The people here are very friendly. We could not have felt more welcome. I have no idea where the tired notion that the French are arrogant or insular comes from. Obviously you get a range of personalities in every country but I also think some of us born in English speaking countries think we are the only ones allowed to feel pride in our language and our home. When we barrel about assuming everyone speaks English it’s ok but the same assumption made in France is arrogant? Yeah, nah.

People will literally approach you in public and introduce themselves, invite you to dinner, join you for a drink, offer help, and go out of their way to be completely adorable. I feel like we have made friends already, and that if we were to settle in France, we’d have no trouble fitting in. It’s a gentle, beautiful vibe. Unless of course, there’s a strike or a protest, in which case, it’s feisty as you like. I love it. I love the fierce defence of rights. I love that half the shops in town are closed on Sundays and Mondays because people want to spend time with their families. I love they are holding on hard to the right to have a life, to retire in their early sixties. I wish there was more of it in Australia.

I do feel extremely grateful for the chance to live my own life now. I can’t wait to curl up in the country with my bloke. I feel so lucky that we have been able to spend this time together already, four months of seeing each other every day and we are still excited to cut ourselves off even more from other people and hang out alone. I don’t really know what to expect. Maybe we’ll hate it. Maybe we’ll hate each other’s company. Maybe we’ll be bored in a week and creeping off to civilisation but we’re going to give it a shot.

I’ll let you know how it goes! If we fall off a ravine or get eaten by bears, know this. We’re ok with it.

Just kidding. That would really suck.

Au revoir Montpellier, merci beaucoup et bonne journee. Tu es la plus belle ville. Je t’aime.

Highway to flamingo zone

Oh, my HEART. I have seen FLAMINGOS. They are GLORIOUS.

And I tell you what, it was a palaver all round, it nearly cost me my marriage and my sanity. But worth it.

Just two weeks ago, we had a disastrous trip to the Camargue in the South of France, near Arles. In as much as a trip anywhere in the South of France can be disastrous – as in not even a tiny bit – but I was tetchy about it at the time. Flamingos are native to the area, in summer there are flocks of thousands and thousands. They migrate in winter but there are some that stay year-round because it’s not that cold these days. But this isn’t summer and I wasn’t going to be here in summer so we went anyway. Even one flamingo would be fine with me. My whole bird-loving life has led me to this point.

I had spent a small fortune on a camera with a built-in zoom lens because they’re shy birds, like most, and they don’t come in that close to shore. We booked a hotel, hired a car to drive to the Camargue. Side note: is there anything more stressful than hiring a car in a foreign city, where they drive on the wrong side of the road AND you have to start the car with an app on your phone AND you have to find your way around a city relying completely on GPS AND you’re running out of phone charge AND petrol at the same time…well…ok, this is a rhetorical question. Is there? No. There isn’t. It is a testament to my marriage that we survived the trip. There was shouting, gritted teeth, white knuckles and eyes bulging with tension, a lot of WHICH WAY, WHICH WAY and I’M TRYING, I’M TRYING and OH MY GOD WE’RE GOING IN CIRCLES and DIDN’T WE JUST PASS THAT BUILDING and STOP SHOUTING AT ME and I’M NOT SHOUTING, YOU’RE SHOUTING and a moment in a carpark at the end where we ran into each other’s arms and leapt about crying and laughing and hugging like we’d narrowly escaped the apocalypse. Want to test your relationship resilience? Or your personal resilience? Rent a car in a foreign country.

Anyway, Arles was gorgeous and the Camargue is divine. It’s a UNESCO-protected area of hundreds of kilometres of salt marshes and lagoons on the Rhone delta, home of the famous Camargue red rice, the “wild” white Camargue horses, bulls and flamingos. We hire a guide and are thrilled with our luck when we find we are the only couple on the tour because of the time of the year. We are not very fussed to learn the wild horses of legend are in fact only a bit wild, and are actually all owned by breeders. No matter. We, at least, I, am here for flamingos. We stop at a paddock to pat a horse on the nose and I ask about flamingos, before whipping out my camera to get a shot of a rather large water rat sunning itself in the pampas grass.

It’s at this point I realise I have a tiny issue with my camera battery. In that, I forgot to check it was charged. This is evidenced by a large flashing light on the display screen which says, battery exhausted. It takes me a minute or two to absorb this devastating news. Ok, it takes me a good 45 minutes to absorb this devasting news. The bloke, who I should mention has very little interest in flamingos, is as exhausted by this stage as my camera battery. He manfully distracts the tour guide with questions he doesn’t want to know the answer to while I get a grip then resign myself to experiencing the beauty of the region with my eyes rather than through a lens. Tres disappointing. We did see flamingos. I think. There were certainly some pinkish blobs out on the water but they may have been shipping buoys. I take some snaps with my phone camera and that’s that.

On the drive home, when we were still recovering from the trauma of the experience and I am planning our next trip back there, we skirt the coastline near the outskirts of Montepellier. I am gazing wistfully out of the window thinking of what might have been, when I notice out to sea some familiar pink blobs gathering just off the shoreline near the highway. That’s right. Flamingos. Flocks of them. It turns out the coast of Montpellier is riddled with flamingos and we could have simply wandered down for a day at the beach if we’d wanted to see them.

So, armed with a camera and a full battery, I set off on my own today. The Gods of Flamingo Spotting clearly did not intend to make my life any easier this trip than the last. It was supposed to be a fairly straightforward 40-minute one-change tram ride to the coast, but they’re doing a bit of work on the lines, which involved trams that weren’t going where they said they were, replacement busses, more trams and a six-lane highway to somehow traverse.

There were helpers at each stop but they didn’t speak English and I don’t speak French. But I was not going to be thwarted again, so I managed to find my way via the medium of waving my phone map about, broken French, and charades. It was the beginning of a great adventure. I got there at last. Et viola!

I could see across the silver sea, not one but two large flocks of flamingos in the distance. Hundreds of them. But no way to get there. Apparently, the locals aren’t as enamoured with access to the native birdlife as I am and there was no nature walk or bike path or any conceivable way around the shore to get to them. Undeterred I went the other way, around the back of some houses jammed right up against the shoreline. After clambering through old fishing nets, a boggy marsh, knee-deep in rotting seaweed and mud, I found, let’s call them a “flock” of ….. three flamingos! Maybe some teenage flamingos getting away from the olds, or the olds getting away from the teenagers. Who knows.

Reader, I married them. Ok, I didn’t but I did fall in love very, very swiftly.

My camera was charged. The light was beautiful. The flamingos were glorious. Oh, you have never seen anything so perfectly delightful. They were an absolute joy to watch. They are cartoonish, elegant, gangly, goofy and all ruffles and beaks, and very, very pink. And white. They wave those long stilt legs around all over the place, I think their knees bend both ways at the joints, I must find out, it certainly looked like it. One of them appeared to be moonwalking backwards for no discernable reason. Another loved to scratch itself above the beak by arching its neck in a kind of reverse loop, then rubbing the top of its head on its back. They are mesmerising. A wonder.

It has been the most wonderful experience. As they say, the journey and the destination. It has been thrilling. I am utterly, utterly dans le rose.

Flamingo facts

A group of flamingos is a “flamboyance.”

There are four species of flamingo, and they are native to the Americas, including the Caribbean, Africa and parts of Europe.

The name “flamingo” comes from the Portuguese or Spanish, flamengo or flame coloured.

Their beaks are adapted to separate mud and silt from what they eat and they use them upside down.

Their colour comes from carotenoids in their diets, which is plankton. The French flamingos are not as red as the American flamingos because there isn’t as much pigment in the plankton they eat.

They honk.

And then I heard the call of home

“Home! That was what they meant, those caressing appeals, those soft touches wafted through the air, those invisible little hands pulling and tugging, all one way.” Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows.

There’s a scene in The Wind and the Willows when Mole, despite all his exciting adventures with Ratty and Toad and Badger, is unexpectedly reminded of home, and then that’s all he can think of. Badger’s Wild Wood and Toad’s Hall lose their shine. He just wants to go home. He longs for it. But his travelling companion Ratty is distracted by something new and Mole loses his chance. It’s wrenching; both because Ratty realises he’s inadvertently broken his friend’s heart and for the violence of Mole’s grief.

‘I went away and forgot all about it–and then I smelt it suddenly–on the road, when I called and you wouldn’t listen, Rat–and everything came back to me with a rush–and I WANTED it!–O dear, O dear!–and when you WOULDN’T turn back, Ratty–and I had to leave it, though I was smelling it all the time–I thought my heart would break.’

Mum used to read this book to my sister and me when we were kids and I found it completely devastating. It imprinted itself on me as one of literature’s great tragedies at the time, and it has stayed with me. But I’ve had my own problems this week. Overnight, I went from flitting gaily through Montpellier, bonjouring anything that looked in my direction including random pigeons, to curled up in bed wracked with homesickness. I cried. Told my husband I wanted my mum. Cried again. Stuck my head in the bag of lemon-scented gum leaves my sister sent me for Christmas for so long that I nearly asphyxiated. Read old books. Not The Wind in the Willows, obviously. I’m not a masochist.

I embraced the sensation as passionately as I had embraced being a visitor in a new and beautiful city only the day before. But even as I pined, I felt a little bit embarrassed. There’s a kind of insubstantial air to the whole idea of being homesick in my case. I’m not young, leaving for the first time. I have a home to feel sick about, I can leave by choice and know it’s there to come back to. I’ve never been displaced or uprooted, home has never been too far or too dangerous to return to. My daughter is grown up and my grandkids have stopped wanting sleepovers. My husband is here to offer his shoulder and top up my champagne.

Homesickness for people like me, well steeped in comfort, brings to mind insipid things like, ‘having the vapours’. In my mind’s eye, I might as well be wafting about in a tie-dye singlet dress, pining for a pie and sauce, reading Tim Winton wistfully on a park bench, hoping someone who speaks my language will happen by and coax me into a game of footy or pour me a large glass of wine. White with ice, please.

I’ve noticed it doesn’t take much to set me off on a bout of mal du pays. Especially in a new country where I don’t speak the language and people I meet don’t speak mine. The following incidents reduced me to a wreck this week;

A young boy working at the supermarket laughed in my direction while I was packing my shopping bags. (Here, clearly I was doing something foolish in his eyes, when I had been trying so hard to either fit in or be politely invisible. What an ill-bred tosser. Laughing at a vulnerable old lady. His mama et papa would be mortified, no doubt.)

A woman in a fabric shop emitted a definite air of being annoyed or at least not effusively thrilled to see me when I walked in and wandered around browsing. So much so, that I approached the counter so she wouldn’t think I was a time waster, babbled something and mimed in a kind of hacking motion with my hand – do you sell cheese knives? She said coldly in English. No. We don’t. Which, to be honest, I took as a bit of a slap in the visage. And then when I left I accidentally banged the door really loudly on the way out, so in an effort to be conciliatory I pushed it open and shouted pardon! she didn’t wave or smile or in any way acknowledge my largesse. (Speaks for itself.)

The Irish man at the local we have begun to frequent because, let’s face it, sometimes you just don’t feel like trying, politely asked us to sit somewhere else because we were blocking the service counter at the bar. (This was the worst. When one of your own turns on you. Likely he was hoping to insinuate himself into the affections of the locals at my expense. I’m onto you matey.)

The combination of all the above was enough to tip me over the edge. The uncomfortable whiff of someone not too far from where I’m sitting being tres sensitive doesn’t help. It only makes me more snivelly than I was to start with and adds a day or two to my recovery. Someone has to feel sorry for me and I have endless patience for the job.

Happily, previous experience has made me aware I’m vulnerable to both homesickness and a tendency to lean in to even benign misery and I had done some preparation in order to get mon tete out of mon cul. Before it set in too firmly.

Far from my romantic visions of self drifting through French flower shops smelling the imported wattle and shedding the odd elegant tear in response, homesickness makes me nervous as much as anything else. I think I underestimated how tiring it can be to brace yourself for everyday tasks, well, every day. Once the novelty wears off, it gets to be a bit of a slog. It becomes more of something that’s good for me and I have to do, unless of course I don’t want to eat or I’m happy to let my husband treat me like les enfant. So setbacks so minor they could be mistaken for entirely fabricated become wearisome.

I indulged myself with tissues and sleeping in and calling my mum but I also noticed other side effects, nothing fatal, but certainly more insidious. I was feeling anxious about going outside, tackling the tram system, going to a shop I didn’t know, trying to make myself understood, preferring to stay in. The idea of facing the market I’ve shopped at most days, felt, if not terrifying, a bit of a bridge too far. The Post Office, ok, definitely terrifying.

A friend at home, who is very well-travelled, unlike myself, tells me homesickness comes in waves, and just when you think it’s unbearable, it changes and turns into something new. My oldest friend, who has been living in Germany for several years now, takes the same approach. And my mum once described childbirth in a similar way, just before I was going into labour with my daughter, and it helped me then too. If you aren’t managing, hang on for a bit and things will change. There’s a lot to be said for pushing it a little bit. Not trying to do everything, but also not giving in to the urge to do nothing. It’s not about feeling completely comfortable or completely uncomfortable. It’s about trying something small to get going. Even when you don’t feel like it much. Especially when you don’t feel like it much.

So, after a fabulous start to my travels, then a tiny, ok big, bout of homesickness, today has been good. I took the tram for the first time on my own to shop, I had a lovely chat in broken French and broken English with a woman at my favourite fruit and vegetable stall and I braved the dreaded Post Office and bought a box and stamps. Huzzah! I couldn’t make myself understood well enough to find envelopes but to quote the great philosopher, Scarlett O’Hara, tomorrow is another day.

I miss you beautiful Fremantle. I miss my loves, (my other loves). I can’t wait to sit on my back deck at home under a high Western Australian sky and breathe the salted air. It’s where I always feel safe. How brilliant right now though, to be a little scared, sometimes.

“Take the adventure, heed the call, now ere the irrevocable moment passes! ‘Tis but a banging of the door behind you, a blithesome step forward, and you are out of the old life and into the new! Then some day, some day long hence, jog home here if you will, when the cup has been drained and the play has been played, and sit down by your quiet river with a store of goodly memories for company.” Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows.