Carcassonne- Of Gazpatcho and Witches' hats

Today was an interesting one. I took the driver’s seat and we headed out of Espana and into the wild, rocky and windblown countryside of Languedoc France.

After a few hours on the road, we began to worry that we would find ourselves in a potentially lethal situation we had been in many times before – caught in the desolate wasteland between lunch and dinner. In France, as in many other Western European countries, lunch time has strict hours – between 12pm and 2pm. After 2pm its siesta time and lunch for the restaurateurs themselves, so if you want more than a café, you had better leg it or pack your own!

We were not close to any little towns and decided to turn-off at an industrial park to try our luck. Squeezed in between the factories, we found a little bistro and decided to quickly grab a table and umbrella and look as if we’d been waiting there for at least 20 minutes. Sitting in the rain with my smelly and broken bag, the lovely waitress walked passed to greet us and proceeded to accidentally tip an entire bowl of fresh tomato and garlic gazpatcho into it. Yes, in every pocket, nook and cranny. Of course, paralyzed with laughter at this unbelievable turn of events, I was helpless for about half an hour, sitting there with a silly little napkin in my hand trying to mop up an entire bowl of soup. It was like trying to stop an artery haemorrhaging with a little plaster. The good news was that this incident revealed to us a ground-breaking phenomenon - bazpatcho gag, what happens when one is sitting downwind of me. Way to make friends and influence people Lan ...

Arriving in Carcassonne was not the welcome back to France we had hoped for. After a massive detour that took us 25 minutes away from the town only to drop us in the middle of nowhere (it’s a special kind of adventure when the detour road-signs run out!), we arrived at the Tourist office to be greeted (or rather grunted at) by a woman who I can only imagine has the personality to be better placed working in taxidermy rather than in tourism.

The hotel we found is definitely a humdinger. As Gary quipped upon entering the room and banging his toes on the bedside table, he has seen stables with more stars than this. The floor has unidentifiable and innumerable stains and suspicious marks on it, the walls are caked in a nondescript black dust and the bathroom is mostly taken up by the cupboard, with the bathtub being more of a pit in the ground with the broken hand-shower lying on the floor. The only saving grace is that the smell from my bag only slightly offsets the smell of the room.

The actual town of Carcassonne however, is a dream. Truly Disneyworld come to life – soaring turrets, moats, drawbridges and witches’ hat topped spires. The walled medieval town sits high and proud on a hilltop and dominates the landscape around it. The streets leading up to La Cite, as the walled town is known, make up the area of La Ville Basse - rickety, quirky and beautiful in their own right. Various parts of the La Cite's castle are used for theatre and music stages, and during the summer months especially, traditional restaurants and street perfromances are serving up all kinds of delights on every corner.

There is a special romantic atmosphere here, and Gary and I loved walking up to the huge stone walls that seemed to breath with history and take pictures of the surrounding views in the fading sunlight. As the dusk sets in, La Cite is lit up in magnificent floodlight. This incredible place was unquestionably worth the journey!

Viva La France!