Following our recent trip through the Cevennes, we've added the route of Robert Louis Stevenson's "Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes" to the Beyond Maps. Stevenson's route ends at St Jean-du-Gard [map] where we found this "Stevenson Tavern", also labeled the "Auberge Stevenson".
Beyond has been travelling, with a few days in the Camargue to see some of the famous Spring bird migrations. We like to visit the Palissade area and the southeast corner of the Camargue, south of Salin-du-Giraud. Our favorite Camargue birds are the birds of prey, like the numerous Black Kites, as well as the iconic flamingos. On this trip we also photographed Purple Herons and White Storks flying, in addition to the many Egrets, Grey Herons, Buzzards, and Kestrels.
We like the idea of the small birds migrating here, especially when we're accompanied by our knowledgeable friends who can actually identify them. The small birds arrive late in the day after crossing the Mediterranean from North Africa non-stop. They head for the first bushes or small trees they can find, exhausted after the trip, and easy prey for the larger birds there expressly to welcome the wee ones.
We've added some new photos for Flayosc, a medieval village just west of Draguignan in the Var. Beyond's Flayosc page has been on-line since 1996, so in addition to adding a few 2008 photos, we've upgraded the size-quality of the original photos as well.
The 2008 trout fishing season in France starts today, 8 March, and continues until Sunday, 21 September. You can read more about fishing in France in Beyond's Sports section.
The annual trout fishing license this year costs 61 euros for adult males. To encourage younger people to take up trout fishing, the license fee was lowered last year to 16 euros for under-18s. This year an effort is being made to draw in the female of our species: women will pay only 30 euros for the annual fishing license.
We've added a hiking page for the GR (Grande Randonée) de Pays de Montmirail. This hiking trail makes a loop around the Dentelles de Montmirail mountains in the Vaucluse, between Vaison-la-Romaine and Beaumes-de-Venise, west of Mont Ventoux.
We've made a special area map showing the location of the GR Pays de Montmirail hiking trail.
We apologize but Beyond's email in not working right now. We will blog here the moment it becomes available again.
Our email service withour Internet Service Provider Hostway stopped working early Friday, 8 Feb 2008. We became aware of the problem late Friday when our steady stream of spam suddenly stopped.
We have been attempting to get our provider Hostway to respond to our trouble reports for over two days now, and still no response from them - not a great situation. We have been hosted by Hostway for over a decade of our nearly 13 years of existance, and the service has usually been acceptable.
It is coming up on morning in the United States (home of Hostway), at the end of the weekend. Perhaps when somebody comes in to start their support department for the week we will get a response, and hopefully our email working again.
Thank you for your patience,
Russ - ProvenceBeyond
History of Ransoms.
France has an unfortunate history of special-interest groups holding the country to ransom by blockading roads, ports, airports and other key points. The sequence is the same each time:
(1) a proposed change in the laws is announced to improve the economy of the country, improve the lot of the people or some other well-intentioned improvement.
(2) a special-interest group blockades key infrastructure points. This has worked well in the past for groups with the easy means to blockades, such as truck drivers and ... taxi drivers.
(3) the proposed changes are withdrawn - and France remains in the past.
The Commission.
In August 2007 a commission was set up, lead by M. Jacques Attali, to propose a set of changes to make France more economically efficient and competitive in the world market. At that time, the President of the Republic said about the Attali commission: "What you propose, we will do...".
The Proposal.
The Attali Report came out in January 2008. One of the 300 changes proposed was to liberalize taxi businesses. Instead of a town having a very restricted number of licensed taxis for a very limited and controlled selection of drivers, the business would be open to competition. This idea of course inflamed the taxi drivers –– competition might be ok for the consumer, but not for the entrenched drivers. There are some valid problems that would need to be solved, such as the very expensive permit (medallian) that the current taxi drivers have invested in, but the bottom line is competition and the people most affected are the consumers.
The Ransom.
Last week taxis in several towns blockaded roads and airports, including the Nice airport. Sure, people struggled to and from terminals by walking and dragging their luggage, with great anxiety. Sure, people missed their flights. But competition was at stake.
This week the Nice taxis blockaded the autoroutes around the town. Not a complete blocade but a "slow down". Roads that are overly congested at the best of times became unbearable for the rest of the drivers (including anyone trying to get to the airport to catch a flight).
The Solution.
The French government today has apparently given in -- once again. "What you propose, we will do...", but not for the taxis, and not for that other special-interest group, and not for this special-interest group. For the rest of us? Well, maybe the next presidental election will give us a new set of promised changes to hope for.
The village of Saint-Martin-de-Crau is located in the Bouches-du-Rhone, north of the Camargue and just east of Arles. We visited there last weekend to see the annual "Pastrage" festival and tour the surrounding sites.
We've added a page for the Notre-Dame de Benva Chapel. Located beside Lorgues in the Var, this tiny chapel has a covered porch with ancient frescos, partially gone but still a fair amount to admire.
We've added a page for the Route du Mimosa, an annual event that links eight regional towns, from Bormes-les-Mimosas to Grasse, during the flowering season for the bright yellow mimosa.
From the last part of January through February there are mimosa festivals and parades in a number of local towns, now listed in our Current Events Calendar.
Our neighboring enclave of Monaco has been renowned for decades for the video surveillance watching our every move, long before London gained its reputation for being the world leader in spy cameras.
Now our own town of Grasse is joining the 21st-century club of electronic crime-stopping towns. From the beginning of December, a video surveillance systme has been put in place. It's on a trail basis for the moment, but it seems to be working quite well and is no doubt here to stay.
There are 13 cameras in this initial system: 6 in Grasse centre-ville, 2 in the lower-town area called Le Plan, and 5 in the low-cost housing area near the Quatre-Chemins called Blaquière (being renamed Fleurs de Grasse as part of an image-inhancement plan).
The controlable cameras are monitored 24/7, and the video images are stored on hard disc for 15 days, then the old images are erased. Tight controls are in place limiting who has access to the images, and for very controlled times.
We're sleeping better now.
We've added a page and photos for the Saint Ferreol Hermitage, next to the villages of Lorgues. This is a hilltop site in the Var with a nice woods for picnicking, health walking and ancient ruins.
We've also updated our Lorgues page, and added 20 new photos of the village.
We've just added a dozen new photos to our Touet-sur-Var page. This little Medieval village is perched on a high rock ledge overlooking the Var river, 50 km north of Nice. Touet is on the Train-des-Pignes railway line, making it a handy day-trip destination from the coast.
The new (2008) bus-trip price of 1 euro in the Alpes-Maritimes (see Beyond's Blog 04 Jan) has increased the popularity of the lines between Nice and the ski stations of Auron, Isola 2000 and Valberg [map p15].
You're advised to reserve your return trip from the ski station back to Nice at least 4 hours before the departure time. We have more information on the [Bus Alpes-Maritimes] page and the [Bus-17] page.
Beyond's Vauban fortified village of Entrevaux was photo-poor, with only 3 dark little photos from about 10 years ago. We've now updated our Entrevaux page with 20 photos, larger and brighter (most taken in the past few days but some of the old ones from a decade ago).
The walled Medieval village of Entrevaux is in the Var river valley, about 60 km from Nice, just past the village of Puget-Theniers.
The large plane trees (platanes) with their huge leaves giving umbrellas of shade in the village squares are a symbol of Provence in the summertime. In the wintertime these same big plane trees evoke another image: thin bare arms with slender fingers pointing to the sky.
The plane trees are (or should be) pruned drastically every year, trimming off the small and medium branches back to the base of the main ones. Rather than looking just bare, the trimmed trees tend to make fantastic patterns, sometimes directly against the sky, and sometimes in shadows on the walls.
These two photos were taken in Lorgues, a village in the Var department. (We have a new set of photos coming for Beyond's Lorgues page in the next few days.
We've improved the photos on our Gorbio village page, and added a lot more new photos. Gorbio is a perched medieval village in the hills above Menton and Roquebrune-Cap-Martin It's a bit hard to find, so we've added directions of how to get there, along with some other content improvement to our Gorbio page.
We've also added a collection of photos of Vaulted Passages of Gorbio.
January 2008 and there's not yet much snow in the middle-lower areas of the Alpes-Maritimes. We made a weekend visit to Luceram to see the wonderful Creches de Noel (the Christmas Mangers of Luceram), then headed up the multi-lacets road to Piera-Cava to the north of Luceram.
There was plenty of snow at the top (although the roads are clear) and the views out across the snow-covered mountains is magnificent.
We've added a selection of new photos for the town of L'Escarene, along the old 16th-century Salt Road between Nice and Italy. L'Escarene is also a stop on the Train des Merveilles (the Nice-Cuneo line) that runs through the mountains and up the Roya Valley to Tende and on to Italy - a great way to see the sites during the winter, without braving the winter roads.
Our wonderful Grasse-Cannes railway line, re-opened in 2005, had difficulties during this past year (2007). We now have information (very unofficial, word-of-mouth) that the scheduled trains may or may not run, depending on last-minute police protection for each train.
Although word-of-mouth, our source is very reliable, and backed up by our own unfortunate experiences with the train during the last half of 2007.
The tiny Alpes-Maritimes village of Auvare is now online in Beyond. Located in the hills about 60 km northwest of Nice, and north of the Puget-Thèniers, Auvare is stuck on the side of a rocky mountain, at the end of a tiny road. A beautiful place to go for the scenery and for the hiking.
The Alpes-Maritimes (Cannes, Nice, Grasse, Menton, etc) had really inexpensive bus service, with a single bus ticket costing only 1.30 euro. It's now (from 1 Jan 2008) even cheaper. A ticket is only 1.00 euro, and that's for a single trip in the Alpes-Maritimes, including transfer from bus to bus where necessary. More details on our Bus Alpes-Maritimes page.
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