The Cromargue

I had a bad time in the narrow tent. It was too hot to fall asleep with my sleeping bag then too cold to continue sleeping without it.

We walked into town for breakfast (croissants and almond pastries) and stopped at a shop across the narrow street and bought donkey, pig, and bull sausage from the local meat vendor. We snacked on these for the rest of our stay in France. Back to the front desk at the resort to checkout, the sign out front said we owed 39€, the woman at the desk told us our stay would cost 41€, and we ended up paying 38.70€. It was the perfect French experience.

We drove out to the ornithological park where we paid 7€ to wander around the wetlands. Flamingos strutted through the shallow lagoons and we saw spoonbill, storks and nutria. They had a few caged birds but many of the cages were broken and empty - collapsed during a freak snowfall the previous winter.

We scrambled for our cameras when we saw the first nutria but they turned out to be pretty common in the park. We saw more than a dozen on that morning hike.

With all the walking my ham feet swelled to grotesque proportions and were starting to hurt.

On the drive out of the Cromargue we saw a sign that said 5 euros for apricots and peaches. We decided to stop and get up some peaches. First it turned out the price only applied to the apricots and then the farmer lady yelled at us in French because she thought we were swapping peaches between baskets or something. I don't know, she was very angry. She charged us 7 euro for the basket. They had a dog chained up in back with a beware of dog sign telling people not to get too close. I guess you get rednecks everywhere.

We considered staying another night but we weren't too far from Menton and it was still early. Instead we decided to get off the highway and explore some of the coastal towns. On the way we passed by a cork grove and saw the way they pulled cork from the oak trees. They sheared the bark from the trunks like a sheep.

After driving all morning we were hot and ready to jump in the Mediterranean but finding coastal access was difficult. Following the signs the road led to a parking lot and a trailer park where we were told it would cost 61€ to spend the night. We opted instead to spend 4.50€ for parking and headed down to the beach.

The water was turgid and murky but it cooled us off and after a short swim we returned to our towels to watch the people walking along the shore and play in the water. Ja and Amanda fell asleep and I decided to wander down the beach and see what I could see.

There was a plump topless woman a short ways down the beach. Most of the women didn't go topless but no one seemed scandalized about the few that did. I didn't even see anyone gawking at some of the more well-endowed women. When they undressed on their beach towels they always seemed to shrug out of their tops furtively, like they were embarrassed to be caught mid-transition but once the top was off, everything was fine. Probably the strangest thing to me was that only about 15% of the women went topless. I could understand 0% or 95% but 15% seemed such a low percentage that going topless would attract more attention than not.

The crowded beach was sectioned off into public and private strips about 30m wide and I noticed strange cultural shifts between each strip as I walked down the beach. People mostly stuck to their little strip of land. I was a little confused when I saw the nude man but after seeing a few more nude men and women I realized I'd wandered into a nude section of the beach. There were no physical fences separating each section of beach and there were children playing and clothed bathers on either side.

Directly inland from the nude beach was a nightclub or bar where fully dressed people were hanging out and drinking. I can't imagine what would happen if the beaches in america were organized in the same way. The nude bathers would be arrested as pedophiles if they weren't beaten up drunken clubbers first.

When I got back we decided it was early enough to just drive back to the house. Along the way Ja taught us some French slang. 'Vaschement-Bon' is literally translated as 'cow-like' and meant strong or admirable. 'Chouette' was the equivalent of 'cool'.

We arrived at 11:00 and I got to work transferring pictures and taking notes on the day and despite the fact it was almost midnight Ja opened the bottle of wine we bought in Arles and we sipped on this while I checked up on the internet and email.

Just before bed, we got up to chase a wild pig (sanglier) that was eating the plums that had dropped off the tree in his garden. We could hear it rustling in the underbrush but never spotted it with our flashlights.