Word Of Mouse

We spent several days in the Haut-Languedoc, a region of forested hills and lakes to the east of Castres. The first night was at the quiet lakeside campsite of Rouquié, then the following day we went on a shortish distance though the heat to camp beside Lake Louszas. The campsite was a bit pricey (and annoyingly we had to move our tent after we had put it up, having been told we could pitch wherever we liked, it turned out that the place we liked had already been booked). The lake water however was warm, blue and inviting and our nerves were soothed by a swim.

We planned to visit the advertised Thermal Baths at Lacaune the following day. I had great memories of the wonderful Blue Lagoon at Reykjavik, in Iceland, and hoped that Lacaune would be similar. When we got there, having cycled though drifting mist, we found the place eerily deserted- however it was indeed open and we had the place to ourselves. They kindly turned on the water slides for us. However there was little to suggest the presence of any kind of hot spring and it could have been any swimming pool anywhere: I felt a bit cheated.

Our plans to hire a sailing boat on the lake didn't work out: the wind was a little gusty and slightly too strong to be a relaxing day's sailing. We changed our booking for a pedalo and spent a couple of hours zooming to and fro across the lake, round the island, to the dam and back, leaving a foaming trail behind us in our wake. (Maybe those miles of pedalling have made us fitter after all).

Earlier that day Ali spotted a poster advertising Basque choral singing in the nearby church in the small village of Nages. We cycled through the cooling air of the evening to Nages, had a good meal at the restaurant there of wild mushroom omlette (me) and chunks of rabbit (Ali), then went round the corner to the church and took our places. The small church was beautifully painted round the altar, although they had had the good taste to leave the raw stonework of the arches and vaulting untouched. The Basque singers arrived, ten or so, all male except for their conductor, dressed in white with red sashes. Their singing was fantastic, with close vocal harmonies a bit reminiscent of a Welsh male voice choir. As we rode back to the campsite the moon was bright and shining across the tranquil waters of the lake. Life felt very good.

We left early the next day to escape the heat and after a couple of significant climbs, totalling maybe 800m, we dropped down towards St Pons de Thomières for the evening by way of the Grotte de Devizes. This cave complex was discovered while a railway was being built round the late 19th century. It does contain some fantastic statactites and stalacmites growing sometimes in bizarre curls and even complete loops: it is quite hard to imagine the physical process that could produce such a phenomenon. There were also some remarkable formations that looked either like hanging curtains or pieces of bacon, depending how hungry you were feeling. We were a little alarmed by the almost complete lack of safety information provided by the guide, and certainly the people at the back of the group were a little startled when the lights suddenly went out: like many public lights in France they worked on a minuterie system and unless you moved through the cave steadily, you could have been left behind. (No head count had been taken before we went down, needless to say).

We spent a little while looking round the small attached museum, largely on the grounds that it might have been air-conditioned (it wasn't). Among the exhibited bits of ladders and early cave exploration equipment was a human skull, many thousands of years old as evidenced by a thick layer of rock that had formed around it. A nearby plaque related the story of its discovery, in the words of the leader of the expedition that had found it. He immediately realized its significance. However he decided, being a bit of a wag, that the time was ripe to play a little joke on his companions. He pretended to have lost the way, and suggested to the other members of the party that they spend quarter of an hour searching around to find another way back to the surface before meeting up again. Quarter of an hour's searching failed to reveal any other way back out, and when the party regrouped, panic was setting in. He then started wondering aloud what cave explorationists of the future would think when they found a further five skulls lying on the floor of the cave covered with sedimented rock.

Eventually he took pity on them and revealed the way back out. As he said at the bottom of the account, "cave exploration is very character-forming." I just wish one of the other people in the party had had sufficient character to give him a good punch on the nose....

We left the museum and cycled the short distance into St Pons de Thomieres. Coming the other way was an endless procession of souped up muscle cars with loud exhausts, driven by a succession of nineteen-year-old testosterone-soaked airheads. This rather spoiled our appreciation of St. Pons. It was only redeemed by making the acquaintance of a friendly self-confessed clochard a velo, who spotted our tandem leaning outside a shop and came over to say hello. He had spent three years cycling round Europe doing seasonal work, possessing only a heavily laden bike, two tarpaulins (which he used for sleeping in the forest to save money) and a relaxed attitude to personal hygiene. The winters, he said, could be tough.

The following day we had a long steady haul up out of St. Pons, past the same rally cars we saw the previous day (which were fortunately coming the other way) and up to a col at 621 metres, from where a lovely seemingly endless gentle descent took us off the Haut Languedoc to Olonzac, on the Canal du Midi. We stopped for lunch on the way in a small layby: like many French laybys this one doubled as an unofficial public toilet but by going a short way we managed to find a great spot for lunch on top of a concrete water tank overlooking a small village, with lizards for comapny.

We tried cycling on the Canal du Midi, but it was very rough going: it would have been possible (just) on a mountain bike but the tandem was too difficult to make it worth it- quite unlike the smooth wide paths of the Canal Nantes-Brest. We headed west towards Carcassonne, stopping at the small town of Trebes- a welcome stop as Ali was finding the heat and the long day´s ride very hard.

Trebes was unremarkable, but we felt in need of a break so we spent a couple of days there. This was the night of the France-Portugal match, which was being shown on a large open-air screen in the park. We sat on the grass- being careful not to get in the way of anyones line of sight, which risked provoking cries of Assis, assis bordel, and shared the joys and tragedies of that fateful evening. Two days later we watched a very good free concert by the South African musician Johnny Clegg in the same place, a man who was singing songs in Zulu with Zulu musicians at a time when to do so in South Africa was literally life-threatening.

We left Trebes on 12 July for the short ride to the medieval city of Carcassonne.