A Rolls Royce of a Day!

Tuesday 10th October 2017 - Arles.

We started our day with a pamplemousse.  It's not something we usually have for breakfast but it was lovely and sweet and juicy.  By the way, a pamplemousse is not a kind of rodent it is a grapefruit.

We had decided to explore the Camargue by bike today so after coffee time we said our farewells to Ian and Sandra and cycled off.  I was trying to avoid having to cycle into Arles but we needed to cross three canals to get to the 'rive droit' (right side of the river) of the Grand Rhone.  I had plotted the route by my mapping system and thought it should be possible.  It was possible but we had to cycle through private farm roads.  

We made the dash and no one stopped us.  The alternative would have been a 10km trip back into Arles and back out again.

The whole route was absolutely flat.  We were wind assisted all the way south and wind challenged all the way back.

I think I can probably sum up the Camargue in two sentences, so here goes.  It is flat, is partially reclaimed land from the sea, there are several large seawater lakes and is bounded by the Grand Rhone and the Petit Rhone rivers.  It is famous for black bulls, white horses, red rice and particularly its pink flamingos.

We crossed the Grand Rhone by ferry onto the rive gauche (left side of the river).

And then started the long cycle back.

We found our first lake?  Plenty of salt though.

We sang the theme song for 'White Horses', a girlie kind of children's series of our childhood.

We couldn't think of a song for black bulls but sang 'Little White Bull' by Tommy Steele instead.

On L'Etang Vaccares we spotted flamingos.  We had been very sensible to take some binoculars.  I thought that the Camargue Flamingos would be elusive like the red squirrel in Cumbria but we saw them straight away.  The photo doesn't really do it any justice but there were about 8 in the water about 100 metres from us and there were hundreds (collective noun is a 'flamboyance' of them in the distance.  We also saw swans, ducks, egrets, heron and cormorants. Seeing the flamingos made our day.  We sat and watched them for half an hour.  We sang 'Pretty Flamingo' a hit from the 60's but we couldn' remember who recorded it.  It turned out it was a Manfred Mann hit in 1966.

We rejoined the Grand Rhone on the way back to Arles.


We went straight back to the site.  We were wiped out.  We had done 52 miles in constant sun and had been wind blasted for the last 3 hours.....not complaining!

What we didn't see was a Rolls Royce Camargue but it didn't matter as we had a Rolls Royce Day anyway!

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