¡Buenas Weinachten!

We're spending Christmas day, to our surprise, in a campsite in Calpe, on the Costa Blanca in the Valencia region (not the Costa Brava as Stella has been telling people – not sure when we crossed the 'border').


We were keen to get into a proper site where we could celebrate the festive season with unlimited showers, mains electricity, hanging our washing out to dry and not being moved on by the police, having a drink at lunchtime and not having to drive in the afternoon.  We only called into Calpe to reconnoitre for a later visit when the Swansea Dunstones come south in January, but the campsite was much nicer than the one we'd planned ... so here we are.

We're surrounded by lovely German, Dutch and a few British people.  We were hoping to have an opportunity to improve our Spanish during this trip, but so far this Christmas it's our rusty 'O' level German that's been exercised.  Most of the others are here for weeks or even months, settled in big caravans with big awnings with the full paraphernalia of fairy lights, Christmas trees and a full set of electric kitchen appliances.  On our first morning our neighbours took charge and badgered us into moving our van to a sunnier pitch.  We moved with some grumbling, but the result was that we spent Christmas morning eating pancakes outside while Scooby (AKA 'Liebe Hündchen') basked in the sunshine.

Big parts of the town have a very German flavour.  There's a bar by the supermarket called 'Ambiente Aleman' where Germans sit at the bar drinking lager and eating sausage with sauerkraut and dumplings, and the local baker has a pretzel logo.  We'd be much less tolerant of their British equivalents, but Germans do Gemütlich so well that so far it just makes us want to visit Germany in the summer.

At mid-day on Christmas day we were disturbed from sunning ourselves by a car moving slowly through the site tooting its horn, then delighted to find it was the family who own the site distributing a bottle of cava and a rose in a gift bag to each pitch.  Finally we got to say '¡Feliz Navidad!' to someone!

Our neighbours are so delighted with the warm weather and the sunshine, it's impossible to continue to fool ourselves into believing that December in northern Europe is anything other than miserable.  Will we ever be able to put up with it again?  Will you be able to put up with it again after reading this? Will you be able to put up with us when we get back?

On Christmas Eve we watched some Spanish TV – very different from what we'd expect in Britain. One item was a long 'round up' of what the Spanish royal family have been up to this year followed by the King's annual speech. He spent most of his speech discussing the economic crisis, saying how important it was that all Spaniards should unite to overcome it. He also had a photo in the background of the Spanish World Cup team and said how proud everyone was of their achievement.

However, the following programme, which was extremely entertaining, had features on how various groups of people were celebrating Christmas in different parts of Spain. This programme highlighted the diversity of Spain – and made us wonder if the King had any chance of uniting the country, if he even really has a single country to unite. The programme featured rough female cockle pickers in Galicia, doing a hard, cold job in icy December waters, dressed up for Christmas and very respectable but obviously very poor; wild gypsy-like people from Jerez who sang and danced lustily in a very un-european way  – even a granny of about 70 was flashing her legs and giving a full flamenco performance on camera; a very camp drag queen from Seville who was having a ball with some very odd friends in his apartment; and a group of incredibly elegant and sophisticated Porsche-driving 'beautiful people' from Majorca who were so rich and stylish that it hurt.  What do they have in common apart from having the same King on their stamps?

On the way down here in the run-up to Christmas we passed through Catalonia.  We're planning to  go back later but didn't dare stay for Christmas because they're too odd.  A typical trip to Barcelona doesn't give anything like the full impression.  Too odd.  We thought we'd best leave them to themselves.

Last year on British TV the Jonathan Ross show was very excited to find out about the Catalan tradition of the 'caganer'; the figure in the traditional nativity scene who squats in a quiet corner, defecating.  Ross had models specially made of himself and his guests, but the shops in Llieda routinely sell models of defecating politicians, royalty, footballers, Simpsons characters and the Statue of Liberty.

In the run up to Christmas the shops and market stalls all over Catalonia are full of Caga Tiós.  They're unusual, but a bit cute; something between a log and a dog. 

Stella loved them and we thought we might buy a small one if we weren't so short of space.  However, with a bit of Googling we find they are the traditional shitting/ giving log that Catalan children beat with sticks, while singing traditional songs, so that they defecate dried fruit and sweets for them.

During a brief visit to Valls, in the Catalan heartland north of Tarragona, we came across another Catalan tradition that even the BBC didn't uncover.  On the sweet stall in the market were 'Primaveras', which looked like this:

During our first brief visit to Catalonia in the autumn they were preparing for their general election for the Catalan  parliament.  One of the candidates, an advocate of independence, used the slogan 'To be Catalan is to work hard and think clearly'.

He forgot to say 'and to be preoccupied with faeces'.  Or is it that the Catalans are normal and everyone else is odd?

¡Bones festes! (that's Valencian, by the way) one and all.

A Spot of Gardening in Languedoc

Our meanderings have been rather formless so far, as we enjoy the unprecedented opportunity to follow our noses and the weather forecast.  One of the few places we were definitely going to visit was Cazouls lés Béziers, a small town in Languedoc, home of Rémy André.

We (the Swansea Dunstones) first met the Andrés in the late 1970s when we chanced on their restaurant 'Au Bon Pasteur' in a back street of Carcassonne.  Rémy was poised and charming front of house, making it all look calm, while Giselle toiled in the oppressive heat of the tiny kitchen.  My little sister and his little son started playing together, we got chatting and kept in touch.  I spent a few weeks with them in the 1980s, then more or less lost contact until after they had retired from the restaurant business. 

With their new found freedom they started to think about travelling, and came to see us in Wales in 2005. We all had a wonderful, if exhausting, time.  It left me thinking how stupid I'd been to stay out of touch for so long, as much through embarrassment at my rusty French as anything else.  A few months later, Giselle had a horrible accident (you are happier for not knowing the details) and died.

Rémy won't mind me saying that in many ways he's a caricature Frenchman of the old sort.  He's spent his working life cooking and serving food, has very strong opinions about how it should be done, and normally considers the traditional French way to be best.  Usually, faced with the resulting meal, it's hard to disagree with him.  After retiring from the restaurant he slipped further into the stereotype, cultivating a luxuriant moustache and taking over a few parcels of vines to keep himself busy.

His English is good, honed during two years of working for Cunard, but rusty with lack of use.  We both had good French 'O' levels but the decades have eaten away at our skills leaving us with one and a half tenses each and a strange patchy vocabulary all mixed up with Welsh and Spanish.  Given that, conversation is surprisingly easy.  Rémy remembers enough English to help out, knows how to simplify his French for us, and anyway likes to talk in gestures and comic-strip sound bubbles as much as in ordinary words, so we get along 'pas mal'.

He has a bottomless fund of tales from a busy life; childhood in cool green Brittany, national service on a fisheries protection vessel in the North Atlantic, two years being the perfect French waiter for Cunard, time in restaurants in Paris, before Giselle and he took the plunge and opened their own place in Carcassonne.  During his decades in the south the sun and the wine and the olives have marinaded him until he's become a native, embedded in the culture and traditions of the Midi*.

We stayed with him for two days in early December, did a circuit of the Hérault region and returned for another quick visit (partly to pick up some parcels he was keeping for us).  We had intended to spend just a Friday night with him, but he had a special treat arranged for the Sunday morning (12 December) so we were persuaded to hang on.

On Sunday morning in the big blue van we followed Rémy out of Cazouls into the sunny vineyards.  We arrived next to a little farm building (a 'Grangette') a little after 10am, to find some of the others had already started. .

The event was an annual working party that's developed into a tradition.  We were faced with a vineyard of old, gnarled vines, with no steel wires, growing unsupported like small trees, but with this year's growth of vines sprawling across the stems and across the ground like brambles.  The job today was to cut the trailing shoots short and pile them into bundles for burning. Someone would have to work their way through later doing the detail of the pruning, but at least they would not have to do it in a tangled thicket of vines.

The team of people worked their way down half a dozen rows, then collected the bundles for the fire and returned to start another set of rows. The atmosphere was more like a party than real work (although it was tough on the hands and elbows after a few hours).  There was lots of chat and laughing, tiny children on pink plastic tractors getting in the way, and dogs romping and digging amongst the vines.

Everyone here seemed to have a clean-shoed day job, but country roots.  In this area, it seems the wine industry is kept alive by the weekend labour of office workers yearning for some fresh air, wood smoke and to take care of grand-dad's vines.

The work was all done by one o'clock.  We returned to the fire where a couple of metres of sausage had been cooked on a grill, potatoes had been baked in the embers of the vine trimmings and mountains of bread, pate, wine, home cured olives, saussison were laid out on a picnic blanket.  More chat and laughs, sitting around a heap of good food in the sunshine.  We visitors probably understood around half of the chat, but got most of the joie de vivre.

But we had miles to go and Spain to see, so at about 3pm we said our farewells and headed off south.

*  However, an odd fact – Rémy was the only person present to refer to the potatoes as 'pommes de terre' rather than 'patatas'.  Everyone there was proudly French, but the influence of Spain, Catalonia and Languedoc is strong in this area.

Celebrating the Birth of the Baby Cheeses

We were heading East on the D999; really heading for an aire de stationment and the famous viaduct at Millau, when we were distracted by signs for Roquefort sur Soulzon, home of the world famous Roquefort cheese.

We spent the night in the car park in front of the tourist information office, looking up the hill at the steeply sloping village sheltered by sheer floodlit cliffs.

The following morning (9th December) we headed off on foot towards the cheese caves operated by the 'Papillon' company, where two uncomfortably cold looking young blonde women were waiting in a big cheese shop just inside the entrance.  One of them took us downstairs to show us a film of cheese making at Papillon in the 1920s and now, then led us down steep narrow staircases to the caves. 

The caves consist of low ceilinged underground rooms filled with damp looking oak shelves.  The walls are largely concrete, but some are chiselled out of the stone.  In places they've taken care to leave open the natural faults which ventilate the caves.  The thing that makes the caves so special is that the flow of air through the faults in the rocks maintains them at a steady temperature and high humidity, ideal for maturing cheese.  Everywhere we went, thermometers and hygrometers were suspended in corners, to confirm that the temperature and humidity was, as expected, the same as it's been for centuries.

I was surprised (and alarmed!) to find the caves are hollowed out of the loose rock which was dislodged from the cliff by a volcanic eruption, not the bedrock itself.  If they were starting today I wonder if they would get permission to excavate into a heap of loose rock on top of which a village has been built!

It's a cramped place to move cheese around in large quantities, helped by a small cargo lift in one corner, but with low ceilings and narrow passages.  When we visited all the shelves were empty – she explained that production was just resuming after the lambing season, and the first cheeses were arriving from the dairy tomorrow!  Drat!

The process:
Milk from hundreds of sheep farms is taken to their dairy about 45 km from Roquefort.  The milk is warmed and rennett is added, then left for two hours to coagulate.

According to the film the founder of the company studied the old hand made processes and developed machines which replicate the movements of the old artisan cheese makers, cutting the curds with a mesh of steel wires then letting it stand again, then more cutting and stirring.

Curds are then transferred to cake tin sized cylindrical boxes (traditionally perforated metal, now plastic) for the whey to drain out.  Penicilium roquefortii powder is added to start the blueing.  Then it's packed into steel racks and turned every day (one person in ten seconds turning a steel cube which must hold over a tonne of cheese, compared to workers turning each cheese individually in the 1920s).  The consolidation and drying of the cheese is all through natural drainage under gravity – it's not pressed like cheddar would be.

Cheeses are then demoulded (now quite hard and safe for the machinery to roll it around) and salted  all over the surface.  Now they're ready for the caves and are drilled with many small holes to let air in, wrapped in perforated tin foil (real tin.  It stops a rind from forming, and avoids the need to scrub the cheeses clean before sale like they had to in the 1920s) and stood on their sides on the wooden racking.

Once ready, months later, they're unwrapped, cut in half to check the blueing has progressed evenly, then packaged.  There are several varieties: gold wrapping for the premium brand with most ageing (sold in a velvet lined metal box as if it was a watch), then black for the classic version, and a milder younger cheese in red packaging.  Since 1977 Papillon have also produced a white and green organic version; one of the first organic products to be certified in France.

To reach a wider market Papillon have developed a range of other cheeses and olive oil.  All impressive and very tasty.  We remembered how short of space we are and restricted ourselves to half a dozen sixty degree slices as gifts to friends and to ourselves.

Before we left the UK we rashly discussed a cookery book with a few people.  It's not going well.  So far it only has three recipes in it, but this one is ridiculously quick, easy and delicious.

Ingredients (serves two):
Four hands full of penne
Two small dark green courgettes cut into hazel nut sized chunks.
A chunk of creamy Roquefort (How big?  Let your conscience be your guide!  A golf-ball sized piece should do it.)

Method:
Bring a large pan of water to boil (no need for salt), then add the pasta and simmer.  Three minutes short of the pasta being ready, add the courgette.  Return to the boil, finish cooking the pasta.
Drain, add the Roquefort, let it melt and stir it through.

Ideally eat it with some crusty French bread and a bottle of Corbières.

Surrounded by soft southerners!

We're still in the Hérault Departement in Languedoc.  After a few days in the hills around Lodève we're moved down to the Mediterranean coast and are parked up in Mèze near Sète.

We're surrounded by people complaining about the cold, and keep reminding them that they are actually living on a narrow strip of habitable terrain on the southern fringe of a frozen continent.  They don't believe us.

On Friday night we stayed at a France Passion site at a winery just outside Mèze.  The proprietor was an unhappy bundle of clothes behind the counter.  When we told her she was living in the warmest part of Europe she turned dreamy and started wistfully listing places that might be warmer “... Málaga, Palermo …. maybe Corsica...”.  We cheered her up a little by buying a lot of her products.

It was chilly in the mountains -  some frost and ice on the puddles in the morning, but bright and sunny during the day.  The 6kg refill of propane that lasted us a month in Blaye in September has gone in a week (but we have not been using mains power much, so that gas has heated our water, space heating as well as cooking).

Yesterday on the beach between Sète and Agde the sky and the sea were both a deep blue, and the air was so clear we could see the tops of yachts' masts peeking over the horizon.  It wasn't sun-bathing weather but one fleece was enough.  We were glad we were there rather than Porthcawl. Scooby had his first paddle in the Mediterranean, but we didn't join him.

In the supermarket everyone was wrapped up warmly, including several elderly ladies in full length Muscovite fur coats and hats.  When we called into Mr Bricolage for some chemical toilet fluid, it was obvious that everything to do with heating and insulation was selling well.  The man in front of me had his arms full of pipe lagging, the man behind was cradling an electric radiator, and in the carpark a member of staff was assembling a gas fired radiant heater to show a shivering dark skinned couple how it worked. 

They don't seem to be at all prepared for this weather.  I no longer feel that I'm the nesh one!  I suppose it's partly because we're from further north, but also I think living in the van has toughened us up a bit.

To put it in perspective, for anyone who's reading this later on; this is the week when Gatwick airport was closed by snow, commuters in South East England were stranded on trains for ten hours, it was minus 20°C in Scotland, minus 17°C in Builth Wells and minus 6°C in Swansea  In France the weather took up half the national news, the main A75 motorway between Clemont-Ferrand and Montpellier was closed by snow, and the Rhône Departement opened its leisure centres to house rough sleepers.

The Pyrenees

We're glad we visited the Ebro valley, but after a few days in the area around Zaragoza we were starting to get a bit downhearted.  It's intensely cultivated countryside with very little to see in autumn apart from stubble and sad patches of wilting vegetables.  It's also dry and grey, and the industrial hinterland of Zaragoza sprawls for miles beyond the city.  Central Zaragoza was interesting for a few hours' visit, but most of the features that are more than about thirty years old seem to be associated with the most alien and alienating strand of Spanish Catholicism.

So our hearts were lifted when we headed northwards and upwards into the green space, pure air and clear skies of the Pyrenees.

We've had a good snoop around, trying to see as much as we can before the weather gets too cold or snow closes the passes.  We've had a look at the Ordessa Y Monte Perdido National Park, shopped in crazy Andorra, taken a quick loop through the western edge of Catalonia , over the mountains into Ariege in France, then to Gavarnie in Midi Pyrenees where we've seen the north face of Mont Perdu (the same Monte Perdido that we were admiring from the south a couple of weeks ago).

Our impressions:

	Blimey they're big.  No surprise really, I knew they were big, but they still made an impression.  Mount Snowdon is a little over 1,000 metres tall, and the parks authority can barely keep a rack railway and a cafe operating on the barren summit.  At 1,000 metres here, there are tables on the terrace with views of the peaks looming over you.  If the road goes up over 2,000 metres you might want to check it's not closed by snow.  It's only the 3,000 metre peaks that people really dress up for.
	They're very steep. Exploring the mountains is much easier with walking poles, but there is still a definite tendency towards sore thigh and calf muscles the day after a long hike. Fortunately the views from the top always make the climb worthwhile. I'm so glad that neither of us suffer from vertigo or we would have missed some amazing views.
	They're very obviously growing.  The Iberian peninsular is drifting into the rest of Europe, and the resulting crunch is throwing up this wrinkle of land that is the Pyrenees.  It's happening very quickly, a few centimetres a year (Yawn!).  OK it doesn't sound like much, but it's really obvious that it's happening.  There's a sense of mountains bursting through the earth like mushrooms, with dirt falling off them as they expand.  Stuff is falling  off everywhere; craggy frost shattered peaks are shedding scree, river gorges are choked with boulders and mountain roads have traffic lights that turn red when avalanches cross the road.
	People are much slower than dogs at running up hills – four legs are better than two.
	Snow makes everything look gorgeous and in the Pyrenees is it particularly bright, shiny and clean. It's hard to stop taking photos of snow topped mountains with the sun shining brightly in a clear blue sky (it's even harder to stop when you've located the 'snow' setting on the camera and start getting some decent shots!)
	When we go high up they make a big fuss about the view.  Views are boring.  What's the point in looking at a thing if you can't smell it?
	They're culturally diverse.  For most of human history it's been so hard to get around in this terrain that pockets of distinct culture have been able to survive (most obviously Basque and Catalan).  Every valley has its own cheese of course.  At Gavarnie I knew that Spain was less than 5 kilometres away, but looking up at Mont Perdu it seemed obvious why these folk spoke French and their neighbours spoke Spanish; there was no way they were going to be socialising across that barrier.  Then a national park interpretation  board gave another perspective; until the nineteenth century there was no road from Gavarnie to France either, and people here may well have spoken Spanish and met their Spanish neighbours as often (rarely) as they did people from the rest of France.
	Snow's brilliant for thirty minutes. It's almost as good as the beach; you can dig in it and you can pretend to lose your toy in it and you can put your nose in it.  After thirty minutes it makes hard bits on the fur between your pads and you have to go and stand somewhere where there's no snow like under a tree or like on top of a person.
	Leaving footprints in deep, pure white snow always gives me a thrill, and finding places where the snow is powdery, fresh and nearly comes up to my knees is very exciting. I loved finding animal tracks in the snow too and trying to decide what they were – I'm sure we saw Izard tracks at the Cirque de Gavarnie which was very exciting; wish we'd seen the actual animal though. Basically, snow is fantastic when you don't have to try and drive to work in it!
	It's biologically diverse.  Many of the places we've visited have a broadly familiar looking vegetation; oak, beech, birch etc, but half the obvious plants look completely unfamiliar.  The sky is full of raptors, the woods are full of weird and wonderful mammals (in spite of the efforts of the hunters).  There are various reasons for this; the extreme variations in altitude provide a wider range of habitats, being part of mainland Europe means more species can reach the area.  I knew this, it's not a surprise, but it still made an impression.
	In the snow things hide under the snow.  You can smell them and you can hear them and you can  pounce on them but you can not see them.
	We may have, by chance, picked the very best time to explore the Pyrenees. Any warmer and the uphill climbs would have been unbearable, any colder and we'd have had trouble with the roads and stopping the water in the van's tanks from freezing. We were also completely out of tourist season; too late for the summer visitors and too early for the skiers. That could have been a problem if we'd needed hotels and restaurants, but with a quick stop at a supermarket before heading off to the isolated spots, we had everything we needed in the van. On some days we walked for hours and barely saw another person. Some of the villages were almost completely closed, with rows of gift shops, cafés and even food shops shut up while the owners presumably have a rest before the winter season starts in mid December. Thankfully it also meant we could 'free park' overnight without anyone minding.
	When we go up high I need an extra sleeping bag inside my usual sleeping bag.  It's a good idea that I had that they should buy that for me.
	It's a great place to visit but I don't think I'm tough enough to live there.