The first part of my trip was a bit of a challenge: thirty hours of continuous travel, and no sleep for forty hours. Every leg of the journey had to match the next in a short time span, and I was to be met at the Montréjeau railway station at a specific time. One missed connection would put my finances at risk. There were two flights by Icelandair (always more comfortable than most airlines because the hefty Icelanders require leg room) but, sadly, my stopover in Reikjavik was less than hour. No chance to stroll in one of my favourite towns. I could do nothing more than look out the window at the black lava fields around Keflavik.
I had worried about border hassles because of the terrorist attack in Brussels the previous day. Last year, Iceland withdrew its application for EU membership, which had only tentative support among the traditionally independence-minded Icelanders, but it remains perhaps the easiest entry point into Europe from Canada. No questions, a quick passport stamp, and I was in. I could walk straight from the plane at Roissy without going through customs. Roissy-Charles deGaulle is, however,an airport the size of a small city, and requires some navigation. After making my way through a maze of inclined tubes resembling a futuristic version of the staircases of Hogworts, I needed to take the driverless CDGVAL train five stations to the part of the airport where the Grande lignes of the SNCF trains depart for the south. There, I caught the train for Lyon, having time to spare only for a baguette with ham and cheese. The trains pull into the station at higher speeds than a Canadian train would go on open track. When underway, they accelerate to speeds that ViaRail in Canada could not imagine. The Paris-Lyon run normaly goes at just a bit under 200 mph (320kph). Trains coming in the opposite direction whip by in a second, visible only as a blue blur. Like most travellers, I find rail travel vastly more comfortable, convenient, and civilized than air travel, and I’m ashamed that my country has let its rail service, once its pride, decay into incompetence and technical backwardness, while much of the rest of the world strides into the future.
At Lyon, I switched to another train, which took me on the longest rail segment of my voyage. It went through Avignon, Nîmes, Montpelier, Beziers, Narbonne, and Carcassone to Toulouse. An elderly lady explained to me the complex geology of the Massif central, a mostly Devonian/Permian structure that is mostly karstland, but with volcanic intrusions. I struggled to translate geological terms that I knew only in English. For example, I ventured “terrain de type Karst” but the correct form is “formation karstique”. This regions marks the transition from North to South, a division that is linguistic, cultural, climatic, and ecological. Once in the South,you are in a Mediterranean place. The architecture reflects it. Plenty of red-tiled roofs, plain stucco walls, and when you get down to the coast, palm trees.
By the time I passed through Carcassone, it was dark,so held little expectation that I would see its fabulous castle. But it is flood-lit, and so huge that I glimpsed it in the far distance in the train window opposite. At Toulouse, I did no more than take a few steps across a platform to get on my last train, a milk run that would take me to Montréjean, in the foothills of the Pyrénées. I shared a compartment with a snowboarder who yearned to visit British Columbia (a logical ambition for a snowboarder — he even knew who Ross Rebagliati was).He brought me to another compartment where a small group, young and old, was passing around a guitqr. The snowboarder didn’t play, but he sang excellent rap, pouring out a stream of lyrics without hesitation.
The train reached its destination on time to the minute (please take note, ViaRail). My host, M.Michel Uchan, spotted me instantly in the crowd of one, I being the only passenger to get off. M.Uchan has proven a most congenial host. He speaks French and Spanish, but no English. His French is the musical accent of the South, where the final vowels and consonants that are silent in standard French are clearly pronounced, and there is the rhythmic lilt you hear in Spanish, Catalan or Italian, rather than the machine-gun tempo of the North. Within a few minutes we were in Loubrès, a village of eighty people that is uncompromisingly rural and Occitan. M. Uchan operates a small fromagerie, which produces a local cheese of the variety known as Tomme de Pyrénées, which I am most eager to taste, but for the moment, forty hours without sleep sends me promptly to bed.
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