Thursday, March 24, 2016 — A Voyage to Blefuscu

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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