Voila Vincent: Cathar eyries and Eus

We had, then, barely 54 kilometres to travel to our house in Eus, but that took us most of one very hot parched day. How these Cathars chose hot dry climes in which to dwell! We stop for our mid-morning coffee at a little Bar-Tabac in a featureless little village, whose name I can’t remember. We are now avoiding hotels and restaurants, heading for Bar-Tabacs in tiny towns. Often they are the only shops open in such villages. Their espresso is usually superb and the owners love that we are Australian, and chat to us incessantly, as if we understand every enthusiastic word they utter. Ah, to do so.

We stop again to see the Cathar strongholds of Puilaurens and Queribus enroute from Carcasonne. Both are built halfway to heaven. Puilaurens, more so. It was first a Visigoth fortress, and only later became one of the ‘five sons of Carcassone’. The Cathars held it until the Crusade crushed them. Today, it looks as if a supreme architect designed its shape, so that its snaggle-toothed stone crenelations replicate the snaggled edges of the sharp stone topped mountains that encase, guard and seem to protect it.

Queribus, similarly, grows in pure lines, straight up, out of the very rocks from which it was made – pure, organic, elegant architecture. I wish more architects appreciated context and created so organically.

Access to the castles is vertical and dangerous, even for sure-footed mountain goats, who, surely, would not choose to walk these places. How anyone conceived of a construction in such a place is the first question. Then, how any human climbed to the top with one masonry brick, let alone clung to pile one atop the other might make a tale in the telling, akin to the amazing theories of construction of the pyramids, of Stonehenge, and the like. Marvels. They are marvels, and surely wonders of engineering and design.

We stopped for groceries and goodies in Prades (pronounced, Prada: our shopping stop for our stay in Eus) then make what we think is our final stop for the night, a carpark outside the Mairie (Mayor’s office) at the top of the village of Eus. We are to be here for two months.

Later it turns out that we have to move our camping car as we are in the wrong section of the village. We eventually find that we live in another even more difficult to access part of town, but, because there are often so many day tourists here, we find we have to park way away from where we would like to, anyway.

Bec and I leave the motorhome loaded up with sacks of groceries, loose bags of toothbrushes, pyjamas, laptops and wallets, as we hunt down our house. Peter spurns carting anything. He will, he says, come back later for his stuff. Wise words, in hindsight.

Eus, like Puilaurens and Queribus, is built on a slope halfway to heaven. The sun is hot, the Mairie is shut, the folk wandering the streets appear to be tourists as Eus itself is on the list of France’s most beautiful villages so it sees its fair share of tourist traffic. The local residents are probably all indoors for siesta. Spain is just over the top of the pointed Pyrenees behind us. Since Albi, we have noticed the countryside is turning quite Spanish. Entrances to fermes have a stuccoed, even an adobe look about them: there are more pink tiles and that Santa Fe scruffiness that we have come to love.

Eus streets are like medieval alleys, rising vertically to the sky, twisted, interconnected, maze-like. No one we speak to knows the address we are seeking: no one, it seems, knows the owners, even the one or two locals we think we are asking. We are, and this is rare for us, but twice now on this trip: lost.

Much to Peter’s chagrin we end up phoning our friends, the owners, who live in England and get the first set of directions. We head off again, purposefully. We think. Half an hour later, dripping with sweat and long divested of our plastic bags and treasures that we leave somewhere against a stone guardrail protecting a deadly precipice, up or down, who remembers? we phone yet again. Lost still.

Again, we are given directions. Again we think we are clearer. We think. But we are lost, yet again. I am sure there must be tourists who turn up in Eus one day and find themselves surfacing from these winding mysterious alleys days later. A little like Venice where tourists are guaranteed disorientation and loss. Which is half the fun, there, actually. Here, though, it is hilly and today is a hellishingly hot day.

I can’t remember how often we do this, but, finally, Anita, bless her stoicism! realises she’ll have to stay online, and guides us with baby-steps, through the maze until we arrive at her front door, search for the key, which, too, stubbornly evades our quick search, until la! we enter a cool and shuttered interior. Our home for the next two months in the Pyrennees-Orientales. At last! It is nearly dark. This has taken us most of the day. We feel a little idiotic.

Now, we need to go back and find our goods and chattels discarded enroute; then haul them high and low, like the Visigoths and the Cathars before us: every bell, book and candle that we need has to come from the camping car to this little house for the next little while. At least, until we leave again. Which won’t be too soon if I have anything to say about it

Before we head off to retrieve our possessions, we open the bedroom shutters on the top floor of our clifftop home and look straight out and up at the majesty of Pic du Canigou, opposite, which rises higher than the clouds, and almost as high as the Pyrennees get. We will wake to this amazing sight every single morning. We can even see it from our bed. Ooh-laaah! the charms of a mountain high eyrie!