Montpeiler to Nimes

Somehow this year we keep popping up in cities, when our preference is for small towns, even villages. Most cities we really should continue to bypass, but we are often too inquisitive, so we find we must stop and many times we wonder why. Montpelier, though, is one of the good ones. Again, we had fun searching for a parking space in its narrow inner-city streets, but ended up wriggling our way into the last spare spot in an open parking space very close to the old town centre.

Montpelier is the capital of the Languedoc department and currently most of the streets, lanes and plazas are under construction. Workers are building a tramway through the heart of the city and large excavations appear like gaping wounds all over the centre, exposing subterranean plumbing pipes, sewerage, ancient foundations and other detritus, usually hidden from sight.

Notwithstanding this, Montpelier’s centre has a lovely feel to it. It is a university town, so there are alleys filled with students and bookstores, a mix we always enjoy. Added to which are dozens of interesting little coffee shops, specialty boutiques, and stacks of noisy and excited tourists thick on the ground in the Place de la Comedie, which has grand buildings with elaborate facades that keep the camera shutters clicking, so the mood all over the city is great. And it feels fun.

On to Nimes, where more road construction, tiny arterial routes, after-school bumper to bumper cars, and traffic building up for a large wine and food festival in the heart of the city that evening, plays havoc with our patience as we try to park (again, we luck out on a brilliant park) then, later on in the day, attempt to leave. Quelle horreur! Tho’ we actually managed all that with some ease.

Nimes has a brilliant old arched bullring, Les Arenes. It is quite amazing to think that the heavy hewn stones that make up most of this arena were placed here by Roman workers some 2,000 years ago. Today it is one of the most beautifully preserved bullrings in France, and from here you can literally feel the city throbbing and pulsing, priming up for this evening’s entertainment and bullfight.

Thousand of folk were pouring into the city centre for the evening events. On every street corner there were bands, buskers, and muzac; and every single restaurant in town (and a few were specially set out and rigged up just for the evening) was primed ready to serve the masses. Paella, tonight, was definitely the favoured item on most menus.

These days, the noble bull, is no longer killed. Instead groups of matadors manage to entertain the crowds by retrieving red tassels from the bull’s horns, a trying and skilful play, which keeps the hoards happy given the early queues at the arched gates.

One of the most amazing events in the centre ville was a group of drummers and a swinging trapeze artist who were playing and swaying as they were hung and swung as if they were a human mobile from a crane at least 4 stories high. The crane was raised and lowered, as they performed, to each of the four corners of the square. Super brave.

We picked up a piece of fascinating trivia in Nimes, too: when Levi-Strauss set about importing suitable cloth to make his sturdy work jeans for farmers in America in 1848, he imported heavy woven cotton which came through Nimois tailors, out of Egypt. When the bolts arrived at his factory they were marked from Nimes, de Nimes. Hence the evolution of the word, denim.

Tonight we camp in a vineyard, and as it is now grape harvesting season we are invited to watch the grapes that had just been harvested from the surrounding fields around our camping car, being poured into the rotating press near the cellar door. Stalks and skins are spat out and reloaded onto a truck to be used in the fields as fertilizer, while the grape juice is piped into vats inside the building for fermentation. Local folk keep wandering in to the cave while we watch, refilling their empty bottles for the evening meal.

Wines from here are sold locally, and to markets in America and Mexico. We were warned, with a wink, that they are looking for distributors for new sales in Australia. For that we need another life, and on lovely evenings, like this, one, we often wish that was possible.

Place de la Comedie, Montpelier

Les Arenes, Nimes

Drummers making music while hanging from a crane, Nimes

Grape crushing at our vineyard stopover tonight