To the Camargue and back ...

One of Carons 'must sees' has been to go to the Camargue to see the wild horses there but unfortuntely for her, there is precious little Camargue left and absolutely no trace of wild horses that we could find. Very disappointing! We did find a little bit of the Camargue that we were expecting which is a salt water marsh which looks like below.

But this was the minority of the scenery, most of it has been developed as vineyards, stud farms for bulls and horses and worst of all, holiday accommodation which looks like this which is what we had a view of while we had lunch. We got a bit sand blasted while we ate by the wind which is called the Mistral here. I don't think that it's quite as bad as Cape Towns wind because the trees are still upright but it's pretty bad nonetheless.

Not a pretty sight at all. We did however see a few flamingo's which were quite beautiful as usual. We had to take a ferry over a river in order to get to Saint Maries de la Mer which was quite fun. We had arrived on the one side and there was a queue of cars waiting for the ferryman to arrive so we decided to get a cup of coffee while we waited. As usual, our timing wasn't so good and the coffee and the ferry both arrived at the same time so we had to drink super quick and I don't think Caron even finished hers. The ferryman wasn't hanging around either, as soon as we had driven on, we were the last in the queue, the gates closed and we were off.

We also spotted mellman looking at the horses thinking "Where did all the stripes go?" and "Those sure are strange looking buffalo!"

After the disappointment of the Camargue we were off to Arles, the town made famous by Van Gogh but although he's obviously a big deal from tourism's point of view, there isn't a decent museum or history of his life or even a 'van gogh walk'. I did however buy a small souvenir which is a small book detailing his life and works which I found really interesting. I'm going to go back to Arles tomorrow and try and find some of the places he painted and take photographs from where he would have painted them. I think it could make an interesting study.

While we walked around Arles looking at the roman amphitheatre which is pretty amazing given that it is 2000 years old I took a couple of photos that seemed interesting.


A short drive and we were home to luke warm showers, a great pasta supper and a nice warm, dry and comfortable bed. Life could be whole lot worse!