Aix-en-Provence-or-not

The saga all started when the alarm went off at 4.30am on Saturday morning (kind of like the good old days working at the airport). We put on our walking shoes and our backpacks and headed out the door and towards the train station. As we entered the station after our brisk 40-minute walk (you may think we were stupid but there are no buses at 5am in Dijon so we had no choice!), we got excited. We were going to Aix-en-Provence to meet up with my sister, Jo, for a couple of minutes before she left to return to England.

Alas!!! A sign displayed at the entry to the departures level informed us that due to strikes the past few days (surprise, surprise), some trains had been cancelled and we were all of a sudden not going to Aix. What to do, what to do? Cry? No, another girl was already doing that at the counter next to us. Get angry? No, that's too American (sorry!). Get our money back? Yep. Got it. We caught a bus home after a cuppa at the train station café and regrouped. For the simple reason that we did not want to stay at the horrible fac all weekend we decided to hire a car and go on a tour of our local Burgundy area.

From the time I was old enough to be given a sample of wine at the dinner table (about 3 years old or so…), my father had gone on about the fabulous wine at Nuits St Georges in France. Just after we’d arrived in Dijon we realised that it was just south of us on the way to Beaune. So this was our goal for the weekend: we would drive to Nuits St Georges, sample the lovely wine and enjoy the country town feel.

Alas! It didn’t have such a country town feel. It was a boring town with nothing to attract us young wine lovers other than a Cassissium. So we went there. After all, it had free tasting of crème de cassis! And actually it turned out to be very informative about the life and times of the blackcurrant.

Unfortunately it wasn’t going to keep us entertained all weekend and so we had to come up with another plan (Plan Z?). With us we had a Michelin Guide to the Burgundy and Jura areas and, after a thorough reading of about 2 pages, decided that we would head for the Morvan. Situated in the heart of Burgundy, this regional nature park had been described to us by friends native to the area as a great place to go for beautiful waterfalls, magnificent mountains and luscious green hills. It seemed just the place to relax and wind down after a bad start to the weekend.

After driving for what seemed like an age, we came across a place called Châteauneuf, an old fortified town set high up above a valley. We wound our way up the hill and into the town to check it out. We were mostly after a church where we could take shelter from the horrible heat (no air-conditioning).

As we sat admiring the vaulted ceiling from a pew, we contemplated what to do next. As it stood we didn’t have much direction and if we continued as we were, we’d end up driving around in circles all weekend and not really see or do anything out of the ordinary (other than drive around in a foreign country seeing amazing foreign things!). Something must have clicked in our heads because we suddenly had a brilliant idea. We would try and make our way to a little village called Rogny-les-Sept-Écluses (sept écluses – seven locks). Just before leaving Australia we'd been given a book to read on the plane to France called French Spirits by Jeffrey Greene. The story was based on an American couple who’d bought a disused presbytery in the village. We thought we might try to find the presbytery since we were in the neighbourhood (well, as far as Australia and Burgundy are concerned).

We bought a map and off we went in our little diesel car (with turbo for the boys). We made it to Rogny at about 9pm (broad daylight in other words) after a few hours of ambling along winding country roads.

We found that Rogny does indeed have seven locks, no longer in use, but still an impressive sight, rising 34 metres. They look like a giant staircase. I could see why they were a marvel of engineering at the time, built to overcome the large difference in height between the Loire River and the Loing River. These connected with the River Seine through a series of canals and rivers to form an important unbroken water trade route between the English Channel and the Mediterranean Sea. The old locks aren’t used anymore though. The Canal Briare, which runs through Rogny, was re-routed in 1880 around the old locks through six new locks.

I’d never seen a working lock in my life so I was captivated when a boat came through. I watched in awe as they closed the gates behind the boat and slowly let the water in under the front gates from the river ahead, which was higher. Then when the water levels were the same, the gates opened to allow the boat to go on its journey. It was fascinating.

The next morning after breakfast on the terrace of our hotel, we ventured up the hill to the presbytery to see if it really did look like the picture on our book cover. We knew as soon as we came to the little square that it was. Exactly the same. And who did we encounter outside painting the very shutters that he’d talked about painting in his book, but the author himself! I was overcome with a strange feeling of already knowing the place through reading his book and like silly tourists we walked up to him and introduced ourselves. He was lovely and showed us around his property and we chatted away for about half an hour, after which time we got him to sign our copy of his book (first time I’ve ever got an autograph…well, there was that time I got one of the Wiggles to sign a piece of paper just before their flight to LA took off but that was for someone else…I swear!).

We needed to get the car back early the next morning but we had been told that Vézelay was definitely worth a visit and being on our way home, we decided to take a look. Our directions were to follow the signs to the autoroute (you can sometimes drive 50km to get to the autoroute just by following the signs!), and along the way we’d find Vézelay. Suddenly, out of nowhere, the massive stone steeples of a church rose up from a perched village on a distant hilltop.

I don’t know what draws me to these kinds of big stone structures. Perhaps it’s the fact that in Australia we only have a small number of stone buildings less than 200 years old. Whatever it is, the Basilique Ste-Madeleine in Vézelay really did loom up and although you can imagine it’s big from a distance, up close it’s absolutely massive.

We parked our car in the pay parking and headed up the steep cobblestone street to the main square outside the church (where of course we discovered there was free parking!). We also wanted a bit of lunch seeing as how it was already nearly 2pm and that’s when all the food places tend to close for the day in France. I can’t even remember what we ate for lunch it was that unmemorable! It was probably something French like onion tart and salad.

We followed a group of tourists around with a monk explaining in detail the different features of the basilica. It’s amazing how informative some guided tours are. It’s a bit hit and miss but if you get a good one you’ll always learn something interesting that you just won’t get out of the self-guided tours.

What started off as an abbey church then a parish church was raised to the status of basilica in 1920 (don’t know what the difference between all these are…their physical size?). Back in the 12th century, St. Bernard preached the 2nd Crusade from its steps and almost 50 years later, it was at Vézelay that the French King Phillipe-Auguste and the English King Richard the Lionheart met before their departure on the 3rd Crusade. Its main features are its capitals and its tympanum. Now, if most of you are like me, you won’t have a clue what these are! Well, I found out (one of the many things I learned during our hot summer of visiting churches to escape the heat!). At the main doorway into the church is normally an arch decorated with statues set around a sculptured centrepiece. This centrepiece, or tympanum, is meant to symbolise the mission given by Jesus to the Apostles upon his ascension into Heaven: to spread the Word of God. Pilgrims coming to the Ste-Madeleine to look at the relics of Mary Magdalene in its crypt would have been welcomed by reassuring stories of salvation after a long and hard journey. Not being very arty I would usually just take a quick look, say, “Ahh” or, “Ooh”, and move on. With our monk guide we stopped for a good 15 minutes and studied in detail the story depicted in the sculpture and its interpretations and I actually learned something.

The group moved on into the main hall of the basilica and the monk took us through some of the capitals. At the top of the pillars lining the sides of the hall are sculptures that depict different scenes and images depending on the artist and the period they’re constructed in. These are called capitals. Again, I actually saw the scenes the stone carvings represented instead of just looking and moving on to the next point of interest written in the guide book. There was such expression in the faces of the stone figures and such detail in the animal statuettes. It really is amazing how talented the artists were. These days art means many things but I think they had it pretty spot on back then (again, I speak as a layperson in the artist world!). 

Our tour ended and we went for a stroll around the back of the basilica to find the gardens and view of the countryside our guide book told us about. To our surprise, there was a fair in full swing, complete with children’s competitions and stalls selling all kinds of wares. We tasted honeys and watched woodcarvers before taking some pictures of what we thought might be Dijon (a mere 140km away!), which reminded us that we should be getting home. And so ended a spur-of-the-moment weekend trip. And we still haven’t been to Aix!