All the photos I didn't take today
We are on Belle Ile, France. It's so lovely that we've decided to stay most of the summer.
It's so lovely that I don't have any photos for you, but there are plenty on the internet! Just look up Belle Ile.
Yesterday Yarrow spent four hours playing in the surf (the water's pretty cold on that side of the island, so I spent it mostly reading my book) (English books are in short supply! Eep! Must find solution!).
I have gone swimming twice, both times without Yarrow: one day after work with a guy called Sebastien who's doing his "stage" at our farm (he mostly walks around drawing plants and making plans, I think), and today with the daughter of the house, who's called Lude, and Marie, another WWOOFer. We had gone down to the sea to pick up seaweed for eating. Yarrow went back early because somehow he wasn't loving hanging at the seashore at low tide as much as I was, so he missed my second swim on the warmer side of the island, but then, he's a bit "comme un tomate" today anyway so I thought he might not have minded a day off swimming.
I learned a lot about eating seaweed from Lydie, the mom. On our walk today there were little berries at the end of some seaweed which you can eat but taste exactly like nothing. Not even like salty nothing, just nothing.
And there was red dulse, and red agar-agar-like stuff, which tasted yummy too. And transparent green sea lettuce, which tasted quite salty. And nori, like sushi seaweed. And giant bull kelp (which we didn't pick for eating), and sea spaghetti (which I'm looking forward to trying when it's cooked).
All the beaches here (58 of them, I think) have their own characteristics. Donnant, which we were at yesterday, Yarrow particularly loved for the huge waves (it is, however, the most dangerous). Kerel, that we were at the day before, had a loooooooooong tidal plain. Yarrow built a circle of rocks like a little stone henge (hm, am I allowed to use that as a general noun?) and we watched the tide come up and surround it. Imagine a sort of tropical paradise. That's what it looked like.
Today, we went to Les Grandes Rocheuses (the big rocks) for the seaweed. It had, um, big rocks. And fortifications, of course. This beautiful little island has been fortified up the yin yang in various eras.
The tip of the island, which Sarah Bernhardt owned once, beats the heck out of the Cliffs of Moher, if you ask me. Cliffs and waves crashing against rocks and wild flowers and birds and... isolation! Plenty of privacy here right now, though it's easy to imagine it full of tourists. Since we're staying, I guess we'll find out!
And my favourite beach so far, which is really seriously like a tropical paradise (except the water is not as warm), is called Berourarde (I think). It's the closest one to the farm (well, the closest big one). There are plenty of places, like the Big Rocks beach we went to today, saying that it's interdit sauf que riverains. That means people who live here, which I guess we are! For now, at least!
For people who don't live here, the bar we are writing at right now (because we get into chats if we write at home though there is comfy unlimited internet there, a first in our wwoofing experience) has a friendly little sign in the window and in the bathroom saying that you can address your post here if you like. :) Yarrow and I didn't agree with all the Irish people who tried to tell us the French weren't friendly, but we'd like to double-down on saying that we think the French are plenty friendly.
I asked the AXA insurance man here about getting car insurance when I'm Canadian and he was all like "No Problem! We totally accept Canadians." Sigh. How nutso crazy it was of me to try to get a vehicle in Ireland! Anyway, the little Golf that we traded the campervan for is a pretty fun little car. We're going along in fine convenience.
I do note, however, that this is a perfect island for bicycling and it would have been grand, in fact, to not have a car here. We may get bicycles also. The problem is, when you have a car, it's easy to take the car and not bike anywhere. However, biking sure would be good for the fatso Bedwins! And Clara and Ala could get little pilot boxes to come along! (Yarrow says no.)
The sand at the beach today was very hard on the feet -- all made of vegetable coral -- but the rest of the beaches we have visited so far have lovely blonde sand.
Ah -- I forgot two beaches that we went to down at the other end, by Port Marie. They had good sand too and the one of them had a huge long swimming pool of a basin to go with it (which is a long flat stretch of sand when the tide is out -- plenty of loooooong tide beaches here, which makes it a bit like The Bay of Fundy, which is another place that I love).
We were there because we were invited by a lovely couple that I met on the beach the first day I went out swimming. She gave me some beach treasures and they invited us for dinner. We also went for a walk (down to the swimming pool beach) and swimming in the swimming pool of their holiday village (which was almost empty except for them). The holiday village also yielded a book in English! It's not a super-exciting book, but a nice thing about it is that it has translations into French along the side, because it's meant for French people who want to read an English book. I realize that I will take any English book I can get these days. Mere days ago we were in Dublin with Eamon at a hugemongous second-hand bookstore where I easily could have bought 20 interesting English books... now that was foolish restraint, so it was. At least we got 3 books, and one of them is a weighty tome of interesting history. Two others were interesting but quickly read Michael Murporgo books that Eamon suggested for Yarrow (I devoured them too, they were both really good -- Yarrow will be book-reporting on them in case you want to read about them). Other than that, due to the desire to stay on Belle Ile, we're just going to have to learn to read in French, or read online, or write more! There's something so delicious about devouring English books though.
Other fun little things about Belle Ile:
* To get into/out of the main town, the main road goes through a one-vehicle-wide tunnel, which is a blind corner also. :) Fun. It's how the locals weed out the tourists.
* There are hardly any fences. Mostly they just have little electric strings on little metal piquets. I asked our landlady/WWOOF host lady what they did before, and she said they just kept the animals all on tethers and when she was a kid there really were no fences at all!
* It's super-friendly.
* It has lovely little towns. A jillion to write about those too of course.
There are a lot of other photos I didn't take, that I meant to tell you about, but it's sort of time to carry on along the chemin and have some more adventures, for now.
Christa
