Travels and Travails

I'm constantly fighting against the inexplicable urge to start every blog entry with the word "well,", or worse, the phrase "well, it's been an odd few days here in X" but seriously - it really has been an odd few days.

For the hard of reading amongst you who are looking for some pictures to punctuate the streams of self-involved text that is spewing onto blogspot's servers I must warn you that I've lost the cable that plugs my camera into a computer so there's not going to be any visual footage of any kind for a while.

For those of you (and I'm sure there are many) plotting my course Indiana Jones-style with a red dotted line on an antiquated map, I'm in Labastide Rouairoux in the Tarn department of southern France and what follows is an entirely factual account of how I got here. It's long. Ready yourself.

Day 1, langeac

After having hung around for ages in Langeac I realised I was waiting for a motorcyle repair man who wasn't going to show. The French only work till noon on a saturday anyway and I was out of time. I did however have another lead: a friendly waitress in a bar had told me of another motorcycle guy way out on the road to Brioude but it was a long way. Well I no had no choice. After getting the nice Mme at my hotel to phone the guy and make sure he was open, I set off in the sweltering pre-midday heat to find the man who could kick-start my journey.

The bike was incredibly heavy and, the bike having no clutch or gears, I was doing the work of a two-stroke engine manually. It was tiring work and no good for my back. I had word that it was around 1.5km out of town so I crossed the bridge to take what I thought was the only route out and walked for around 2km. I stopped to ask an incredibly old toothless french man and he told me, in a french accent which owed more to liberace than liberte fraternite etc. that I was not on the road to Brioude, and that the road to Brioude started just over the bridge into Langeac. So, back I went pushing the bike that had already come to feel like a cross to bear than a crosser of countries. I got on the right road and, to cut a long and deeply unpleasant journey short, arrived at 11:50am drenched in sweat and delirious with thirst and sunstroke. The man took a look at the bike and told me that it was unfixable without a part that wouldn't be in until the following week, but that the bike was perfectly usable as long as I could do the work of the kickstarter myself. This basically involves sprinting down as steep as hill as I can find to jump the engine into life. This has turned out to be doable but a huge pain in both a metaphorical and literal sense.

But, after a ridiculous struggle with a steep gravel path and a falling off I was on the road.

The travel section of my blog will have to wait as my hostess needs to use the computer.

Blog again soon.
Rob