by Mike

From the plane, it looks like a web of lights is clinging to the French coast and spreading inland in constellations. And the lines and webs extend to the horizon where they climb onto the black sky and become stars.

And ahead, morning light gathers into an arc and builds its Mediterranean blue, then it spills into the sea. It conjures orange and pink, and finally, gaining confidence, the morning matures and pushes away the night. We fly into its colors.

Below, in France, places I love are waking up. People I love are waking up. Places I have loved in the past are waking up. People I have loved in the past are waking up. Places I will love in the future are waking up. People I will love in the future are waking up.

The girls hopped from rock to rock with their skirts brushing the bushes. They sang high-pitched hymns that reached us in the wind, voices fragile like glass, clear and pure as the hill’s high air. From here we could see the Mediterranean to our right and the Pyrenees to the left.

Gabriel knelt.

“This is rocayrol.” The frizzy little lettuce grows in the cracks in high places. He slid his knifeblade into the rock and sliced the rocayrol at its root, tossed it in his basket then searched for another. Gabriel wears a leather necklace with a stamp-sized image of the Virgin Mary on one side and Jesus on the other, and it dangled outside his shirt.

“That’s asparagus,” he said, pointing to a fern leaning into the path. I’d never seen wild asparagus. “That’s fennel. And over there, that’s lemon balm. A tea of lemon balm, rosemary and mint gives men strength in the morning.”

We were collecting dinner salad for 13 people – the parents, nine kids and us two guests. Though they live on a farm in the valley, they collect much of their food from the surrounding hills. “God is generous,” the father said. And while neither of us is religious, as travelers our job is to listen to understand. And we understood.

“Rocayrol has the most wonderful taste,” he said. “It loves high rocks in the sun.” So we climbed high to find it, and as we collected it we listened to the girls’ crystalline hymns.

This post has been entered into the Grantourismo HomeAway Holiday-Rentals travel blogging competition.

by Mike

Azure fell in love with a Corsican cheese, a cheese that doesn’t travel well. We were leaving in a couple days and she might never again see or taste the enchanting, goaty brocciu. Azure was sad, so I had to do something.

We asked a young man at the market if he knew a brocciu maker who might teach us to make the cheese. He told us to ask the widows who sit on the steps of the mayor’s office.

We rode our scooter to the mayor’s office and asked the old ladies where to find a brocciu maker. In the next village over, they said, lived a woman who made it for years.

We rode our scooter over the ridge and asked a man where Mme Albertini lived. She was his aunt, in fact, and she lived at the edge of town.

We found the woman, but she no longer made cheese – the process is too intense. Her cousin in the next village over, though, still made it.

We found the village and found his barn and Philippe was inside, milking the goats.

“Please,” we said, “Azure loves brocciu and needs to learn to make it herself.”

He looked at her and smiled: if we returned the next afternoon he would happily teach us everything. The next day, alongside his wife and daughter, he patiently taught us the generations-old recipe.

All we had to do was ask.

This post has been entered into the Grantourismo HomeAway Holiday-Rentals travel blogging competition.

Y’all want to know about our finances anyway. I’ll keep it oblique so there’s still a sense of wonder and enchantment.

Az and I budgeted about 50 Euro per day for us as a couple this winter, which works out to about $1000 per person per month, not including airfare. We spend less traveling than we do at home.

Here’re 20 tips for traveling Europe on the cheap:
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Tip 1: Travel with a partner. Save on accommodation, split meals & taxis, free massages, share toothbrushes. AWWWwwww….. Stop paying strangers to hold hands while you walk through the park.

Tip 2: Learn the language. You’ll be closer to people’s hearts if you can communicate with them, and for that reason opportunities will knock. You’re also more likely understand when someone’s telling you about other/better options and it’s less daunting to get off the beaten path.

ACCOMMODATION
Tips 3-10: Spend as little as possible on accommodation. Unofficially, SEVENTY FIVE per cent of our daily budget went to accommodation when we were paying for it, in fact the price for a hotel room was sometimes so high that we would start the day over budget. Yucky! By spending one night in a free place we can halve the price of a night at a hotel.

And the math doesn’t lie: spend half as much and travel for twice as long.

There are a lot of ways to do it: Wwoof, Couch Surf, Servas, Global Freeloaders, Help Exchange, rent an apartment, stay in a hostel, stay in a pension, ask for a good price for a longer stay, offer to exchange services, visit places where you know people who would welcome you in their homes….

Tip 11: Stay in a place with access to a kitchen. So you can cook instead of eating out.

Tip 12: Get away from the tourist areas. The tourist areas attract money-obsessed locals (as is the case everywhere in the world). They’re good at business which means they’d punch their own mother to make a buck. Break the cycle of violence, try to deal mostly with businesses that don’t cater to tourists.

Tip 13: Rent/buy a scooter/car/bike. The more independent you are, the more options you have. Most of the places we stayed would have been next to impossible to find without our own transportation. It’s also possible to do this and save money on transportation, especially if you can buy & sell for the same price.

Tip 14: Stay in one place for a longer period of time. Develop a routine. You’ll learn what’s cheap, what’s a rip-off, where you can go for free. There will also be less urgency to experience everything before you have to run to your next destination.

Tip 15: Stay in one place for a longer period of time. Moving costs money. When you arrive in a new place you might need to take a taxi, to sit in a cafe to kill time, to stay in a too-expensive hotel because you didn’t plan well, etc. There are a lot of costs associated with changing places besides just wasting your precious time.

EATING
Tip 16: Buy your food from local markets. Some have the idea that it’s cheaper to eat crappy fast food, but in fact eating the absolute healthiest is the absolute cheapest: raw veggies, salad, pasta with tomato sauces, water from the tap. Our bodies & wallets love going vegetarian.

It’s hard to get past the pride of wanting to “eat bouillabaisse in Nice” just so you can say you did. But food doesn’t have to be your ego’s crutch every meal. Ordering vegetarian food in Thailand, one says, “Gin mung.” That means, “I eat like a monk.” We should eat more monk-like anyway.

Tip 17: Carry food staples with you. Have you ever been so hungry that you panicked and splurged on, say, two bottles of liquor for lunch? Oops! You’re less likely to repeat that classy performance if you have some snacks with you at all times. Our to-go bag includes jam, cheese and some fruit, olive oil, salt a bottle of water and some cutlery. To complete the meal we buy a fresh loaf of bread, some wine and a jar of Nutella, then picnic somewhere beautiful. See video below (it’s just 7 minutes of us eating in beautiful places. I won’t be offended if you skip it).

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VThrBmX45FE&hl=en&fs=1&]

Tip 18: Eat at small local places if you do want to eat out. It’s best to ask locals where they go most often, as it’s usually a sign of good food at good prices. In France there’s almost always a plat du jour (daily special) which is the best deal.

Tip 19: Split meals. Our bodies & wallets love eating less.

GENERAL
Tip 20: Don’t buy crap you don’t need.

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Azure and I agreed that Bonifacio is one of the most spectacular cities we’ve visited – it’s built on a cliff that’s surrounded by water on 3.5 sides and it’s pretty much waiting to fall into the water, as you can see above. From Bonifacio you can see Sardegna, Corsica’s Italian sister to the South. Bonifacio is hundreds of years old, of course, and somewhere up here was found one of the oldest inhabitants of Corsica, a woman whose grave was dated to ~9000 years ago.

We found the town itself to be one of those annoying seasonal towns that’s a shell in the off-season, so there’s nothing to do, nothing that sustains people. Tourism keeps em going the rest of the year, of course, so when we were walking around the town our interactions felt uncomfortably artificial. We were much happier in Sartene where there was a university and some commerce and free wifi only half an hour away.

Which direction to Paris?

by Mike

We’ve spent the last two days in the medieval town of Noyers-sur-Serein right in the middle of France, about 200km south of Paris. It’s typically French, as typical as I’ve seen with their admirable attention to detail and commitment to a high quality of life. The Bourgogne region has fairytale castles, rolling green hills with woods filling the crevasses and lining the rivers… the movie Chocolat was filmed here.

This town – Noyers – fills the bend of a river and its buildings have exposed beams on the facades. They lean over the stony street like they’re about to give up, and life goes on as usual. There are only 700 residents here. We saw signs for an “Old Chateau” so we walked out of town and followed the river against the foot of a forested hill as it bent to the south. The next sign pointing to the chateau was so white-washed that we walked past it and only realized we’d missed the turn a mile later. So we turned around and found the path and turned up the hill. We went up the steps, steps made of wood, and walked up the hill through the trees until we came to a plateau where two towers were being excavated. It looked like the top of the towers were still original, they stuck up like broken fork tines, but the bottom was being expertly redone by a team of archaeologists, I hope.

There was a sign pointing to a panoramic view, so we followed the path across a golden field, then we crossed down into a valley and up the other side. When we got to the top we kept walking through the woods but noticed that the ground was strange – it was bumpy and just didn’t look right. We started to notice a lot of white stones and we started to realize that the path was taking us over a buried city. To the left was a wall pushing out of the ground, to the right the inside of a turret had been exposed. The valley we’d walked across had been a pair of city walls. We’d later learn that we had walked near a dungeon and a church and the town square. All buried on the top of the hill.

Anyway, we’re going up to Paris today to say goodbye to the scooter. We’re heading home in just a few weeks so we feel we should start trying to sell it now rather than wait until we’re desperate. Neither Azure nor I are looking forward to being back in a big city, but it’ll be brief – after it’s sold we’re going to go back down south for the end of the trip.

Today’s Route (by foot)

by Mike

I had the good fortune of Azure getting sick, so I went for a long walk today from Noyers-sur-Serein (where we’re staying) to two neighboring towns along the border of pasture and forest. At one point the path was an old Roman road. It was about 9km (5+ miles) and it took me around 2.5 hours.

France is a walker’s paradise – there are well-traveled trails crossing the entire country and excellent, abundant maps that explain the routes – but this was the first time I’d ever taken advantage of them.

I also ran into a few good looking ladies along the way…

Today’s Route
(Where the hell is Valreas?)

by Mike

Today we went north, skirting the Alps and following rivers until we got to an area called the “Drome.” The “Drome” is a lot of nice hills where the sun still penetrates and there’s pine and lavender and olive trees.

We had a small breakfast in a small town – Touet-sur-Var – then lunch at a bistro in a town called Barreme where everyone in the town passed through and kissed on the cheeks. The whole way up, the river(s) were small in their gravelly banks, cutting new designs for the season.

We stopped on the side of the road near a small tower (more of an agricultural tower than a tower for defense) and took a half hour nap in a field in the sun and three cars passed the entire time. We could hear the river and birds. It was a nice break.

We pushed over a pass and came out in the town of Nyons, which was too expensive, and finally found a cheap hotel in Valreas. Last night I got a free pizza because I was the first American the owner had ever seen in town. We talked about Will Smith, Robert DeNiro, Michael Douglas. I tried to pay but he refused, so I told him that when he got to America there was free pizza for him there. Pass it on.

by Mike

UK resident Ellen Frye paid us a visit in Nice this weekend and we had a ton of fun. Ellen got to ride the scooter along the coast into Nice on Saturday morning, then we immediately went to Italy for a multicourse lunch that featured much food and much wine. We drove to the town of Eze where we saw the best view on the Riviera. Then we went back to the hotel and checked our email for a while.

For dinner we went to another Italian restaurant – La Voglia in Nice – and had their antipasti misti that included most conceivable foods.

The next morning we went to Antibes and talked about things that were impossible. We walked through the market and along the old wall, we/I had a great conversation with some Harley owners who had fascinating jobs & lives.

Finally we drove up to the farm and introduced Ellen to Margarite, Claude and a new-born goat:

It was an eventful visit to the farm – it was the first time that the year-old goats were to go outside the barn, so Claude gave us all bamboo sticks to guide them and the adults down the hill. It didn’t prevent them from freaking out and one ran all the way back to the barn. Azure had to go and fetch him and carry him to the others, and even when he was within eye and earshot of the others he still didn’t get that he’d have to actually walk to get to them, so he started going the wrong way again. Eventually he was herded to his mother.

We then sat down and made a little fire in the woods on which Claude boiled some water for tea. We had tea and talked about Corsica and cheese.

When we were done with the tea Azure grabbed the pot to bring it back to the house, but Claude said to leave it for the next time.