Pesto Change-o!

After completing our tour of duty in St. Martin de l’Arcon, we returned our rental car in Montpellier (but only after dealing with the stress of a malfunctioning fuel gauge) and caught a morning train to Nice. At Nice, we jumped on an eastbound train and disembarked thirty minutes later at Ventimiglia (which translates to “20 miles”), an Italian border town where we were meeting Kaberi’s cousin Amit and his wife Chetna who were vacationing with their two young daughters, Aryana and Anika. They had rented a well-outfitted hillside apartment in Apricale, a nearby village with the well-deserved reputation as one of the most picturesque settings in Italy.

After a pleasant drive to Apricale, we embarked upon the short, but steep, walk up the hill to the apartment. Huffing and puffing, we wound up getting more of a workout than we had anticipated. A few hours later, on a walk to the town center, we found ourselves put further to shame by older townspeople (a mere two to three times our age) effortlessly navigating the steep terrain while we fought to catch our breath with each step.

Upon settling in at the apartment, we had a chance to play with three-month old Anika and were quickly enchanted by her happy-go-lucky temperament. In comparison, three-year-old Aryana bowled us over with her seemingly-boundless energy and curiosity. We found ourselves thoroughly outmatched until nap-time beckoned. Amit and Chetna fortunately had stocked the apartment with ample provisions for rebuilding one’s energy. While the kids napped, we spent the afternoon enjoying local meats and cheeses with tall glasses of Lambrusco wine and Bailey’s. After a relaxing chat, we made our way into the village for an authentic Italian meal at an outdoor terrazzo.

The next day, Amit and Kaberi hiked uphill for a coffee fix before the six of us partook in a hearty breakfast at home. Making good use of our relatively-early start to the day, we drove to a farmers market in the idyllic neighboring town of Dolceacqua to stock up on fresh, local ingredients for a pasta dinner planned for that evening. We enjoyed sampling the myriad cheese options available to us before we carefully accumulated mushroom ravioli, cheese ravioli, fresh tomatoes and apricots. Afterward, we briefly strolled up cobblestone alleys and across a prominent bridge depicted in a Monet painting. In deference to Aryana’s utter glee at hearing the local belltower toll, we good-naturedly waited until the top of the hour before continuing on our way.

From Dolceacqua, we followed the coastline across the border to Menton, a French beachside hamlet that once stood in Italian territory. We were all amused by the exploitative toll system that forced motorists to pull a ticket in Italy and pay toll to enter France 50 feet later. After securing a parking spot in the heart of town, we found an inviting spot to dine al fresco with views of the sparkling emerald and aqua Mediterranean. After lunch, we continued on to one of the only sandy (as opposed to pebbly) beaches on the French Rivera where all of us ventured into the surprisingly-cold late June surf.

On our return, we stopped in at a local Conad supermarket to augment our dinner provisions. We soon found freshly made pesto (a regional specialty), two local varietals of red wines, and a panoply of meringues and éclairs (bearing more of a French ancestry than Italian, in Kaberi’s humble opinion). After returning home to the apartment, Amit and Chetna ventured out for a drink while we babysat the girls. With Aryana down for a nap, the two of us devoted ourselves to lavishing attention on Anika. When Amit and Chetna returned, we started the dinner process, with our hosts whipping up a feast of salad and pesto ravioli accompanied by local red wines and capped off with Kaberi’s hand-selected dessert options. Both the company and the food made for a fabulous evening at home, a nice change of pace after our soporific week in southern France.

Tour de France

After an overnight stop in Madrid with Iraxci, we caught an afternoon flight to Toulouse, the French city where Airbus is headquartered. Once we touched down and made our approach to the gate, Vik was entranced by the sight of a huge, bulging, beluga whale-shaped aircraft sitting outside one of the hangars (apparently, an Airbus experimental plane). Upon setting foot in the airport, we immediately armed ourselves with a Rough Guide to Langueduc-Roussilon (a so-called underrated region of southern France lying to the west of Provence) and a detailed Michelin map of the area. After picking up our rental car, a silver, automatic-transmission Citroen C3, we began the three-hour journey north-east to the village of St. Martin de l’Arcon.

After thirty minutes on the A9 autoroute, we stopped for directions and sustenance at a rest area gas station. Here, we encountered an incredibly-personable French storeclerk who gave us advice on the routing and highlighted key milestone points on our map. On our way out, we bought fresh sandwiches that rivaled their fresh-prepared, gourmet counterparts at Au Bon Pain or Panera Bread. After getting off of the highway near the town of Beziers (which looked to be a mere 25 kilometers from our destination), we spent another 90 minutes winding through narrow, pitch-black switchback roads. After making a couple of wrong turns on the basis of subpar road signage, we finally pulled into the driveway of the cottage where we would be spending the next week, exhausted and relieved.

Our accommodations had been generously set aside for our use by its owner, a British-based friend of a friend. She had warned us in prior e-mail correspondence about the possibility of encountering a scorpion or two during our stay. Fortunately, the only scorpion present in the cottage was the 5 foot “6” inch tall one bossing Vik around. We did, however, encounter other representatives of the insect world, namely a plethora of spiders and mosquitos, which encouraged us to spend as little time in the cottage as possible.

Using the Michelin map as our compass, we explored the area’s sleepy little backwaters to our heart’s content. On our first day, we drove on picturesque roads that underlie one of the stages of the Tour de France. We slowly made our way to Beziers, stuck behind two cautious timber trucks, where Vik’s singleminded obsession with procuring a GSM sim card propelled us to a mobile store. Half an hour and 30 Euros later, we were in possession of 15 minutes of mobile talk time and Vik was finally able to enjoy the town surroundings. We walked the small streets to the main Cathedral offering beautiful views of the river bisecting the city. As we returned to our car, an open air foodgrocer near the central market caught our eye, leading to a carton of wild strawberries and a cheap bottle of local red wine accompanying us on the ride home.

The next day, we journeyed west to picturesque Carcassone, a World Heritage site that we had seen beautifully illuminated from the highway during our initial drive to the cottage. As the artistically-licensed reconstruction of a medieval castle (the domed turrets added in the restoration were not historically accurate), Carcassone was captivating from a distance, but merely a tourist trap (like Bruge in Belgium) from up close.

On our return, Kaberi, in her role as navigator, gave Vik directions to repeat the prior day's route before promptly falling asleep. Unfortunately, half an hour into her nap, Kaberi was awoken with an urgent request for assistance by a frantic Vik who had missed the correct turnoff which so happened to be the only exit for the next 50 miles. After we missed another exit which would have allowed us to retrace our route (much to Kaberi’s dismay), we once again took slow, meandering backroads home, stopping briefly at a local Champion grocery store to stock up on such necessities as After Eight chocolates and another local vintage of red wine. The alternate route allowed us to discover a local boulangerie which quickly became our source for such staples as pain chocolate, pomme beignets and pain de mie.

Later in the week, we drove through Languedoc’s lush wine country to the college town of Montpellier. After locating the train station for our own reference (we were scheduled to take a train from Montpellier to Nice later in the week), we navigated the labyrinth of streets before finally locating a parking space. A brief stroll delivered us to a reasonably-priced Internet café (in sharp contrast to a pub near the cottage that charged an obscene 5 Euros per hour for remarkably-intermittent service). At Kaberi’s insistence, we uploaded the relevant Indonesian updates to this blog (narrowing the visit to publish time lag to a mere five weeks) before dining on crepes in Montpellier’s central Place de la Comedie, a plaza overlooking the ornate, gilded Opera house. After dinner, we indulged in a “version originale” showing of Ocean’s 13 at a local cinema.

The high point of our time in southern France was getting a chance to visit with our friend Doug (Vik’s old boss at Disney and a man with a treasure trove of embarrassing stories about a 24-year-old Vik). A fellow Carleton grad with a similar passion for world travel as Kaberi, Doug was on a Mediterranean Disney cruise with his family. With his ship docked for the day in Marseilles (an easy three-hour drive from our cottage), Doug was able to meet up with us outside the eclectic city’s exuberant Hotel de Ville. Our freewheeling conversation over a fine seafood meal went by far too quickly as we chatted about our travels and caught up on each others’ lives.

The week crawled by at times, but nevertheless gave us a chance to catch our breath from our adventures in Egypt, Spain and Morocco. We both luxuriated in a little downtime with which to fit in some summer reading, blogpost writing and, of course, excessive sleeping. As the end of June approached, we felt rejuvenated and ready to embark upon new adventures in Europe.