Men in tights, bullfighting cocker spaniels, and Byron Kelleher

Cojones for Africa in Dax

Dax. Rhymes with wax. Equals Dax Wax - at least according to the younger generation, who can recite verbatim the relevant advertising for hair products.

In fact, the town of Dax - way down in the south west near the Atlantic coast and the Spanish border - has about about as much in common with a hair product as do the black bulls with which it is most famously associated. (We went for the bulls, but people also go for the thermal spa. Some of those people stay - including my father in law - in the splendid Splendid Hotel, which could almost be in Napier, such is its art deco wonderfulness.) And having recently seen those bulls in action, it would be a very brave person indeed, or a total @#$&wit, who would accuse them - to their faces - of having any truck with hair product. You'd be minus a femoral artery before you could say 'Justin Beiber' ...

Al fresco, Orange

Anyway, before we get to the bullfighting part, there was the small matter of the 1,000 km drive down through the south of France. Ema, Rosalie and Camille would probably beg to disagree, but for me that was as much part of the reason for heading for the south west as the corrida. The pépémobile loves long drives; the motorway system in France is staggeringly good (if expensive: the round trip probably cost us the equivalent of $200 - $250 in tolls); and I'll head down to the south of France at the drop of a hat. So, first stop was Orange, a couple of hours south, where we've already been (March 18, 'Don't think we saw Peter Mayle'). We stayed at our favourite hotel again (the one which feeds you endless crepes for breakfast); the difference this time was it was so warm we could eat out in the street.

House of Usher, Albi

Then a long swing through the south west to Albi. France is really, really Big: big in an Australian sort of way; big in the kind of way in which you look at something on a map and think, 'Oh yes, that's a good 3 hours from here in the pepiemobile', and it turns out to be a good 6 or 7 hours at 120 kph. So the range of different countrysides and architectures you see in the course of a long day in a car is striking. On that day the two which stood out were the garrigue, the striking scrubby, herby terrain of Provence, and the plateau du Larzac, which is a high, rocky, utterly otherworldly place which, on a stormy, windswept night, I can well imagine is home to any number of French equivalents of Emily Bronte's Cathy. (Don't bother watching this clip unless, like me, you think Kate Bush's single is the greatest song every written, or ever likely to be written; even then, you may wish to skip to the good bits on 2.20 ...)

Rosa planking on the Larzac

Albi sans Cathars

Albi is one of the central towns in the story of the Cathars (told really well, if a little lengthily, here). Apart from its significance in that respect, it's also just a gorgeous, gorgeous town. We stayed at a suitably gorgeous, gorgeous chambre d'hote (i.e. a flash B&B), and ate at a little restaurant right alongside the cathedral walls. The sun was setting, a warm wind meandered through the olive trees surrounding the tables - and Rosalie grew concerned that she was going to be brained by a falling gargoyle. Didn't happen, of course, but I suppose it might have, it being Albi and all, where many, many people were put to the torch (don't think that history records any deaths by falling gargoyles, though ...).

Dinner a la Sengresse

After Albi was an even longer sweep into Les Landes, the department in which Dax is situated. The real highlight of that third day on the road was what happened at the end of it. What happened at the end was that we wound up at what was perhaps the loveliest place I've ever stayed at, and that includes the hotel at Whangamomona. Domaine Sengresse is owned by an English family and it is drop dead gorgeous. Big, beautiful rambling houses; a discrete pool out amongst the fruit trees; apperitif served with the other guests (unfailingly lovely and not remotely offensive, and the guests scrubbed up well too); dinner out on the lawn as the sun set. There are many places I recall with affection from other trips, but Sengresse was something else altogether. Then we hit Dax  ...

young Dacquoise bulls in training

... and that, too, was something else altogether, but for rather different reasons. We arrived 3 days into a 6 day festival in which everyone wears red and white, and things were in full swing. They were in such full swing that the music - strategically situated mere metres from our hotel room - ended around 5.00 am for the first couple of nights (on the 3rd night we got a bit of a treat it wrapped up at 3.00 am). With one exception, the music was mostly global pap (including the Village People, who were never any good and who just get worse with age). The exception was the music pumped out by the 'bandas', which are the big bands associated with the villages of the region. There were dozens of them tramping the streets 'til all hours doing their thing. (This clip, in which a banda play the final song of the corrida, is from a corrida in Condom, which is close to Dax. But the atmosphere - including verbal evidence of extreme sangria consumption which, given the lyrical complexity of the song, have no discernible effect on anything whatsoever - is exactly what it was like in Dax.)

When in Dax ...

So far (and bandas apart), so generic. However, two things set Dax apart in a good, entirely non-Village People kind of way. The first were the two evenings we spent quaffing sangria and hooking into Dacquoisian tapas at a bodega. (For some reason people from the town and surrounds are known as Dacquoise and not Daxians, which is what you might expect. You'd be wrong.) That was great: lots of noise; good food; a 30-strong male choir belting out local songs; and semi-butchered conversations about rugby. (The south west is serious rugby country and they take considerable pride in the fact that every New Zealander who's ever played there falls in love with the place (and frequently its women). Watch the locals' reaction to Byron Kelleher's haka on top of a bus.) The second thing was the corrida ('bullfighting' is a misnomer, as it's not a fight at all - more a ritualised series of confrontations ending in the bull's demise). As tends to be the case with things I haven't grown up with, I didn't understand anything about the whole shebang. But Michel's efforts to rectify this were not entirely fruitless, such that at the end of the session we went to, I'd figured out the significance of at least some of the ritual and pageantry. 

Don't try this at home - or anywhere

As a result of all of this, I have altered my thinking slightly on the subject of corrida. Not that it's something one thinks about all of the time but, still, it is a subject that people tend to have strong views about. I'm not that keen on seeing the animals killed, and think that arguing the case for bullfighting because it's cultural and traditional is a bit like saying it's alright to beat your children because that might also have been cultural and traditional once upon a time. On the other hand, the bulls aren't tortured (they do way more damage to themselves in the state of nature than the mere flesh wounds the picadors and bandarillos hand out), and - at the risk of anthropomorphising - perhaps some part of them appreciates being able to go out in a blaze of glory rather than in an abattoir.

And then it was time to head home. Just one night on the road this time, at a chambre d'hote outside of Toulouse. This one was notable for the fact that one of the owners was a chef in a starred restaurant. In short, he was good, and we ate very well that night and the following morning. Then, it was back in pépémobile and a long run home. Just in time to hit the heatwave ...