Aix-en-Provence and Avignon

Walking with Tricia - seed pod full of bugs ew!
Red dirt pine trees and rocks - Provence

Mount Sainte-Victoire

Low reservoir

Dam

Priory atop Mount Sainte-Victoire

Hazy view from the top

Scary fish at market in Marsielle

Paintings in the church

Model ships and airplanes used in rescues or sunk at sea

Golden mosaics

Early morning flight

Avignon airport and Ralph our pilot

another one pot wonder!

Avignon and is famous half bridge (dont quite know why they like this bridge so much when half floated away)

Because our bus only stops at a few destinations and no where in between we had to make our own way to our next destination Aix-en-Provence. We caught a local bus for 21 euros each and arrived in Aix (x) just after midday. There we were met by Ralph who is my second cousin twice removed... or my grandads cousin with a generational gap (its complicated i know, lets just say he is whanau).

We drove back to Ralphs house to meet his lovely wife Tricia and have a beer and some lunch, this was just the beggining of a great five days. The weather was not its best but we decided to chance it and ventured out for a walk with our jackets. The rain cleared and we walked through some forestry land where everyone can go walking in any season except for summer due to a very high fire risk. Feeling comforted by the recent rain we through a landscape that is a rich red colour with lots of bluffs and cliffs, olive trees and wild thyme rosemary and lavender. It was the first of many nice walks.

We filled our time with visiting a few local markets and trying all their olives mmm so good! And a few more walks around the bottom of a mountain one day and up it the next. The mountain (Mount Sante Victoire) is named after a battle fought on it in 1st century BC where they say the river ran with blood and the valley running down from the mountain is named after the stench of the rotting bodies, yet another roman victory over the celts. The mountain is mostly all bare rock so it made for a very hot hike but great views of a very hazy landscape, maybe due to the huge refinery just over another range. At the top there was a little Priory from the 1500 century where a bunch of people were doing an archiology dig, and a huge cross at the summit where we were rewarded with a great view and a cool breeze.

The following day we took it easy and visited Marseilles a huge city on the coast. About half of the population of Marseilles are migrants so the city has a very different culture along with a huge crime rate. On a hill overlooking the city we checked out a church that was dedicated to the seafarers, it was really different to any other church we had been into, it was still ornate and stunning but was covered with model ships and small paintings people had given when a family member had been saved from a tragedy at sea, it was nice to see one of these churchesa bit more connected to the people than the rest we have seen. The markets were amazing with a lot of arab and african influence so a huge variety of food. Our gudie Tricia treated us to a few things we had never seen or tasted before.

That evening Ralph and Tricia treated us to a ´congratulations on getting engaged´ dinner which was really nice as we had not really had one yet. We tried globe artichokes which as interesting, its a bit of work to eat your meal but they are really tasty! The next morning we had to rise early to catch a plane to Avignon. Ralph who has been learning to fly decided to try to couple a lesson with flying us to Avignon in a little Cessna, many people were dubious that our oversized packs would fit in the plane but luckily the instuctor was not. Ralph was supposed to fly as if he were flying in cloud so he could not look up and had to fly only by instruments. It made for a bumpy flight but he flew well so we made it in one piece. The flight was beautiful as we were in the air as the sun rose through the smog and flying only about 900m above the ground so we could see everything. We landed in Avignons small airport where no buses go so we had to catch a taxi, not too big a deal as it saved us a big walk with our heavy packs. After settling in we checked out Avignon which is an walled in town that used to house the Pope in the one of the biggest palaces in Europe. It was a nice town with a lot of character but we were a little too tired to really appreciate it and soon headed back for an afternoon snooze crashing for over 2 hours!