Day 90. Bordeaux Nov 4 2001.

Three months of our grand European adventure.

We woke this morning to a volley of gunshots. Even as the sound echoed around the campsite the ducks from the night before came hurrying across the lawn and into an open tent across the road from us. We became, I must admit, more than a little hysterical, and our tent rocked with the force of our laughter. Giggling screams of "DUCK" came from us at sporadic moments through the rest of the day. Possibly the funniest morning I have every woken to.

We were more than a little hesitant to poke our head from the fabric of our tent, lest we be blasted to pieces. Eventually the need to move on and an urgent desire to spend the night somewhere other than here finally drove us from our tents. The sounds of shooting followed us almost the length of our trip into Bordeaux.

It was cold this morning and I wore my sweatpants and sweatshirt for the first time while we biked but they soon became too hot and I shed them gratefully for my normal garb.

The countryside was beautiful, greens mixing with occasional reds and yellows to create a panoply of diversity. The church of St. Vivian was a beautiful spire against the sky as we passed. The peaks and roofs of its necropolis shrouded in an early morning mist.

Eventually we left the highway and began the long final ride into Bordeaux. The road became deserted as cars and trucks left us for the autoroute and local traffic trickled into homes and backyards for lunch. Without warning the road curved sharply upwards and we reached a crest high above the neighbouring landscape, the peaks of trees beneath us.

We had reached the old bridge over the Dordogne river. Beneath us the Dordogne roiled. It was a murky mess of brown water, churned into a froth by it's passage between the pylons of the old bridge. It had the look and texture of newly made chocolate pudding, churning beneath the rapidly swirling spoon of a hungry child.

The bridge ahead of us was a series of intermittent metal girders that brought to mind the Eiffel tower, stretched out to span the waters. We crossed the narrow span warily, there was little space between the road and the rails and we were grateful to reach the other side, but here things become confused. Bordeaux was no longer meant to be reached in this fashion and the roads had disappeared or been suborned into Autoroutes.

Our path took a wrong turn and went too far north, allowing us to see much of the vaunted Pont of Aquitaine, a bridge designed along the lines of San Francisco's Golden Gate but rising over the waters of the Gironde river like a curse in steel and concrete to all that modernity had wrought. Beneath it crumbles an unknown town, traces of former glory blotted by the bridges monstrous shadow. Who can live beneath ugliness and not be reduced by it? Old chateaux lay in burned out ruins, while caves fronted by Gothic churches collapsed in heaps of stone. We pedalled quicker here, the defeated faces of locals looking at our bikes, our clothes, our bodies, appraisingly.

The lower twenty feet of every building in Bordeaux was a sooty black from the pollution of multitudes, a nightmare in stone and dirt. The pavement was covered in dog shit so thick it seemed to have been spread with a trowel.

The guide said there was a campground ten kilometres out of the city centre so we began moving in that direction. Our trip seemed to go on forever, past a repetitious serious of shops, apartments and shops again. We left Bordeaux proper and entered the suburbs, cleaner and more comfortable than the central city. They still had no sign of our campground and we began to worry.

We stopped at the university and examined the map in despair, No symbol for camping! Then, almost at our wits end we saw a tiny camping sign in the bottom corner, almost off the map. We biked on. We passed into the suburb of Gradignan and through. Just outside of town, was a sign declaring Camping Beausoleil. A beautiful little spot so far outside Bordeaux it almost couldn't qualify as camping in Bordeaux at all. The ground was hard and rocky but we set up our tent gratefully. We have learned that beautiful or ugly, nothing really matters until you have a place to stay.



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