Pays Basque!

The chateau tour was nice... We took a scenic route through some of the more famous growing regions and toured the cellars and production rooms. There was a lot of talk about having respect for the wines, and all the other superstition that's developed over centuries of wine-making. Interesting if not a tad wanky. I bought a 1995 bottle from Chateâu D'Agassac to drink over my couple of nights down here in Bayonne. I broke my bottle-opener trying to get the cork out and ended up just pushing the remains of the eroded cork inside... so I've been drinking wine from a plastic cup, with cork fragments floating throughout... However, it is lovely wine. All of the Irish pubs in Bordeaux were holding Australia Day celebrations on Saturday night. The Cock & Bull advertised 'Rolf Harris! Dame Edna! Kangaroos! Come and get pissed like a true Australian!' I had an early night though. Given that I didn't make it to the Spanish Basque country (Bilbao, San Sebastian, Pamplona...) I headed south from Bordeaux yesterday in order to visit the French Basque country. Bayonne is a very very quiet little town. I assume it's much busier in Summer because they seem to have a lot of hotels. But at the moment it's populated by eccentric locals; ageing hippies, gypsies, and a lot of apparently homeless people drinking vodka and beer under bus shelters. It feels like the French equivalent of the NSW North Coast. There's not much indicating the ancient Basque culture. I tried to find the local Basque Museum but all signs seems to point in different directions. Nevertheless, there's plenty of those charming old French people who actually do wear berrets and carry baguettes under their arms. In the afternoon I went to Bayonne's little art museum. It feels like a smalltown public library except that it's got rooms filled with Rubens, Goyas, and Roman antiquities. They seem to have had the bright idea of letting visitors leave their comments on post-it notes... and I don't think the museum administration regulates the English-language comments much - there was a great big painting of two female nudes in a woodland setting, and someone had stuck up a note beside it saying 'lick my tits'. Brilliant. There's a pretty strong North African influence in this part of France, so I went to a Moroccan restaurant last night. I'm getting used to this dining-alone business. I like to think that I look like a food critic preparing a restaurant review... This morning I caught the bus to the nearby beach town of Biarritz, which of course, being Winter, was all but deserted. Apparently Napoleon used to visit on his Summer holidays, and it's supposed to have the best surfing in France. Today it was shrouded in fog, most of the shops were closed, the sea was choppy and there were only a few brave surfers out there... It's an impressive coastline though. I'm considering heading to Paris tomorrow but I may stop somewhere along the way.