Medieval Sarlat

27 March

After a good night's sleep in Arcachon, we woke up and shipped out of the motel. Not only did we actually make it back to Bordeaux to drop Josh off, the car, and everyone in it, arrived intact.

We then set a course on the GPS to take us to Bergarac. Despite being waylaid by a duo of windscreen cleaners who hustled us out of 2 Euros and a highway tollbooth which hustled us out of 6, we arrived in Bergarac around lunch time. Berganac is a small riverside town on the banks of the Dordogne River.

Our first act after the long-ish drive was to find the bathroom. A sign on the wall of it read that the toilet seat is disinfected every hour. I can only assume this to be true because the toilet didn't actually have a seat. They probably keep it somewhere a lot less filthy to lovingly scrub it every 60 minutes, but then again, this toilet didn't seem to have a flush button either, even though it is generally quite a crucial aspect of the whole thing.

We had lunch in one of the town square and then had a look around the streets. But we had arrived at precisely the time that everyone decides to take their lunch break for two hours because every shop was closed. With nothing to do there, we drove on to Sarlat.

The drive through the French country is extremely pleasant, especially once you figure out how to play music through the stereo and not have to listen solely to the incessant instruction of the GPS. We passed through several small villages and crossed the Dordogne several times and made it to Sarlat with a minimal amount of wrong turns.

After parking the car, we had a wander around Sarlat's centre-ville. It is quite a typical medieval-ish town (I have no idea what I'm talking about) though certain areas of it have become modernised. we walked through the old part of the town, looking at the churches and cobblestone alleys. On our way back to the car we picked up an eclair for mum's birthday before heading off to Carrefour for a grocery run.

We eventually found our bed and breakfast, the Girouette, after a confusing drive through some rural streets and a gigantic struggle to make it up the driveway. It is run by a lovely retired Dutch couple. The house is huge with many rooms. We were the only tenants in the whole place and got to choose our room. I opted for the one with the two single beds. It doesn't do anything to help the snoring but at least we didn't have to share a duvet.

For dinner, we took the ten minute walk into Sarlat town to find some place nice to sit and eat. It turns out Sarlat is exceedingly quiet in the evenings with almost no night life that we could see. The only other people out were tourists like ourselves who had also wrongly assumed that there would be something to do. Regardless, we found a nice restaurant at which to dine and had a very filling meal that would probably sustain us for the next few days.

The next day we rose for the breakfast part of our bed and breakfast (croissants, baguette, etc...) and then headed out to learn about some prehistory. The first place we stopped at was the Grotte de Font-de-Gaume, where we had a guided tour of the cave paintings done by prehistoric man. The tour began by the guide closing the door of this narrow, dark cave on us before inquiring if anyone suffered from claustrophobia. The drawings themselves were very interesting, painted with natural pigments like iron oxide and mostly depicting bison and horses. No photography was allowed but we could only just make out the pictures with our eyes so photographs would probably have just shown a bit of rock.

After a bit of deliberation, we decided to go to another cave painting place. On the way, a big castle on the rock face of cliff caught our eye so we stopped for a look.

This turned out to be Castle Reignac, a recently refurbished castle-museum type deal. I was thinking that living in a castle would be pretty cool until we reached the instruments of torture room.

All the grotesque images and mean looking devices were a bit offputting. Fascinating though. After this, we broke for a dubious lunch (it consisted entirely of an apple each and some mandarins) before heading to Lascaux II, our next prehistoric site.

Lascaux II (according to my dad) is so named because the cave drawings there are only replications and restorations, not the original works of our neanderthalic ancestors. This resulted in a somewhat cheesy display of prehistoric art and a 45 minute guided tour that could've been done in 10.

Following this, we sped on over to the Chateau de Castelnaud, the museum of war in the middle ages. Even bigger and more imposing than Reignac, we walked through the castle looking at old weapons and armour and walked across the battlements to see the trebuchets and all that good stuff. I also inadvertently used the women's bathroom but no one was around so it was ok.