Today, Tuesday, most museums and tourist sites are closed, so Ronnié came up with the brilliant idea that we could go for a bike ride. We drove 10 km to the village of Lalinde, along La Dordogne, found a bike rental place, and off we went following the bank of the Canal d’Lalinde. It was all we could have expected from a ride along the levees of a beautiful canal, bordered by giant trees, summer camps for kids, schools, and even the local prison!
At the end of a couple
of hours we reached a shallow dam on La Dordogne, where we stopped by
the obligatory ice cream.
For dinner we enjoyed escargot
(snails in a parsley and butter sauce), which Ronnie thought were excellent, a
big DJ salad, and a typical Périgord treat of confit de canard
(slow-baked duck) sopped with a fresh baguette. Life is tough here in
the southwest of France.
The following
Wednesday we started early because we had a long day ahead of us. First we reached
the town of Rouffignac, which will be remembered by one and all for a good snack
of mini-saucissons. Faby has learned the hard way that it is always good to
keep her boys well fed before heading for adventure, which this time meant
going to visit the cave of Rouffignac. This is a long cave formed by a
subterranean stream that followed soft Cretaceous limestones loaded with chert
nodules. The cave is several kilometers in length, but you only get to see one
kilometer, comfortably (?) seated on a little train that takes you deep into
the vowels of the Earth. Now and then the guide would stop to show the black on
white outline of a woolly rhinoceros or a mammoth, but the real show came when
we got to the end and stepped down from the train. At this place a thick fill
of clay (now removed so one can walk into the room) closed against the flat
roof of the cave so the artists would have to lay on their backs or sit down to
draw dozens of wooly mammoths, artfully represented with just a few strokes of
black manganese oxide. I am very fond of simple, black on white designs, and
these ponderous processions of giants of a bygone era totally captured my
heart. Careful inspection revealed additional horses, wooly rhinoceros, ibexes,
and goats, but this time auroxes, buffaloes, or deer were prominently absent.
The guide told us that since deer were their main source of food, current
thinking was that the designs were probably not related to propitious hunting,
as had been believed for many years.
Ronnié was very
attentive looking at the designs, and plans to reconstruct one of the drawings
in his journal, back at the house. He also treated himself to the reproduction
of a bone harpoon that he can wear around his neck, like a true prehistoric
boy.
Our next stop was at
Les Eyzies, where we were going to visit the Abri Cro-Magnon. This is
the place where the first burials of modern humans were found, and it started a
big debate about who the actual prehistoric peoples had been. For the longest
time it was thought that the Neanderthal had disappeared before the arrival of
modern humans, but the new archaeologic evidence from this site showed that the
two sub-species had coexisted for quite some time. The displays are well done,
and at some point in the 1970’s some actors and actresses reconstructed, in
film and in photographs, what a Cro-Magnon tribe might have looked like. Blonde
and blue-eyed, the depictions show the bias of the times; today, many
anthropologists would depict the Cro-Magnon as being black and significantly
neotenic in comparison with the Neanderthal. May I recommend to you “The Dance
of the Tiger” by Bjorn Kurten, as a very readable novel of what the encounter
between the two subspecies might have looked like?
Our final stop was the
medieval core of Sarlat, which Ronnié thought was just boring but where Mom
broke out in song at the view of every cute nook and cranny that reminded her
of Beauty and the Beast (quite embarrassing, really, but she didn’t care).
Back at home we
treated ourselves to a meal of boiled shrimp and sea snails, just because we
could.
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