Verdant silence, soft,
Filters through triangle leaves.
The garden sits and breathes.
This morning's ride was not easy... we thought that we would be heading along the edge of a mountain range indicated on our map, but we actually wound up cutting through it more than we intended. Turns out foothills are serious business.
We decided to try a new sandwich today for breakfast! For a long time (since Granada, I think) we have been breakfasting on tomato bocadillos, fashioned from a half baguette each plus two pear tomatoes each plus 4 slices cheese each plus olive oil, garlic, and salt. In addition to those, we generally had yoghurt (haha, British spelling) and müsli and pastries. That is probabaly done with for at least a while, because those bocadillos can bore one's tastebuds after too long. So today we started out with peanut butter, honey, and banana sandwiches with peaches on the side. Oh, and pastries. We'll almost assuredly be returning home with some kind of dietary problems from all the sugar we consume... sigh.
Anyhow, the ride took us up into a really beautiful countryside of rolling hills with mountains in the distance. It's a shame to think that most people drive past in 30 minutes what took us a few hours to get through (uphill makes us really slow). We really liked it.
We arrived to Prafrance and the Bambuseraie at about noon, just in time to make lunch. We stopped at a supermarket and picked up some leeks, mushrooms, goat cheese, green beans, and bread. We fried up the first two with garlic and olive oil and balsamic, then added the result and the goat cheese and raw green beans to the bread for a super delicious sandwich. Yummmmmm...
Full for the moment, we headed in. It's 8€ for adults, but it was definitely worth it. There's a lot of lovely garden to walk around in (see the photos), but there're also information posts that give you cool stories and stuff about the gardens and the plants therein.
So, first off, "Prafrance" comes from some old French words meaning "land of no taxes." This made it a pretty good choice of location for something like a giant garden containing thousands of Francs' worth of imported plants. The guy who started the gardens actually spent a lifetime getting them going; he initially had to invest something like 45,000 Francs to build a crazy set of irrigation channels to divert water from the nearby river into his gardens so that they wouldn't die.
All the bamboo at Prafrance is hardy to -20C. They've actually had a number of problems with huge snowfalls in the area, and some of their older exhibits and gardens were destroyed by snow in the past. Flooding has also been a big problem, and on one of the buildings they had markers indicating some of the several metre-high floods they've seen in the last century (including a large one in 2002).
The entire complex contains a bamboo forest, a Laotian village (with houses and rice shacks and the like constructed entirely of bamboo... there were numerous displays around here describing bamboo's use as a building material), a feng shui garden with a dragon pond and torii, aquatic gardens, greenhouses, a bonsai garden, and a bamboo labyrinth. There was a gingko tree where we learned that gingko can survive pretty much anything, including one that grew back after being partially charred by the bombing in Hiroshima. We also learned about ferns and their age as a species, and there were even things about making textiles and paper from many of the plants contained in the gardens.
Then of course there was a shop at the end for buying plants and things made from plants and things about plants. I wish that we had room to get a souvenir... but presumably most of the items on sale there would be findeable on the internet if we so choose. I liked the bamboo ladders. :)
So, we headed down-ish through the mountains' edge to Alès. We took our first hobo bath! We didn't really make it a proper bath since we were near to town, but sometime I am sure we will. For now, we have only washed our arms and legs in a river. But we'll see how our hygeine progresses as the trip continues.
From Alès we hit Uzés, where we stopped for a refreshing drink (anise-flavoured water, yum!) and some fries so that we could charge our laptop for a bit. The waitress pointed us to a good spot to camp nearby where we wouldn't be bothered or be bothering anyone, so here we are. Watching Repo Men (thanks, Henning!).