Les aires de France

We've been to Bordeaux, travelling by car from St Malo, a long drive but with frequent stops at aires.

Les aires are the motorway breaks on French autoroutes. They tend to occur every 10 to 20 kilometres, more frequently than British motorway stops, but also much much smaller. Some aires provide only toilets, benches and a few tables in the shade, but are frequent enough and pleasant enough to encourage you to stop.

Some aires have fuel, toilets, a small shop that sells coffee and sandwiches, and a terrasse with shade and a few chairs and tables, set in the shade, perhaps with a glass roof in case it rains. The flowers and shrubs are frequented by birds, and small animals living on the crumbs that people drop. We sat at a table in the shade, listening to the sparrows, watching them chase each other through the trees or attempting to hover around car fronts wanting to pick the dead insects off.

Youth hostelling

We're off youth hostelling again with the two eldest grandchildren. We leave our Austrian visitors in the charge of daughter.

Wilderhope Manor is our destination, a National Trust property. But the trip to get there is itself interesting. We headed for Ironbridge and visited a couple of its museums: Engenuity and the Museum of Iron. Engenuity enticed the children with its many activities, water & potential or kinetic energy, damming fords and opening dams, splashing the water to encourage it to flow, electrical energy to power a radio, a light, a vacuum cleaner, a video camera and TV or a pair of flying pigs - they took little energy. In the Iron Museum we explored history of cast iron and had a cup of tea.

The hostel was somewhat difficult to find - we had the address and a map but not directions so by heading off in the wrong direction on the right road a couple of times, we had to triangulate in on it. But arrived too late to order supper. See similar situation in Ireland a couple of weeks ago. We toddled off down the road to the local pub again.

The hostel is this amazing Elizabethan building with stone fireplaces, fancy ceilings marked with 'S' for the Smallman family who lived here and two oak spiral staircases, one for the servants and one slightly wider one for the family. The children have great times haring up and down the different staircases, romping along the corridors, chasing each other, playing hide and seek.

We share a four bunk attic room with our own bathroom. Breakfast in the large stone flagged dining hall. The upper floors are boarded, which is why we can hear the children thumping along the corridors and through the dormitories. The entrance hall is embellished with swallows' nests - one still occupied in the evening by "teenage" swallows, well able to fly, but squawk loudly when their parents arrive.

Houseboat (Jan 6th continued)

Eventually we reached the coastal area again, which is an extensive area of lagoons, interspersed with canals and settlements, sometimes described as like Venice (but without that city's urban beauty). The largest body of water is Lake Venbanad, which extends south from Cochin and is separated into a fresh water part by a bridge, which we crossed on our way to Allepey. The lake is marked by a floating lily plant which is thickest at the edges (see photo) where is delicate lilac-blue flower intensifies its appearance. Abundant fish life too, so that fish-eating birds flock to it – white herons (and an occasional black one), kingfishers, cormorants (the cormorants looked like grebes when swimming but I saw one pop up with a catch (an eel or a long fish) which took some time to process. Grebes are perhaps vegetarians?!) And an egret which was a drab pale brown on the ground but miraculously in flight has white wings and a black back (Also a pair of golden-brown white-tipped winged fish eagles)

We met up with our houseboat – covered in a bamboo framed, rattan covered roof, like a Chinese river boat – and said goodbye to Sunil, our affable driver. The crew of three – engine –driver, captain and chef (not cook) – were to take us on a cruise through the canals and across the lake, with meals prepared and eaten on board. We stopped to purchase six plate-size prawns (fresh-water) on route (1000Rs per kilo, which was the weight of six of them).

Officially leisure traffic should moor at six pm, so that the locals can go fishing, but there is continual ferry traffic for the locals, which goes on much later. As we passed some of the can’s children would run alongside shouting, apparently, for ‘one pen’. We assembled a few old biros, but too late to see if they were what was wanted.

We moored slightly off shore overnight and feasted on our prawns – grilled in spices – but also some fish curry and ‘boatman chicken’. The chef has a web site with recipes.


The dwellings by the canalside were small, but permanent in the most part. As washing of clothes and persons was done in the canal, it would seem that running water, and electricity are not available to most. In addition to the well-stocked lake, coconut tress (and cashew trees) there were paddy fields where water could be fed in from the lake and waterways.

Kummily to Kumarakom

January 6th (Kumilly to Kumarokan)

Before breakfast two pairs of birds stayed long enough in a near by tree to enable us to have a good look. First was the red-crested cuckoo with red stripes to its wings and a mustard yellow back. Then the blackbird which had a surprisingly clear and resonant song, and was distinguished by a tail appendage of two long stalks with a small feather at the end, 10 or 12 inches from the end of the tail proper.

The roads were full on a Sunday morning with buses and pedestrians including many long distance pilgrims, singly and in groups, with their belongings in a bundle on their heads, trekking to some religious destination. Looking out for the variety of Christian churches I espied a Bethany Bible Institute, which Douglas Fairman would have known about, I surmised.

The descent to the coastal plain from around 4000 or 5000 feet was predictably vertiginous, and the occasional group of bus passengers whose stomachs were not up to the challenge were seen by the roadside – another reason why the more basic Indian buses have no glass in the side – windows – I had thought it was just for ‘air-conditioning’. Musing on the journey, I started a list of rules for driving in India.

To Thekkady

January 4th Munnar to Thekkady (forest) / Kumily (town) or Periyar (river and lake)

We ate breakfast in the Tall Trees restaurants, much impressed by the view through the roof, then packed our bags and descended from the plantation to Munna where we visited a tea museum and saw the mechanics of tea processing. There is only one tea plant whose leaf buds are picked and turned into white tea, (the tip before the leaf has started to open in growth), green tea and black tea (which are both processed mechanically (CTC – cutting, tearing and curling), to reduce the leaf size), winnowing to remove the stalks. Then black tea goes through an oxidation process and is winnowed into about 8 sizes – bigger means more aroma, small means more colour. Blending then produces types for different markets, customers or packaging such as teabags.

Then we set on our way here – a 100 km drive scheduled to take 3 hours but Sunil, our driver, explained that one section hadn’t been upgraded and due to a dispute was in very bad condition. After lunch in a Keralan style local restaurant (fish stew or fish curry and pink coloured drink made from infusing a local spice leaf) Sunil embarked on a detour which meant we only had 5 km of pot holes to negotiate, so that we arrived and went straight to Periyar lake (a reservoir) for a boat-trip – deer, bison and many birds – white heron, snake bird and cormorant nests built on some of the tree stumps which stuck out of the lake – a close view of cormorant fledglings waiting for more lunch – but no elephants.

We booked into our hotel and booked ayuvedic full-body and head and feet massages for both of us. Unlike my previous relaxing muscle massage, this was a vigorous stroking after application of hot oil (and while completely starkers) of (almost) every part – arrived at the blood-vein layout of the human form. Finally we were cooked, separately, in a steam bath apparently powered from a Prestige pressure cooker.

Still oily, we ate an evening meal, as it was nearly 9pm (the massage took about an hour and a half).

Under instructions to keep the oil on until morning, we soon opted for bed, when a gecko climbed up the wall to have a peek at the world.

I slept well, but was awake before 5am to hear the electronic peal of bells and striking of the hour followed by some uplifting (I presume) words. All this was followed by the call of the local muezzin – also amplified – half an hour later. For a state which is about 20% Christian the local churches are surprisingly prominent with their gaudy vernacular architecture, the many schools attended by neatly turned-out, uniformed children, (to judge by one extensive washing line, the school also launders the uniforms). The churches are also diverse – Anglican, RC, Orthodox, Syrian Christians, Seventh Day Adventists and no doubt many others.