Huttopia - camping with the kids...

There is no denying, Camping Huttopia is very lovely spot. What could be nicer than waking-up to birdsong in a sun-denched wood on an island in the Dordogne? So, it's fairly likely that I am poised to become positively effusive in a moment or two about the delights of the site, how sharing our time here with stylish millenials and their smallish off-spring brought back great memories of camping holidays with our kids. Undoubtedly, I will attempt to persuade you that if you wish to sample the best things that rural France has to offer, this place is definitely worthwhile considering. So, it is essential to get all the negatives out of the way first.

Without exception the ACSI reviews for camping Huttopia are glowing, but it's strange not one of them mentions the challenges of getting into the place. The access road is down a narrow lane; there are priority signs to ensure drivers don't attempt to squeeze through simultaneously- there really is not enough room for two vehicles to pass and the dog-leg bend next to reception makes it tricky to reverse, impossible probably if towing a caravan. For us, however, driving a moho with an overcab bed, the wooden bridge at the entrance with a 3m height restriction presented a bigger challenge, The hanbdbook gives Maisy's height as 3.1m. The guy in reception insisted we would fit through. He was right, but it was very tight. Gill, who was on arm waving duty out front, reckoned we cleared the hazard with less than 3 cms to spare. Soft tyres?

Another consideration concerns where is best to stay on the site. The riverside pitches cost a bit more; you get a lovely view, but less shade. It is where English caravaners gather, given their endearing pre-occupation with the Picturesque, for them pitch with a view is de rigueur, whatever the price. Every car was emblazoned with a National Trust decal. With 35 degree temperatures forecast we opted for a shaded woodland pitch. There were plenty to choose from; the Ascension Thursday millenial invasion had yet to happen. We chose a lovely large pitch near the perimeter fence. How did we fail to hear the roar of the nearby weir?

During the day it was not so noticeable, at night, however, because we opened every window and skylight for ventilation, the roar became much louder. In the small hours worse was to come, the weir was connected to the Dordogne valley hydro-electric system, from time to time a turbine would kick in with an annoying high pitch whine, like a hippo sized mosquito. Luckily the site is wooded, so the annoying noise is muffled by the trees and only audible in the pitches furthest upstream; we simply had made the wrong choice. Next morning, by 10am it was red hot; the kind of weather where merely moving an inch provokes profuse sweating in every nook and cranny. So we stayed put and read for a while. I amused myself by annotating the site map with useful warnings concerning its hazards and delights.

Now you have no excuse whatsoever to be caught out by Huttopia's more annoying aspects- Niagara Falls, the resultant insomnia zone, the enclave of National Trust enthusiasts and the guilliotine portal are all clearly noted on the map. For the sake of  balance  the place's delights have been highlighted too. Lets start with Camp Hipster. This small settlement of erected safari tents seems to appeal particularly to hipsterish couples (prophetic beards, skinny jeans, startling specs, garish blazers [him], leggings with knee length floaty top, glimpsed tattoos, facial piercing, quirky hat [her]. Most were couples, though one had a small baby with them, stylishly garbed, but carried about gingerly as if it might be virulent or belong to somebody else.

Our pitch was adjacent to the zone of fractious toddlers. Some grey-haired moho owners consciously avoid family orientated sites. 'Adult only' campsites are quite common in the UK. Clearly there is a market for 'peace and quiet'. However, some of our happiest memories are of camping in France in a secondhand 'big-top' of a frame tent with our three kids. Watching the next generation of enthusiastic, but harassed parents being systematically outfoxed by a clutch three foot high toddlers brought a smile to our faces. Both of us spent our working lives as educators, you would not do that unless you were interested in children and young people and like to see them catered for and having a good time. So, we are happy to share a camp site with families and accept at any one time, especially in a heatwave, some small person is going to become outraged by life's frustrations or parental injustice and decide to wail.

As the Ascension holiday approached the site became ever busier. Nearby - a family group of four - parents, two older teenagers, all sleeping in a small ridge tent. "That's not going to be very comfortable in this heat," Gill mused as the four crawled into their bivouac in the twilight gloom. A couple with two boys and a baby had parked next to us in their motorhome. The motorhome looked newish and the couple perhaps in their mid thirties. We speculated how they could have afforded it; we could not have envisaged being able to do that at their age. More similar to our past experience - the family next to them, again three kids, a biggish ridge tent and a Mercedes Sprinter. We travelled the length of southern Europe with kids, firstly in aged estate cars, then, when our third child arrived, we bough a Ford Galaxy, but carried so much stuff for our tribal encampment that eventually we needed a trailer.

Version 1 - Gill plus venerable Nissan Bluebird and ten ton frame tent

We reckon...summer 1993, near Puivert, Languedoc.

Version two - after Laura arrived in 1995 we needed a people carrier and trailer.

On the way home from Croatia - 2000.

1997 - Tuscany

and Corsica

The antics of our fellow campers reminded us of just how hard work camping with small children was . Over the course of the day levels of exasperation on the pitch next door slowly increased. At breakfast the woman was merely hyperactive, by evening her emotional energy had reached fever pitch. This was due in the main to the gradual effect of what might be termed 'mother duck syndrome'. The three kids looked to be  aged about 7, 4, and under 1. The elder two did their level best to stymie the man's concerted attempts to be fully involved by constantly seeking the woman's attention. Every time 'mum' attempted to breastfeed the baby, the middle child tried to climb on her knee and when 'dad' tried distraction tactics, the toddler had the screaming habdabs. In the end the woman took to nursing the baby while standing-up, hiding behind a tree at the back of their tent. Is this nature or nurture? Are small humans hard-wired to seek maternal protection, or is this an example of 'gendered' behaviour, the result of social conditioning? What happens in the families of same sex couples, do small children orientate more towards one parent as a mother surrogate, or is attention seeking behaviour split more evenly? There must be a literature on this. Something else to google!

One effect of the influx of families was to turn the sanitaire into a minor war zone every evening as exhausted parents cajoled or coerced tired offspring into the showers. We waited for the place to calm down. The heat was such that it took until almost midnight for the van to cool to the mid twenties, at which point, with a light sheet as a cover, it became possible to get to sleep.

9.10pm. still 31 degrees.....

Sitting out under the stars on hot sticky evenings is one of the pleasures of summer camping in  the South. We don't experience it so much these days as most of our moho travels are outside of the high season. By elevenish the site was quiet and we had the shower block to ourselves. I have annotated it on the map as 'the beauteous vintage sanitaire' because like everything else at Huttopia it is styled to be a 'pimped-up' Municipal - glamping with a vintage vibe. Millenials love it; we might regard the overt re-branding with a somewhat ironic eye, but in truth, I think it's fair to say we loved it too, if only because it prompted fond memories of camping en famille, Judging by our photos we did not rough it, we even had EHU and a small fridge. Perhaps we were pioneering glampers.

The entire Acension holiday seemed to provoke some sort of nostalgia fest. On the way here we passed convoys of  2cvs and Citroen Dyane's of every type - some hippyfied with big flowery graphics, others souped-up with chrome pipes sprouting from the side, or lovingly restored to their dull green original livery, complete with arse-breaking canvas seats. I am not sure where the rally was, but an escapee camped immediately behind us with  a gleaming example and a tiny vintage caravan light enough to be towed by a car with 425cc engine.

Our sense that reality had been temporarily augmented by some kind of vintage sepia simulcrum increased when a contingent of soldiers dressed in Bonapartiste uniforms marched across the footbridge a few metres from the site. Beaulieu was poised to celebrate a re-enactment weekend involving a skirmishes between Royalists and Bonarpartistes. This explained the arrival of a large four-wheeled cannon towed by a Toyota Hilux which we had witnessed the day before in the main square. Whether this commemorated a real event or was just an excuse to dress up and make huge explosions I don't know. I thought Royalist resistance to the Revolution was concentrated in Brittany and the Vendee, but maybe smaller insurgencies occurred in the Central Massif too. Anyway, I think there is a fairly loose connection between re-enactments and historical fact. It's all about dressing up and putting on a show.

On the question of dressing-up, I can just about see why men don uniforms with braided epaulets and snazzy tri-corn hats and strut about clutching muskets; what attraction it holds for the women participants is less clear. Their role seems to be simply to trail along behind in a bonnet, which I suppose is an improvement on their actual historical role, which in reality probably involved making gallons of scarcely edible beef stew while at constant risk of being raped by the opposition soldiery.

The re-imagined past is undoubtedly very fashionable, ranging from full-scale re-enactments, and the inexplicable popularity of Downton and Game of Thrones, to an enthusiasm for vintage vinyl and shabby chic. Given the speed of technical change right now and an increasingly unstable political situation, burgeoning golden ageism is hardly surprising. However, the notion that the past is reassuring or innocuous is fundamentally flawed. The past is a dangerous territory; its myths cast long shadows over the present and discourage us to deal rationally with the here and now. Everybody and every thing has a questionable past because any question posed about the past can only ever have a partial answer,

As if to re-inforce the notion that the past is a risky place, prone to unexpectedly intervening and posing a 'real and present danger' here and now, next day we left the campsite, squeezed gingerly through portal guillotine, and immediately were surrounded by Napoleonic forces. I don't think a surprise move on the flanks by a Prussian motorhome was ever envisaged by the organisers of the re-enactment. The unexpected manoeuvre worked, resistance melted and we swept imperiously through the ranks of Bonarpartistes to head northwards towards the safer territory of the autoroute. It may be tedious, but at least it is a place firmly rooted in the 21st century; well, aside from occasional roving gangs of Belgian Peter Fonda fantasists riding Harleys three abreast at 40kph purposely to irritate fellow four-wheeled  road users.

Towards Dordogneshire and beyond.

Millau to Beaulieu-sur-Dordogne, 116 miles 

Instead of continuing north from Millau up the A75 (free, hooray!) autoroute to Clermont-Ferrand, we opted to head across country on the D911 in the direction of Rodez. This piece of our mental jigsaw of France we have never managed to put into place - and now we have. Given the bleak upland terrain around Millau, I anticipated more of the same. In fact, despite the altitude the countryside is green and wooded and fun to drive through as the road snakes uphill and downhill dale, under a big sky, which today was a deep blue from horizon to horizon.

Tellytubby land with wind turbines

The Causse - more wooded than I had anticipated

The only giveaway that at times the road reached almost 3000' was that even in late May some trees were only just coming into leaf. We reached Rodez at lunchtime coinciding with the noon traffic jam. If we were not hurrying homewards with a ferry to catch in just a few days I would have liked to have visited the Musee Soulages. Pierre Soulages was born in Rodez in 1919; astonishingly he still does. Though I suppose it is a matter of opinion if, as François Holland claims, Soulages is the greatest living painter; what is indisputable however, is he happens to be the last living exponent of Modernism. His European take on Abstract Expressionism, a style associated primarily with 1950s New York, can resemble Rothko, but Soulage's palette is more mono-chromatic, and even darker and psychotic than Rothko's in intent. Another time, I promised myself. 

17 December 1966 by Pierre Soulages

Onwards, up the D840 towards Aubin and Figeac. It feels remote here, redneck territory signified by a preponderance of peeling le Pen posters, very few defaced by Hitler moustaches, which is the norm in the more civilised parts of France. "It's a bit Vosgses around here," I observed gloomily. As explained elsewhere, Vosgsesness is our private cipher for any god-forsaken area of France, characterised by mundane architecture, rural deprivation, de-populated villages inhabited solely by odd looking elderly people whose sole amusement appears to involve staring balefully at the occasional passing vehicle. 

Vosgsesness

We left the main road and headed north towards St. Cere. The landscape became more attractive and the vernacular architecture more typical of the Dordogne, a country of woods and meadows dotted with creamy stone farmhouses with steep red pantiled roofs and round towers.

The way it is.. squashed flies on the windscreen, tractor ahead doing 15mph and oncoming traffic...not Vosgesish though...

Off the main road, though the lanes were narrow, the traffic was light, so we made better progress reaching the river itself at Bretenoux. The outskirts of the place seemed blighted by retail sprawl. The heart of postcard pretty Dordogneshire, so beloved by the British as a sunnier version of the Cotswolds, is located a few kilometres downstream around Sarlat. I suppose the land of  Wallace Arnold and Saga spawns retail sprawl. We were now close to our destination - Beaulieu-sur-Dordogne, which happens to be by the Dordogne, but not in the Dordogne; the town is located a few kilometres beyond the eponymous Department's border and actually is in Correze. The towns of the upper Dordogne - Beaulieu, and Argentat - are as lovely as those downstream in Dordogneshire itself, but are a little less frequented and less dependent solely on tourism. Consequently they do not achieve the same sanitised charity-calender look of places on the coach-tour itinerary. To continue the Cotswold comparison, they are more Hook Norton than Bourton-on-the-Water.

Beaulieu-sur-Dordogne is a lovely riverside town, its medieval centre a tangle of timber-framed houses, narrow alleys and attractive small squares. With excellent local food shops, stylish craft shops selling well designed fabrics and objet d'art, it is a tourist town, but remains enough of a functioning community to have small supermarkets in the centre and a clutch of old cafes in a tree shaded square, well frequented by locals and visitors alike.

Bealieu's old river port.

Only one gate remains of the original three.

Square opposite the Abbey

Great patisserie and charcouterie 

Beaulieu's most significant monument is the large abbey church of St Peter in the centre. Most of the building is Romanesque and the large tympanum over southern portal is unusual for a Benedictine foundation in this part of France, Rather than depicting the Last Judgement designed to scare the living daylights out of 10th century illiterate peasants, it shows the second coming, - Christ in Majesty - it is uplifting rather than terrifying, which I like.

Christ in Majesty - the trumpets announce the Second Coming

Not quite as scary as some local sculptures  - but it would not be Romanesque without the occasional many headed monster.

Tree of Jesse 

 The campsite we stayed in,  Camping Les Illes, is part of the Huttopia chain of sites. As the name suggests its occupies an island - a pretty wooded one - yet is only a five minute stroll from the town's ancient centre - but more of that in the next post.

Millau: harem pants, pink facades, ganterie survival

Collioure to Millau, 150 miles

I suppose in recent years Millau has become synonymous with the magnificent​ viaduct which carries the A75 autoroute across the Tarn valley about three kilometers west of the town. There is a certain irony to this because the very thing that has put Millau on the map ensures most people now zoom straight past it. We didn't. Since we used the town's lovely, yet inexpensive Deux Rivieres campsite, both on the way south and coming home, we never actually crossed the famous bridge, thus saving ourselves about €18 in tolls. It's this kind of serendipitous moment that provokes Gill to remark "All good!" Which she just has, as I brought news of our windfall to her attention.

Any conversation you happen to have about the viaduct with fellow countrymen inevitably will include an apparently off the cuff remark that the mighty structure was designed by a British architect. The visitor centre next to the bridge plays down this aspect, concentrating on the challenges of construction and its status as an icon of French engineering, merely mentioning in the 'small print' that Norman Foster was a design associate. Furthermore, to make doubly sure that passing international visitors have time to fully reflect on the essentially Gallic nature of the site, the place has installed Turkish toilets in the recently built sanitaire. Whatever the truth of the matter and despite the idiosyncratic sanitary arrangements, Brits have embraced the edifice as a stunning example of Anglo-French collaboration, along with Concorde, the Channel Tunnel, Café Rouge and Eric Cantona.

Which brings us obliquely to the question of harem pants. It was precisely​ because we did not opt to cross the viaduct that we found ourselves ensnared in Millau town centre's experiment in 'shared space' traffic management.

Driving gingerly past crowded café tables spilling out from where the pavement used to be into the area once regarded as the road, I happened to note a preponderance of customers wearing harem pants. Women, men, cute tousle-haired kids, all sporting voluminous floaty nether-wear. I was too busy trying to avoid flattening the local hippydom to jump to any broader cultural conclusions regarding this​ sartorial oddity. However, the conclusion I would have jumped to, given time, was that since our last visit here around 15 years ago, Millau had taken a distinctly 'green' turn, a bit of a leap to the left, to an extent that visitors might anticipate that every other shop will be committed to selling products prefixed by the words 'bio' and 'eco', and promises of resultant 'wellnesssl abound.

In the event, I was proven correct. Even the local hairdresser promised all products were vegan compliant and 'bio'. Although it's an unlikely scenario, if I was going to have a perm or my hair dyed aquamarine, personally, I would want the product to have been thoroughly tested on Dolly the sheep beforehand​.

Once I come across something that intrigues me, I have to investigate further. I am not given at all to Gallic 'c'est la vie' shoulder shrugging. So I ended up googling 'harem pants'. It turned out to be unexpectedly complicated. There are two styles: high crutch and low crutch. The former are simple garments resembling light weight voluminous jogging pants, the latter a more complex affair with a baggy crutch that hangs below the knee, resembling a DIY attempt to make a maxi-skirt that went horribly wrong. Both types are offered in vaguely sixties styled Paisley or ethnic patterns, apart from a black sheer varient, pitched primarily at devotees of belly dancing. 

The obvious question, if like me you are cursed with an insatiable curiosity, is where did the style come from? Not a harem, certainly. Vintage photographs of Ottoman and Berber harems in the nineteenth century show women in long black skirts.

The style of the modern garment seems derived from European colour prints from the same era depicting vaguely eroticised scenes of the mystic orient, which in turn probably draw on earlier French imagery of 'Araby' found in Rimbaud, Flaubert and the harem paintings of Ingres and Delacroix.

These influences, mediated through Hollywood (the pantomime costumes of Aladdin Disneyfied), vague longings for the simplicities of the hippy trail, or a sense of 'wellness' derived from scented candles, alternative medicine and small statuettes of Buddha - all this mumbo-jumbo I think is mixed up in the desire to don floaty patterned pants of voluminous proportions. 

In America, however, the term 'harem pants' is not universally used; I am uncertain if this is this due to latent Islamophobia, or sensitivity around cultural appropriation among the chattering classes. For example, 'Forever 21' adopts the phrase 'bohemian pants', drawing on the garments' popularity among makers of badly crafted polished stone jewellery or vanity published poetry collections. Other terms include 'yoga pants' - their loose fitting style well suited to people bent on becoming inordinately bendy, or most bizarre all, Thai fisherman pants...here I decided to pursue my research no further, at what point does a healthy curiosity become a peculiar obsession? I think I have just proved I am somewhat hazy about that distinction. Anyway, I may have given the impression that Millau is entirely populated by hippies (both ageing and aspiring) and others of an alternative disposition - eco-warriors in cargo pants and waif-thin vegan therapists; this is not exactly the case, it is no more hippyfied than Hebden Bridge or Machynllyth, which is to say, "well, not totally, man."

This small but well established migrant population from planet Zog gives Millau a lively, youthful vibe quite different from how we remember it, as a sleepy southern town that felt remote and somewhat down at heel. The town noticeboard sums this up nicely advertising a mixture of forthcoming cultural attractions as well as election posters that indicate that the Left and the Greens are vocal if not actually influencial hereabouts.

It's not just the atmosphere of the place which has changed. Millau looks different too. The first time we ventured into the Languedoc was in the summer of 1994. The towns and villages of the Corbieres and Causse had a uniformly sludge-like palour, as almost every older building was faced in dull cement, much of it crumbling, though occasionally cheered-up by faded painted gable advertising Dubonnet or Gitanes. It's easy to get nostalgic about the France of yore, complete with clapped out Deux- Chevaux, elderly peasants in blue overalls wobbling homewards with a few groceries packed in a wooden fruit box tied precariously onto the back of a mobelette.

This is not some Stella Artois advert fantasy; rural France really looked like this when we became regular visitors​ four decades ago. In parts it occasionally still does, but for the most part the country has embraced retail sprawl like the rest of us.  As France developed economically, ordinary people became much better off and that is a good thing. The extent of this progress only becomes apparent when you revisit somewhere like Millau after a break of more than a decade.

One ​ change we noted immediately was that quite a few of the dull cemented facades had been colour washed in pastel shades reminiscent of coastal towns and villages of Provence. Why not! It looks much jollier.

Another change were new buildings in the town centre. The French are much less ambivalent than we are about 'la Moderne'. They construct boldly designed contemporary style buildings in the midst of old streets and celebrate the startling juxtaposition rather than worry about them 'fitting in' or grumbling about 'concrete carbuncles'. I particularly liked the way old and new had been melded together in the area around Millau's refurbished market hall. We promised ourselves breakfast here, but failed to get up quickly enough. Next time perhaps.

One of the more intriguing aspects of France is how it has embraced globalisation yet simultaneously supported local producers and to some extent traditional, rural based industry. I am old enough to remember a junior school Phillips Atlas with a map of British cities and their specialist industries - Stockport (hats), Wellingborough (shoes), Consett (steel), Sunderland (glass), Newcastle-upon-Tyne (shipbuilding), Stoke-on-Trent (ceramics). All gone, or foreign owned. A similar atlas of France would have shown next to Millau - leatherwork and glove-making. It's still going strong, not the odd craft shop here and there but two substantial 'ganterie' selling high end products with window displays reminiscent of the boutiques of the 1st arrondissement - and that lifts the spirits.

I realise France is not perfect, that unemployment among young people is endemic, parts of the de-industrialised north and east are deprived as much as the north of England, but at least the government seems to want to attempt to balance local with global rather than heading wholesale towards a casino economy run for the advantage of the wealthy.

We liked Millau, its 'alternative' vibe - how it seems to be thriving and investing in the future. I know I have been rude about some of its more crusty inhabitants, but that's because I recognise in them kindred spirits of a kind. I may not wear the uniform, but I have kudos, I have been published occasionally, and can boasts a volume of heartfelt poetry that hardly anyone bought. I would fit in...but only on one condition - that harem pants, crotch lo or hi, are not an absolute prerequisite, in my view, you don't need special pants to be a bohemian.