The main reason that I decided to go to southern France for vacation was to see the old Cathar castles of the Languedoc. There is a lot of information available out there about who the Cathars were and what happened to them in the 12-14th Centuries, so I won't bore you with a lot of detail. But basically here is what happened (if you're not interested, skip down to the line below)...
The Languedoc (or Language of 'Oc') is the term used for the places in southern France where they spoke 'Oc' (also known as Occitan or Romans). It was different from the Langueoil (or Language of 'Oil') which they spoke in northern France. The difference came from the fact that in the north they pronounced the word 'yes' as 'Oil' and in the south it was pronounced 'Oc'. Of course that was old French (now 'yes' translates to 'Oui'). Very few people still speak Occitan anymore, and it is called 'Provencal' now. It is similar to Catalan. You can buy French-Occitan dictionaries in certain bookstores in the area.
So basically, back in the 1100s, the Languedoc was a totally separate country from north France. They had a different language, and they didn't really pay any attention to what the King of France was doing up in Paris. Around that time, the Catholic Church was pretty corrupt. The bishops held a lot of power and all the money. The people were poor, but the clergy was super-rich. They sold blessings to people and had their enemies executed and really were oppressive. So a new religion sprang up in the city of Albi called Catharism. It was related to some other religions that were appearing in Eastern Europe at the time.
Catharism said that the organized church was evil, and people should live a simple life, free from the tyranny of the church. They dumped a lot of the pomp and spectacle from religion and tried to make it more equitable for the poor and disenfranchised. There were no professional clergy, everyone had regular jobs as well as performing ceremonies. They also switched from monotheism to duotheism, elevating the devil to be the equal of God. They also threw out the Old Testament and believed that anything physical was evil. But for the most part, they were the some of the first Protestants. A lot of the problems they had with the Catholic church were the same ones that Martin Luther and others would have a few centuries later.
Of course, the pope didn't like having his priests being told to take a hike, so he declared a crusade (the Albegesian Crusade to be exact). He basically sent roving bands of thugs around the countryside killing and converting the masses back to the fold. The deal was that anything they did there (murder, theft, rape) wasn't a sin because 'God wills it'. A lot of folk took advantage of that deal to commit some interesting atrocities. On the other side were the Counts of Toulouse, which was as close to kings as the Languedoc had. The war went on for a fairly long time and it was pretty much a stalemate. Then, the Pope went to the King of France and got him to support the crusade with the understanding that the Languedoc would become part of France once the Counts of Toulouse were gotten rid of.
That was the end of the Cathars, since the Counts couldn't match the King's armies. After the crusade was done, the Catholic priests went around and had an inquisition, and an awful lot of men, women, and children got burned at the stake, sometimes a few hundred at a time.
Ok, enough history! The important part is that the area has a lot of castle ruins dating back to the 12th century, and is the place where a whole culture was wiped out. Until recently I never thought to consider that France wasn't always France, that it used to be separate countries; and, had things turned out differently, it might still be separate countries.
We left Andorra after breakfast and headed in the direction of Carcassonne, which would be our base for the next few days. Surprisingly at the border, the French border guard stopped us and looked at our passports! But he let us through. We drove north to the town of Foix, which is one of the larger cities in the regions. Foix has a really impressive looking castle that overlooks the city. It is one of the only places in the region that is kept up and isn't a 'ruin'. We stopped in downtown Foix to take a look and to check in with the local tourist bureau.
Click here to see some pictures of Foix and the castle.
After Foix, we headed to the ruins of Montsegur. This was the last refuge of the Cathars. Once it fell, the Albignesian Crusade was over. It is an unbelievably secure location, being way up on the top of a mountain. In fact, the crusaders weren't able to take it, they just laid siege until the Cathars ran out of food and gave up. Then the crusaders burned 200 of them (including kids) to death in a big pyre (nice guys huh?).
Click here to see some pictures of Montsegur.
Montsegur was the first place that we saw some American tourists, and heard other people talking in English. It was some sort of high school tour group. They weren't very interested in talking to us.
After Montsegur, we headed to Carcassonne to get a hotel room. Carcassonne is almost two separate cities. In the lower parts of the town, it is just a regular French city, like Toulouse or Foix. But up on the hill is the old walled city (La Cite). It was first built in the 6th Century, and the majority of it was built in the 12th Century. It had lay in ruins until the beginning of the 20th Century when a famous French architect had it rebuilt. Now is a little like Disneyland. Inside the walled areas are a huge number or restaurants and hotels and bars (no rides). It is very touristy, but it is almost exclusively French tourists, and it isn't cheesy or fake like Disneyland. The restaurants are very good.
We felt that both the Lonely Planet and Let's Go!guidebooks were very misleading when they spoke about Carcassonne. First off, they said, "Outside of the Old City, there isn't much to do," implying to us that it was a pretty dead town. Technically they are right in their statement, but the Old City is so full of stuff to do that there is little reason to ever leave. There are dozens of restaurants and bars that are open quite late. The other thing that the tour books implied was that there were only two hotels in the Old City, a youth hostel and a four-star luxury hotel. So, we got a hotel in near the Square Gambetta in the main part of the city, almost a mile from the Old City. Once we got to the Old City though, we found that there were a large number of mid-priced hotels there! If we had only known, we would've stayed the Old City. Oh well. It wasn't that far a walk, and we did have to do some laundry in a laundromat downtown.
Click here to see some pictures of Carcassonne.
The laundry was a bit of an adventure in itself. We were both out of cash. I walked around for almost an hour trying to find an ATM. I found several that were 'closed' for the evening. I didn't understand that at all. I mean, what's the point of having an ATM if it is only open when the bank is open? After I finally found an ATM, I had even more trouble trying to find an open store to get some change. I finally found a little mini-mart that was open, and they asked me if I was Spanish. But they gave me some change.
Once laundry was done we went into the Old City for dinner and a few drinks. Then we turned in for the night.
As I said, the main reason I chose this place for a vacation was because I wanted to see the old castles. But on the way from Andorra we passed the Grotte Nieux (Nieux Cave) which the tour book said had 13,000 year old cave paintings. While I thought that it would be interesting to see them, it was a long drive from Carcassonne (it is south of Foix), and I wasn't sure that it would be worth the time to see them if it meant missing some castles. But Dave promised me that we would see all the castles I wanted to see before we went to Bordeaux, so off we went.
I don't have any pictures from the cave, because they didn't allow pictures inside (sorry). The flashes can ruin the paintings. We drove out to the cave, which is up a winding road and overlooks the village of Nieux. I did take a few pictures of the village of Nieux though.
Click here to see some pictures of Nieux.
We went in with a tour group of about 15 people. They don't allow any more than that at a time because the carbon dioxide and water that people exhale can damage the paintings. Most of the time I go overseas I am very surprised by the lack of personal injury lawsuit protections, and this place was no different. There is a cavern near where I live in DC called Luray Caverns, which is nice I suppose. Inside the entire place is well lit, they have carved out sidewalks, and they have non-slip stairs and handrails. This Grotte Nieux was nothing like that at all! First of all, there are no lights, you have to walk the whole way (almost a half mile into the cave) with just a flashlight. They have no paths or sidewalks, so you have to walk over wet, uneven, slippery ground. There are overhangs to bang your head and places to fall into deep pits. I'm a pretty agile guy and I had a hard time not falling.
The guide showed us a few things here and there about the cave, the most interesting of which was the graffiti. People had been coming to the cave since the 17th Century and many left their mark. It is pretty weird to see things like "Kilroy was here 1624" written on the walls. But no one went all the way to the back of the cave where the painting are until recently. They had a few dozen pictures of cows and horses which dated back about 13,000 years. I was cool to imagine what the people who painted them looked like and why they decided top paint things in the back of a cave. The tour was all in French, but I was able to get about half of what was said. Luckily for me there was a group of people from the US and one of them spoke French. She was translating into English for her friends so I was able to get most of what I missed by eavesdropping on her.
After the tour we decided to have some lunch and then head to Rennes-le-Chateau, which isn't a castle, but it is caught up in all the old Cathar legends. We went to what we thought would be a quick lunch in Nieux, but of course, there is no such thing as a quick meal in France, and lunch took almost 2 hours. It was pretty good though. If I hadn't been in a hurry to get to our next destination I would've been quite happy to just sit in the cafe and while away the afternoon.
We got to Rennes-le-Chateau at about 4 in the afternoon. It didn't close until 7, so that gave us time to look around. Basically, Rennes-le-Chateau is this church that was renovated around 1900 (actually, Rennes-le-Chateau is the name of the town that the church is in). It seems that the priest who ran this particular out-of-the-way, rural church somehow was able to do millions of dollars of renovations on it, and no one knew where he got the money from. He also made some very odd choices in his renovations. There are a lot of interesting and bizarre conspiracy theories as to where he got the money, and what secrets he was trying to give clues to in his strange renovations. Anyway, it is conspiracy central, and anyone interested in weirdo conspiracy theories simply must make a pilgrimage there.
Click here to see pictures of Rennes-le-Chateau.
It turned out that we had just enough time to look at the church (which is now a bit of a local tourist attraction) and to get some souvenirs. We were pretty tired after we left, mostly because of the heat. It hadn't been that hot since we had gotten to France, but our time at Montsegur and Rennes-le-Chateau was pretty uncomfortable. To make things worse, our car didn't have air conditioning. We headed back to Carcassonne and had dinner in the Old City. Dave picked a wine at dinner and when it came out the bottle was quite obviously designed to hold in carbonation. "Oh no!," Dave said to the waitress, "We didn't want to order champagne." "Don't worry, it's not champagne," She replied calmly. It wasn't champagne of course, it was simply carbonated, sparkling wine. It wasn't from the Champagne region at all. That's like saying, "This isn't Cognac, it's just brandy." We drank it anyway, but I thought that the semantics were pretty funny.
It is very rare to get an air-conditioned hotel room in France, and our hotel room in Carcassonne was no exception. It didn't particularly bother me, but Dave was very grumpy about it. The plan for that morning was to look at a few more castles and then start our trek towards Bordeaux. We started our day by driving through the city of Limoux (Dave needed his coffee). They have a little town square and we sat outside. In the US, one of stereotypes of French people is that they are always holding a baguette. This stereotype is totally accurate, at least in Limoux. As we sat and drank our coffee, hundreds of people walked by, and I swear, 90% of them were carrying baguettes. Some people were carrying whole bundles of baguettes.
We also learned that Limoux was the first place to invent sparkling wine. The town of Champagne made it famous, but it was first made in Limoux. After we learned this, we were glad that we had ordered the sparkling wine in Carcassonne, since that bottle was from Limoux.
We also took a few minutes to look at the big church they have there, but we couldn't figure a way in. We were also wasting our day, so we went off to the next destination.
Click here to see some pictures of Limoux.
Our plan was to see two castles, Peyrepertuse and Queribus. Queribus has much more historical significance, but Peyrepertuse is a more impressive ruin.
Peyrepertuse was on the way to Queribus, so we went there first. Like Montsegur and Rennes-le-Chateau, it is almost impossible to get to without a car. The Cathar castles were generally put in inaccessible, out of the way places.
Peyrepertuse is of course, way up on the top of a mountain. We drove and drove and eventually had to walk and walk to get to the top. It is pretty large, at least compared to some of the other ruins we went to. It was also in use for a long time. Unlike some of the other places, it remained a working castle after the Cathars were gone, and in fact was even used as a local garrison until the French Revolution.
Click here to see some pictures of Peyrepertuse.
It was quite hot up on the mountain. I don't like it when it is too hot, so I was dragging a little. After we left Peyrepertuse we headed towards Queribus, but we made a slight detour.
The map had this 'gorge' listed on it, and it was pretty much directly on the way. Dave, being a big hiker, wanted to take a look at it, so we took a look. It was quite impressive, much more impressive than either of us would've though. If we had had a few more days, it would've been fun to rent kayaks and drift down the river, but I wouldn't recommend driving.
Click here to see pictures of Gorge Galamus.
Once we extricated ourselves from the gorge, it was a quick hop over to Queribus, which is actually a keep, not a castle (don't ask me what the difference is). Queribus is also billed as the 'last refuge of the Cathars'. The difference is that when Montsegur fell, it was the end of the Albegnesian Crusade and the armed, open Cathar resistance. Then the inquisition started. Queribus was the last place that they found a bunch of people living the Cathar lifestyle. The inquisition busted in and burned everybody at the stake. After that people who were Cathars pretty much kept the fact to themselves.
Click here to see some pictures of Queribus.
By the time we got out of Queribus, we were very, very hot. It was not a good day to be driving around without air conditioning. I was ready to get a hotel and take a nice cold shower. Then, all of a sudden Dave said, "Hey, let's go see the Mediterranean Sea!" Now according to the map, it was about an hour's drive from where we were to Albi, where we had planned to spend the night. It was also an hour's drive in the exact opposite direction to get to Perpignan, which is a resort town on the Mediterranean. It was about 5 pm at that point, and the idea of spending two more hours in an non-air conditioned car was not particularly pleasant to me. But, Dave was excited about it, and swore that we'd get to Albi soon enough, so off we went.
Perpignan is a working class resort town near the Spanish border. It wasn't too bad I suppose. We parked near the beach, got out, and walked on the sand a little. Dave even dipped his feet in the water. There were a few topless people there, but not too many.
Click here to see some pictures of Perpignan.
Dave was able to placate me with some ice cream, and things were looking up as we headed to Albi. Of course, we didn't get into town until about 10pm.
We had agreed that we would get an air conditioned hotel room in Albi, no matter what the cost. I had gone through the tour book and picked out a nice place right on the Place de Vignons, which is a main square in Albi. We parked, and found the hotel right away. Of course, being 10 pm, they were already full for the night! Oh no! So, I grabbed my tour book and we went looking for another hotel. Albi, perhaps even more so than other French cities is like a maze, and it was very difficult finding anything. And of course, as I mentioned before, the hotels were all closed for the night. I started getting worried and I figured that we would have to sleep in the car, but Dave was calm and cool about the whole deal. It was rather odd, since even the slightest traffic problem got him shouting at other drivers, but for some reason, the idea of being homeless in a strange city didn't bother him in the least.
Eventually, we found a little hotel that was still open (The Hotel St. Clair). It was on the verge of closing, but they had one room left. It was more of a bed and breakfast really, and they only had an attic room (the hottest in the place) available. Of course they didn't have air conditioning. But it was a place to sleep so we took it. The hotel was quite nice though, and the matron was helpful. After getting the key, we went back to the Place de Vignons and had dinner at an Italian place. Dave ordered a martini in the restaurant and we learned the 'martini' in French translates to 'a glass of pure vermouth'. I had a nice cool shower in the hotel before going to sleep.
I didn't think that the room was that hot, but in the morning Dave was all grumpy and complained loudly that the French need to get air conditioners if they wanted to be taken seriously as a country. But in general we felt better. We were driving to Bordeaux that day, but the woman at the hotel said it would only take about three hours, so we were in no rush. We walked around the maze-like streets of the old part of Albi and it was quite nice. Plus the Place de Vignons was happening (although not with tourists). If I had more time I would've liked to have spent a day or two in Albi, but we wanted to get to Bordeaux before it was too late and we had a repeat of the previous night's hotel adventure.
We did take the time to see the Cathedral at Albi, which was by far the most impressive Cathedral I've ever seen. It was built just after the crusade and was designed to be a warning about how powerful the Catholic church was, just in case the people of Albi (the Albignesians) got any ideas about starting another heresy.
Click here to see some pictures of Albi.
After looking At the Cathedral, we packed up and headed for Bordeaux to get some wine.
On to the next section, Chris Goes to Bordeaux
If you are thinking of going to Peru instead of France, see my Peru Page
If for some reason you think that I'm a great writer, and you like scary, conspiracy-laden, psychological thrillers, you can read my novel, City of Pillars, published by The Invisible College Press. It has nothing to do with France though. PS: I use my middle name as my nom de plume, but it's still me.