Yesterday we went in pursuit of Lavender and today we go in search of Flamingo. Evidently they are just down the road. The handmade house book in our cottage tells us we are an hour away from lakes, river and the sea and if we head down towards the Carmargue region we can visit the marshes and see horses and flamingo.
Its overcast today but by 9 am its still 26 degrees so our four bottles of water still get packed. We stop at the pharmacy because evidently the mosquitoes are ferocious because of the marshes and I use my translate app yet again (love that app). “Antimostique” of course.
We pass pretty fields of sunflowers with a promise to take some pics on another day. We arrive in Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer , pay 5 euro for parking and begin to wander. Its not a quaint nor particularly pretty town but we find a bike shop and hire a couple of bikes to bike the seawall. I go electric and WH initially thinks he will just have an ordinary one but changes his mind and gets a two deal. He will thank me later.
We head along the sea wall on the hunt for the pink birds and the pink lakes. We seem to go a long way and the lighthouse that we are biking too (because that is where they said to go) is nowhere in sight, not even in a far distant horizon. there are also no pink lakes. Its an interesting landscape and when I see some Flamingos in the distance and I stop to take a pic the smell is not unlike Rotorua on a not too smelly day.
We keep biking along and also pushing along the seawall as the sand drifts have become too deep in parts to ride through. We stop and I take pics and we watch the sky darken. Still the lighthouse cannot be seen on the horizon.
The salt lakes are interesting against the darkening sky as it looks like snow crusting at the edges. The famed lighthouse finally appears on the horizon and pulls us forward as the path turns to a bone jarring broken tar-seal. I am afraid the lighthouse does not live up to any expectation except that we have arrived and we can now turn around and go back.
We wind the bikes up to top gear and with the wind at our backs zoom along the path (except of course when we are pushing through the sand drifts) back the way we came. This time some Flamingos have edged closer to the path and we stop to take a couple more shots.
I forgot to add that we had no raspberry tart (and bad coffee breakfast), as we didn’t see any tarts worthy of my quest when we were wandering earlier on in the township, so by now its well past noon and I am pretty hungry. We get back to town and find a cafe, but alas no Raspberry tart. The most interesting thing in the town is that tourists pay 3 euro to climb up onto the church roof and are wandering all around. You can’t see the pitch of the roof in the photo but it’s actually quite steep as they make there way right up to apex of the roof.
We drop our bikes off and our butts enjoy the slow walk back to the car just as it starts to rain. On the way home I get WH to pull over despite the rain so I can snap a pic of the sun flowers. I remain hopeful I will get a shot of the rolling fields full of them but just in case I will catch this moment.
