From the roadway that winds around from the bay, you can watch the surfers riding the grey-green rollers that curl in from the Atlantic. I’d always harboured a romantic image of Biarritz as the summer playground of French aristocracy – suntanned, diamond-draped and sipping Moet as they lazed on the sand. Napoleon III and Empress Eugenie placed it on the must-do list for the social elite in the mid 19th-century but as I walked along the esplanade overlooking La Grand Plage, which when translated as “the big beach” sounds somewhat less grand, there were no jewel encrusted aristocrats in sight.

There were however, several thousand beach-goers sprawled on towels, lying in deck chairs or stretched in the shade of candy-striped beach tents to escape the blaze of the August summer sun. I had driven in on a Sunday and without realising it, became one of the luckiest people in the city – I found a car parking space - driving in ever decreasing circles in search of a nonexistent parking bay being one of the principal pastimes in Biarritz on summer weekends.
Biarritz marked the western extreme of a journey which had begun, as should all journeys to France, in Paris. Paris had been hot and frantic. We’d seen the landmarks, cruised The Seine, had an argument under the Eiffel Tower (this wasn’t in the guidebooks – it was spontaneous), consistently overeaten, consumed a significant quantity of red and white wine and walked from dawn till dusk.

We drank Champagne on the Champs-Élysées, listened to music in the Latin Quarter and mastered the Metro underground train system. It had been wonderful and exhausting and we’d done as much of Paris as it was possible to do in a week.
On the day we left Paris, we managed to attract the attention of one of the few taxi drivers in that city, took a cab to the station and from there a train out to the airport at Orly, 18 km south of the city. There we collected our rental car, having been warned not to attempt to drive while in Paris ... sage advice indeed. The car was rented under those deals by which you buy it, drive it for as many weeks and as far as you want and then sell it back to the rental company. The car – a Renault Megane – was waiting as arranged, the paperwork took five minutes to complete, and with my partner chanting “keep to the right, keep to the right’’ we navigated our way onto the motorway heading south from the City of Lights.

It was a bright, clear day and the toll roads beckoned as we rolled along at 140 km/h, occasionally passed by BMWs and Mercedes-Benz as their drivers attempted to break the sound barrier. A soothing vista of green fields and chateaux unfolded alongside the road, an idyll broken occasionally by signs proclaiming the imminence of another toll booth and the handing over of another fistful of Euros.
The map reading went smoothly – too smoothly - until the toll road mysteriously disappeared and towns began to appear that were not on the way to Sarlat.

Technically speaking we weren’t lost, just taking an unplanned detour. That divine force which watches over travellers who are map-challenged was with us and after a detour of several hours which took us past more chateaux and more rolling green fields, we eased off the freeway and into the medieval township of Sarlat, the tourism epicenter of the Dordogne.
It was dusk when we dumped our luggage in the stone-floored kitchen of the farmhouse we had rented, staggered out onto the terrace and collapsed into two strategically placed deck chairs. A six-hour journey had taken nine but we’d seen a lot of France. The view from the terrace embraced a broad, deep stretch of lawn fading into a distant tree line as the long summer twilight ebbed. Paris suddenly seemed a long way away.
The days that followed were spent in unhurried exploration of the towns and villages that make up this tranquil, captivating region. The Sunday morning food markets of St Cyprien overwhelmed us as we wandered past stands piled with strawberries, blackberries and plump, black prunes, past the glistening slabs of fresh salmon and duck, and the smell of fresh bread mingling with the sharp tang of strong, aged cheese.

We drove to Cenac, along narrow roads which clung to the banks of the Dordogne, the river on one side and on the other, cliffs topped with fortress-like chateaux with their turrets of stone the colour of alabaster in the morning light. We drove to La Roque Gageac, a small town and an impossibly appealing one, its serpentine streets lined with restaurants, the vertical cliffs beneath which it lies topped by the inevitable medieval castle looking down on the river where canoeists drifted and families played on the thin white spits of sand which reached into its green waters.
We crossed an arched stone bridge and drove to Domme, its 13th-century walls and fortified gates extant and dominating the surrounding country. In the evenings back at our farmhouse, we stretched in the deck chairs and ate cold meats and duck confit and drank chilled white wine.
And then my partner’s work commitments recalled her to Australia and I was travelling solo, map stretched out on the passenger seat and pounding my head on the steering wheel at every wrong turn. After the verdant fields, wooded river valleys and quaint villages of the Dordogne, Biarritz came as a visual shock with its crowded beaches and Gold Coast bustle. In the pleasant winding streets, set back from the beachfront behind high fences, the town’s permanent residents hide in their grand chateaux, the local aristocracy which one presumes retreat when the summer hordes descend.

Having satisfied myself that topless bathing was still popular with the beach-going French masses, I headed south to St Jean de Luz, a resort town a short drive south from Biarritz and another short drive from the Spanish border – street signs in both French and Basque giving a clue to its hybrid culture and proximity to Spain.
I wandered the cobblestone streets with their shops and restaurants and occasional bars, and offered a brief prayer in what is said to be France’s largest Basque church, Eglise St Jean-Baptiste, in which Louis XIV married Marie Teresa of Spain in 1660.
I walked to the beach but the weather was becoming disagreeable, the families which flock to this pleasant holiday town collecting towels and children as the storm which had been swirling on the horizon for the past hour headed shorewards.
I returned to my hotel and made a booking for dinner in its restaurant from where, at a corner table I sat and watched the rain lash the windows, all but obscuring the Bay of Biscay and the Atlantic beyond. As I watched I devoured a bucket, a small bucket but a bucket regardless - of garlic and oil drizzled mussels followed by squid served with a warm goat’s cheese salad and a chilled pitcher of the local rosé. It was one of the gastronomic highlights of the trip.

The next morning, I drove through a light drizzle beneath a sky which promised blue skies and headed inland towards Basque country and the towering, snow capped peaks of the Pyrenees. St Jean Pied de Port was described in one guidebook as a town desperately in need of a bypass, not due to the desirability of avoiding it but rather to its popularity with tourists, and ensuing traffic snarls.
I arrived on market day which compounded the chaos. However the approach to the town, through a deep, green timbered valley as I’d kept pace with an electric train as it ran alongside a fast flowing river and rattled across narrow bridges, had been promising.
So I parked my customary 2 km from where I wished to be and trudged into town. A mere 8 km from Spain, trudging or rather tramping, is very much the thing to do in St Jean Pied de Port. Feet encased in sensible boots, backs bent beneath packs and clutching sturdy wooden staves, the hikers were not difficult to pick as they headed off into the surrounding mountains, some to follow what was once a heavily trafficked pilgrim trail from here to Santiago de Compostela across the border.
In the shops which line the main street and the delightfully cool and cobbled back streets of the “old” 17th-century city, shopkeepers hawked brightly striped Basque linen in a hundred different styles and the obligatory black Basque berets which no one but the occasional intellectually challenged tourist wears.

Dominating the town are the stone ramparts of the Citadel, a steep climb which rewards with a view stretching out across the patchwork of green and caramel fields clinging to the foothills of the mountains which climb from the valley floor.
Basque decorators know but two colours, the deep, bull blood red with which every window frame, shutter and door is painted, and the universal white of the buildings.
I doubt if there is a single colour chart in the region. It must, at least, remove any possibility of marital discord as to what colour to paint the house.

I spent the night in a bed and breakfast in which I was the only guest, a vast double storey manor house with four-poster beds, creaking floorboards and a rugby-mad host named Philippe with a cellar the size of my apartment. When I arrived, the cellar contained several hundred bottles of French red wine. When I left the next morning it contained several less, the arrival of friends of Philippe signalling the beginning of a determined assault on the cellar’s contents. It’s true what they say – the more red wine you drink, the more fluent your French becomes.
At Philippe’s direction, I drove out the next morning to a village called Iraty and found the beginning of a circular route through the mountains which he had promised was the most picturesque drive in France. The road climbed and turned and climbed, a slow, serpentine ascent halted occasionally by herds of cows and sheep and on one occasion, a magnificent white mare and her foal as they wandered along the road. It peaked at 1327 m, the alpine views, distant snow caps and sharp, crystal-clear air surrounded by a silence which was broken only by the distant tinkling of cow bells. If Julie Andrews had stepped out from behind one of the towering pine trees and burst forth in song, it would have been an unsettling but not surprising experience. Overcome, I dropped my notebook in a pile of fresh cow manure.

I paused several times on the drive back, hauling off my shoes and wading along mountain-fed streams where lone anglers cast for trout, and decided that Philippe knew his scenic drives as well as he knew his bordeaux reds. After three days in the Basque country I drove back to Biarritz, dropped the car and caught a train through to Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris to begin the long haul home.
In three weeks l’d seen what could have been four different countries without leaving France - the cosmopolitan swirl of Paris, the verdant valleys of the Dordogne, the tourist crush of Biarritz and the alpine splendour of the Pyrenees. It would take a year of travel, I guessed, to truly know this country and its many moods and colours.

Text: Mike O'Connor
From issue: Spring/Summer 06/07

FACT FILE
Getting there: Mike O’Connor’s visit to Paris was organised by France at Leisure, 283 Elizabeth St, Brisbane, a travel company which is run by expatriate Frenchman Christian Blondeau who specialises in travel throughout France. The Renault Megane was provided by France at Leisure through Renault Eurodrive. Tel: 1300 302 623. www.franceatleisure.com Air France offers the quickest route to Paris with 41 weekly services departing from Adelaide, Brisbane, Cairns (new), Darwin, Melbourne, Perth and Sydney. For more information please contact Air France reservation at 1300 390 190 or visit www.airfrance.com/au