Highlight

• Lascaux

Weather

• Cloudy, cool

Last thing before leaving the hotel in St-Émilion, we went to the local Maison du Vin and bought three bottles of the local wine, for drinking when we get to Juan-les-Pins next week. AnnMaree would have loved to take some back to Australia but we figured we probably wouldn’t get them through Brisbane airport security. (Turned out that we would be able to get a couple of them home, by wrapping them in clothing and packing one each in our respective suitcases. They didn’t last that long after we got home, sadly.) The three bottles are all Chateau Grand Cru from different years – as you can imagine we were looking forward to sampling them.

We drove out of St-Émilion northwards (thankfully avoiding having to retrace our steps from yesterday), and stopped to get some petrol at a place just a few hundred meters out of town. At first we followed a number of back roads north and northeast, eventually emerging on to the E70 (La Transeuropéenne) autoroute, which took us generally eastwards well over 100 km. At Exit 17 we left the autoroute behind us and headed southwards down the D65, D67 and on to the D704 that took us into the local town of Montignac on the Vézère River.

Here we stopped for lunch, a couple of scrumptious bread rolls stuffed with meat and salad bought in a shop in the town’s narrow main street. How we leave French bread! Leaving the Renault in a public car park by the river, we were able to find some steps down to the grassy river bank where we could eat our lunch and watch the dark water busily flowing by.

Then it was across the river and up a hill only a kilometre out of town to the Lascaux caves where prehistoric rock paintings were discovered in the 1940s. The original cave has been closed since the 1960s when they noticed the damage being done to the paintings by the passage and exhalations of visitors. But a replica of the best bits, Lascaux II, has been constructed nearby so tourists can still see what the originals look like.

All the wall paintings are of animals: bulls, horses, deer. Experts don’t know exactly how old they are but are guessing about 7,000 BC. They’re also not sure why the painters depicted animals or why they went to such trouble. Perhaps the most popular theory is that they had religious significance. They were preserved because the entrance to the cave was blocked off by a landslip at some later date, which allowed for constant temperature and humidity inside.

After waiting about an hour and then going on the mandatory guided tour through Lascaux II (Steve found it uncomfortably claustrophobic, which is probably intentional) we left there and continued along the D706 as it followed the Vézère valley southwest. This whole valley is awash with prehistoric sites and artifacts, including Le Thot and Les Eyzies-de-Tayac-Sireuil. It was in the Cro Magnon cave at Les Eyzies that the first remains of Cro Magnon man were discovered back in the 19th century.

Just a few kilometres short of where the Vezere flows into the Dordogne River is the largish town of Le Bugue. Here, where the Rue du Cingle heads southwest out of town, and after only getting a little bit lost this time, we found our hotel, the Hotel Restaurant Le Cygne. It’s a lovely, old, three-storey stone place with a ton of charm, and the hosts Isabelle and Christophe, who had only recently taken over ownership, were very friendly and helpful. Our room had walls of deep blue and really had something of the feeling of a dark cave itself – lovely for sleeping in.

After settling in, it was still only mid-afternoon so we opted to go for a walk around the town. It had the look of a fairly prosperous country town, with plenty of activity on the streets and in the shops along the main thoroughfare. At one point a stream flows swiftly along beside the street and through some back yards. Some of the tall houses had eye catching shapes too. All very picturesque and a pleasant prelude to dinner.

We ate that night in the hotel’s restaurant. The food was good to very good, but the most memorable part of the meal was the wine, a very nice wine from the local Bergerac wine region. We were making it a habit to drink wine from the local region as we travelled throughout France – a habit that was paying off handsomely for us.

And then to bed, relatively early. Tomorrow was to be a long day of travel, as we headed southeast towards our next destination, Carcassonne.