Exhausted,but loving arty Avignon

We're in Avignon, Provenance, spending our last two nights in France before heading off to Spain for six nights - Madrid and Barcelona.

As you can see by the photo, we are staying in tent city! It is a quite a nice camp site near to the centre of town and has a sort of Woodstock feel with a lot of the people who are performing at the local arts festival staying here. Yesterday there were at least three people juggling and a guy cycled past our tent with all the props from his show on the back of his bike.

The town is very busy with festival goers and people handing out brochures for their shows. It reminds me of the Edinbugh festival, though everything is in French. Despite this hecticness, the town has retained its medieval charm and is one of the most beautiful towns, French or otherwise we have been to. It is entirely surrounded by a castle wall and a winding river with green grassy banks. Because of the festival there are a lot of street performances and yesterday we watched a brilliant brass band and later a Celtic band.

African safari....

We are making a 'slight detour' after Europe. Next week Thursday, we are flying from Madrid to Zurich and then on to Johannesburg for a bit of homecooking and quality time with my folks. We are both exhausted and in need of a break, but we also need to sort out a bunch of visas, mainly due to my South African passport. Attempting to do this in a foreign country has proved fruitless and utterly soul destroying. So we will stay in Joburg as long as it takes to get visas for the US, Morocco, Egypt and India and then head off from there. We are both looking forward to some home cooking, quality family time and finally getting our clothes washed properly!

The last few days in particurlar have been very long and tiring. Tuesday in particurlar was a nightmare. It involved about 9 hours of train rides from Bologna to Lyon. This would have been OK if we had not been dropped off at the Lyon airport at 10pm (instead of the centre of town) and then had to take another bus to the centre of town, followed by a metro journey and then a walk (the rude Italian man at the train station in Bologna never explained any of this to us - a word about Italy vs France at a later date...)

We ended up at our hotel at 11pm. The reception was shut and no one could let us in despite me banging on the door like a loon. Fortunately the locals came out to help (I have never encountered such friendly people as those in Lyon) and I eventually managed to get hold of the owner of the hotel who gave me the access code to get in. Not a great travel day in the annals of the Beeg adventure, but we survived!

Almost four months abroad!