Our man in Conques
Conques is certainly a village which knows how to hide itself. Perched on the steep-sided hillside of a river valley, it is completely invisible from the road below. Successive signs may welcome drivers along that valley road to the village first in French, then in English, and then in German, but if they want to get a look at the village itself then they must leave their car in the car park and climb up the hill on foot or by shuttle bus. Or by bike... My two-wheeled approach to Conques involved a fair amount of getting slightly lost, such that when I first glimpsed Conques I was in fact already above it. Always nice to end a ride with some freewheeling, although maybe not on Conques’ slippery medieval cobbled streets…
I was arriving in Conques (following a week spent with my family) to work for two weeks as a volunteer tour guide in the village’s 11th century abbey church as part of a scheme run by CASA – Communautés d’Acceuil dans les Sites Artistiques. The charity brings together communautés of young people in around fifteen churches across France each summer and provide lodging and reimburse food shopping for the group in return for them giving tours around the church during the day. In my communauté were Amadou and Sidonie from Paris and Carmen from Madrid, as well as Julien, our team leader, who was also from Paris.
On the day we arrived, the communauté which had
been in residence for the previous two weeks was still there to greet us and
train us in giving tours, but after a few days they moved on, and we were left to
fend for ourselves. Although we were all meeting each other for the first time
as we arrived in Conques, we soon bonded as a group over writing a mega weekly
shopping list (as needs must when the nearest shop is 20km away) and all the
heated discussions that entailed over how many kilograms of carrots we should
buy.
Having given our first tours in pairs (always nice to have a friendly face to look at despairingly when you have a massive mind blank mid-tour), we soon moved on to giving them individually, with one of CASA’s key ideas being that each guide should choose what they want to highlight in particular to their visitors, and make their tours personal in that way.
The tours are given on the basis of participation
libre – rather than charging a fixed price for a tour, we invited visitors
to donate whatever they wanted to CASA in return for our services. There was a
fairly steady flow of visitors despite it being near the end of the tourist
season, and most were keen to engage in a dialogue with us about the church:
why so tall? why here? how do we know that? The tours soon started to feel more
like conversations rather than history lectures, and as a result they felt a
lot less scary to give. I gave an approximately equal number of tours in
English and in French, and Carmen found a fair number of Spanish tourists to
show round, even if overhearing them speaking in Spanish on the streets of the
village and doing some on-the-spot advertising was a necessary tactic.
We filled our off-duty time with wanders around the village, or sometimes more ambitious hikes up the surrounding hills to the Chapelle Sainte-Foy and the Croix des Scouts. Pilgrims on their way to Saint Jacques de Compostelle, having spent the night in Conques, are supposed to ring the bell in the Chapelle Sainte-Foy on their way out the next day, and the bells of the abbey church back in the village will answer. There was a wedding going on in the abbey church on the day when we made the ascent up to the chapel and rang the bell, so we certainly got a peal of bells in answer from the church in Conques, but I think that may count as cheating...
Our hike up to the Croix des Scouts (a large wooden cross constructed and carried there by scouts on a visit to the village) unexpectedly ended in a near-vertical-slide-down-the-mountain descent after a path marked on the map turned out not to exist on the ground – wouldn’t be the first time…
Far better-planned and gentler in gradient was the pèlerinade, a mix between a pilgrimage (pèlerinage) and a walk (balade), which consisted of being dropped off by one of the monks (who turned out to be a daredevil driver round the hairpin mountain bends and not a great believer in the necessity of looking at the road whilst driving) at a tiny hamlet a little way away from Conques, and making our way back to Conques along with twenty or so others, passing through various hamlets in the parish, at each of which we were treated to coffee, wine (yes, at 10am!) and the traditional local cake, fouace, still warm from the oven.
We were led
by another of the monks from Conques on our pèlerinade (not the dangerous driving one, although I am pleased to report both he and his car made it safely back to
Conques in record time after dropping us off), who carried his accordion with
him so that we could repay our hosts along the route with a good old sing-song
(or la-la if, like me, you didn’t happen to know the words off by heart to all of
these French songs…).
Carmen introduced all of us CASA guides to a particularly high-octane card game called burro (donkey in Spanish), which filled many of our evenings. Unfortunately my reflexes weren’t quite up to the mark and so dancing to the song Tchic et tchac as a forfeit became a nightly occurrence for me. I'll spare you the videos documenting my interpretation of the dance...at least the others took pity on me and joined in too after a while!
Before I knew it, it was time to get ready to leave Conques and move on to Tallinn for the next section of my year abroad, but not
before we had treated all the monks (there are around eight of them
resident in Conques) to a meal cooked by all the CASA volunteers, as has become
the tradition. We each chose to showcase a different national cuisine, so
Sidonie prepared a French-style apéro, Carmen a Spanish-style gazpacho, Amadou a Senegalese-style Yassa, and myself
English-style Eton Mess. They all started looking slightly less apprehensively at their
plates when I explained that it was ETON mess and not EATEN mess… But
eaten it was before long, and no food poisoning ensued, as far as I know...
Having said sad goodbyes to everyone on my final morning in Conques, I
got on the one bus a day out of the village and travelled to Rodez, before
cycling the final ten kilometres out of town to the tiny Rodez-Aveyron airport.
As I could have guessed, virtually everyone on my flight was a British expat (I
imagine it’s they who keep the twice-weekly Ryanair flight coming to this
airport from London over the summer), many of whom were very keen to tell me
how they’d overtaken me in their hire cars driving along the road to the
airport and been amazed at how much I was carrying on my bike. It might have been nice
if they could have taken some of my weight in their cars 🙄
I evidently wasn’t looking sufficiently different from the expats and the second home owners after my time solo-travelling in France, because as I passed through passport control, the French border guard asked me if I was resident in France: maybe one day! For now though, it was back to the UK for a speedy 24-hour turnaround to pack my suitcase full of far warmer clothes, ready for the Estonian winter.
Comments
Post a Comment