One Afternoon in the Camargue

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It was cool and cloudy on our drive to the Camargue. We stopped by Arles at 1pm for lunch, and had another rage-inducing bout of looking for parking, any parking. The medieval city centre is narrow, and half the streets seemed to be blocked for market day, so we found a free spot across the Rhône river. We found the market stalls were just packing up, so we frantically flitted from stall to stall, buying things for lunch including accras, a duck sausage, a donkey sausage, a bottle of apricot-flavoured rosé, a baguette, a pain au chocolat, and a bowl of mixed rice with four types of meat. Ryan and I found a bench on which to eat our lunch and watched the shopkeepers tidy up. There was quite a mess leftover, but city cleaners promptly started to hose down the streets and streetcars swept up any debris. We spent a few more minutes wandering the narrow, medieval stone streets before heading back to the car. By now it was hot and sunny, so we made a beeline for the Camargue visitor information centre.

The land gradually got flatter as we hit the salt flats, and we saw a marsh of pink flamingos, which prompted me to pull over so we could take photos.

At the rather small visitor centre La Capelière, we got a map and were shown which routes to take to see the white horses and black bulls. The staff recommended we not go on any hikes as there were dark and stormy clouds overhead and lightning flashed nearby, so Ryan and I just went for a scenic country drive. Thankfully there was no traffic, because I spotted a field of white horses south of the road and hastily stopped the car, leaped out while leaving the engine running and door open to take photos. Doing so, I startled a few black bulls on the other side of the road, big ones with sharp, pointy horns! We took pictures and then got back in the car. This happened a couple more times to take photos of a beaver and a trio of storks.

We didn’t see any hikers in the Camargue, but we passed quite a few cyclists and surprisingly several campervans. The clouds finally broke and it began to pour, so we headed back to Aix-en-Provence without buying any famous Camargue salt!