Nimes & Aigues Mortes

When we got to Aigues-Mortes I had intended just to stay just long enough for a look round the town and to get my car from St. Jean de Losne. A car is a problem when cruising as one has to consider carefully where one leaves it, sometimes for weeks or even months on end and then one has to return to it normally by train to drive it to Carmen’s latest location, only to repeat the process later. Hence when the Andy Fletcher my friend looking after it in St Jean de Losne offered to buy it at the fair market price I agreed. We needed to meet to agree the deal so I returned by train via Nimes, where a wait between trains enabled me to visit the Roman arena.

Nimes Arena

In Saint-Jean-de-Losne Andy kindly agreed to drive me back to Carmen and give us a hand to take down the wheelhouse which was necessary before we entered the canal du Midi where the bridges are very arched and would have planed off the wheelhouse. However on hearing that a festival was planned for the forthcoming weekend involving bulls running through the streets of the town it seemed a once in a lifetime opportunity so we delayed our departure.

“Aigues Mortes” is so named because it was created in an area of “dead water” or salt lakes. The lakes are still harvested for their salt today.

The parade beforehand was impressive.

Not knowing what we were getting ourselves into at first I was cautious seeking a vantage point safely above the bull run. This also gave us a first class and safe location to watch the proceedings in the ring once the bulls had been run to it through the streets by men and sometimes women on horseback. We never saw any bulls harmed.

The arena took the form of tiered seats behind a vertical plywood wall or iron vertical bars close enough together for people to pass through but far enough apart that a bull could not. There was then an inner fence of two horizontal rails intended to keep the bulls in that inner ring.

The main sport seemed to be to release the bull into the ring at which point it would chase any individual daring enough to approach it. Definitely a young man’s sport, who when seriously chased would vault the inner fence leaving the bull to find another challenge. If as sometimes happened the bull was released outside the fence the young contestant could slip between the steel bars or climb the vertical ladders on the outside of the vertical plywood.

The first couple of bulls were unchallenging to the young contestants who either escaped over the fence, slipped through the vertical bars. The horse riders kept a keen eye on the bulls at first but then became lax as it was all going so well.

. There then entered a young, lean individual who was challenge by a particularly daring lean young man.

The bull attacked very quickly and very directly and the young man had to run as fast as he could. So fit and motivated was he to escape that he hurdled the inner fence to great cheers from the crowd which then rose to football crowd noise level as the bull also hurdled the fence. One could see the lad was in trouble now with the crowd baying. He obviously had no time to climb a ladder and demonstrated his fitness by hurdling into the tiers of seat. I thought this was the end but the young bull did the same thing getting in amongst the spectators who by this time filled almost every seat. Fortunately the bull had his priorities in the right place and ignored all the people climbing quickly to the outer barrier and disappeared over it. A drop of five or six metres.

He disappeared from my view for a time but then reappeared in the distance heading into the salt lakes pursued by many young men and cowboys on horses.

I have no photos of this as I recorded it on video which I will try to insert here if I can master the technical challenges.

Having sized up the risks, the next day when it came time to return the bulls to their stables I decided to drop down to the street level and savour the excitement personally

Full of confidence that the cowboys had it all under control people would get in front of the bulls as they thundered through and then duck out of the way at the last minute.

I found a good place where I could duck behind a lamppost at the last second. Unfortunately a lady was also trying to get her slow overweight husband to experience the thrill. We had apparently picked the same escape route and at the critical moment was knocked to the ground by him. All was well though and the bull went thundering by.