If any of you are interested in a bit of information about the places that I’m going to visit, I have read through my Rough Guide book of Provence and I’ve picked out snippets that might provide some insight.

ARLES
With its sun-kissed golden stone, small-town feel and splendid setting on the east bank of the Rhône, Arles is one of the loveliest cities in southern France. It’s also one of the oldest; the extraordinarily well-preserved Roman amphitheatre at its heart, Les Arènes, is simply the most famous of several magnificent monuments. Originally a Celtic settlement – the name Ar-larl meant “moist habitation” – it later became the Roman capital of Gaul, Britain and Spain, and survived the collapse of the Roman Empire as a base for the counts of Provence before unification with France. For centuries, the port of Arles prospered by way of the inland trade route up the Rhône, profiting especially whenever France’s enemies blockaded its eternal rival, Marseille. Decline set in with the arrival of the railways, however, and the town where Van Gogh spent a lonely and miserable – but highly prolific – period in the late nineteenth century was itself inward-looking and depressed.

THE CAMARGUE
Spreading across the Rhône delta and bounded by the Petit Rhône to the west, the Grand Rhône to the east, and the Mediterranean to the south, the drained, ditched and now protected land known as the Camargue is distinct in every sense from the rest of Provence. With land, lagoon and sea sharing the same horizontal plain, its shimmering horizons appear infinite, its boundaries not apparent until you come upon htem. The whole of the Camargue is a Parc Naturel Régional, making great efforts to maintain an equilibrium between tourism, agriculture, industry and hunting on the hone hand, and the indigenous ecosystems on the other. When the Romans arrived, the northern part of the Camargue was a forest; they felled the trees to build ships, then grew wheat. These days, especially since the northern marshes were drained and re-irrigated with fresh water after World War II, the main crop is rice. To the east, along the final stretch of the Grand Rhône, the chief business is the production of salt. Evaporation was originally undertaken by the Romans in the first century AD, and the Camargue now holds one of the biggest salt works in the world. Saltpans and pyramids add an extra-terrestrial feel to the landscape.

The Camargue is a treasure trove of bird and animals species, both wile and domestic with its most famous denizens being the bulls and the white horses that the regions gardians (herdsmen) ride. Neither beast is truly wile, though both run in semi-liberty. A distinct breed of unknown origin, the Camargue horse is born dark brown or black, and turns white around its fourth year. It is never stabled, surviving the humid heat of summer and wind-racked winter cold outdoors. Of the region’s fifty thousand or so flamingos, ten thousand remain during the winter when the rest migrate to North Africa. They’re born grey, incidentally, then turn pink between four and seven.