BRITTANY has a faintly dreary reputation with us. Its crime is that it is not the Mediterranean. We think it might be a bit like here. Damp. Folkloric. Potato growing. In fact, in the bright mid summer blue, with great swathes of geraniums hanging from the grey stone churches and bursting from every grey stone window sill, and with light glancing off the shallow bays where tiny French infants with chipmunk voices hop up and down in the wavelets, Brittany is just gorgeous.
And richly foreign. Go asleep on the ferry from Cork and when you wake in the dawn mist as the ferry enters the port of Roscoff, past rocky islands and stands of pine trees and the holding pens and rafts for lobster and oyster and mussel enterprises, already everything is different. The detail of the place is different. And the way to savour the detail is to go around the highways and byways of Brittany, slowly. Not too slowly walking would take too long. But not by car you see no details from a car. By bicycle, say.
Wheeling along the back roads with someone to tell you the way, and with your bag gone on ahead and waiting for you in the gingham curtained Hotel. Because your where the girls are already laying the tables for dinner on the terrasse under the wisteria. That's one way of doing it.
The great thing about a cycle tour is that it is not anxiety free. Rothar Cycle Tours which is Aidan Quinlan from Cork does all the hard work of the holidays it organises in Brittany. Aidan books the berths, arranges hotels and provides the sturdy Raleigh touring bikes most of his clients prefer to use, and back up transport every day. But inveterate worriers can still enjoy themselves. There will still be something they can top up their anxiety level with. Cycling does involve weather and signposts and traffic and getting tired and stopping to put sun block on your nose and feeling the need for a banana and going around roundabouts the wrong way with your arm stuck out so that the voitures won't get you.
It is much more relaxing than lying beside a swimming pool. You have a life. You have your childish responsibilities. You have to get your bike out of the hotel garage in the morning and get your togs and your water bottle and tie them to the carrier with a bungee and you have to prop the bike up at beauty spots, outside patisseries, on promenades above beaches and wherever anybody in the group decides there should be a little stop.
There were 11 people with Aid an on last week's Rothar tour of north east Brittany the bit they call the Coast of the Pink Granite, between Roscoff and Saint Malo. The great thing about them was that they were as likely to be found sitting on a bank as wheeling along between the rustling, ochre wheat fields. They were taking things as easy as things can be taken, while still getting from A to B. There were as many stops as starts. The Very Alternative Tour de France, you might call it.
"That's what they all ask when they see my ad," Aidan says. Is this a tour for cyclists?" It is not, in the sense that none of the people doing the tour last week cycles much at home or owns those special cycling mittens with holes in the back or any of the rest of the semi professional gear. There was one chap, Peter from telecommunications, who wanted to cover more ground than the rest. No problem he just took off by himself after breakfast, and turned up later. The others teachers, a civil servant, someone who works in television, a nurse, a schoolboy were healthy and energetic. But only one of them was ultra fit. The way Aidan works it is that the basic day isn't long. Then if you want to peel off somewhere or add on when you get to your destination, you're welcome. But the main group ambles along at the pace of the slowest.
After day one, when they did a good bum toughening 40 plus miles, the distances were short.
When I caught up with them in the middle of day four, they were all turning brown, they were all playing the gears on their bikes like violins and they were all doing their slightly different things. A couple of them had gone to see one of the zoos which mysteriously dot the Breton countryside, one had gone to the hypermarket, one had spent longer than the others looking at the dance of death" frescoes in a little church, and the rest were ready to dash into the turquoise sea for a zingy, salty swim.
You grab a full tide when you can, in Brittany. The group had already learnt that when the tide goes out on that side of the Channel it goes out miles, and the best you can hope for out there on the horizon is waist-high warm water full of sea-lettuce.
Everyone was learning about Brittany in a hands-on way. Dave from Dublin had never been anywhere in France before. He couldn't get over the countryside itself - the way the fields of artichokes and maize and hay and cereals are so scrupulously well- kept, with even their verges tidy. The farm-yards are strikingly neat and attractive, to an Irish eye the houses proudly cared for Ancient trees line the kind of quiet road the cycle tour tries to take. Here and there is a turreted manor house, or the great trees of a hidden chateau, or a small chapel, or the lichened stone of some old enclosure.
BUT mostly this is a working landscape that smells o5f slurry as well as honeysuckle, where there are big agricultural depots on the edges of towns and sleek cattle and shining horses gaze thoughtfully out from the fields at the humans on bicycles whizzing along.
One of the special beauties of this corner of the world is that this worked landscape comes right to the edge of the sea. The headlands around the great bay of Saint Brieuc end in meadows where straw is stacked in golden bales and fat rolls, and the seagulls peck in the stubble, and these meadows sweep right down to the low cliffs and lines of Scotch pine that edge the sparkling sea.
Even old French hands were learning things. Mairead got sun burnt. She asked the lady in the hotel for yogurt to soothe her skin.
"Ah!" the lady said. "Le fromage blanc." And sure enough the cream cheese, brought up to the room on a salver, did the trick even better than yogurt. The value of a plastic lunch box on a trip like this was discovered.
One of the great pleasures of touring is going up the street in the morning the early mist being burnt off the roofs, a distant cock crowing, the market traders putting their stalls together to get a little something from the boulangerie or the traiteur for the midday stop. French delicatessens, always first and best, now seal your salads with a sheet of polythene quickly bonded to the neck of the little boxes. But the group might have pain aux raisins or cheese or nectarines or squashed croissants left over from breakfast. Lunch boxes were a good idea. And so were baseball caps for the back of your neck and wipes for getting bike oil or mayonnaise or Ambre Solaire off your fingers and learning to keep your bottle of mineral water where you could get at it. A cycle tour is a learning curve.
And it either brings out the very best in the Bretons, or the Bretons are the nicest people in France. ,Cars were careful of the small group of cyclists perhaps because, Aidan said, cycling is the national sport, and it is respected. Old ladies waved and called "Courage! Courage!" as the bunch passed through villages.
The woman in the hotel in Paimpol had been like a mother teaching everyone the French words for things, and giving them lifts into town. Everybody was courteously ready to give directions. A whole family got out of a car to help in looking at the map. Too often, in fact, someone would say bust follow me", obliging a tired Irish cyclist to take off at speed behind the helpful tractor or racing bike.
When Maureen fell off her bike a car pulled in at once to offer help. It wasn't necessary. We all just stood around while her grazes were cleaned and she got herself back into the saddle. An old man from the Italian circus in town a man with slicked back hair like a tango dancer had just been about to put up a circus poster on the lamp post beside which she fell. He stood there, open mouthed.
Paris was never like this so friendly and helpful. But what was classically French was the food. The group met in the evening at about eight or nine and found somewhere fairly inexpensive to have dinner. In the perfect little seaside village of Binic the 66 franc menu at the Neptune offered a homemade rabbit terrine, a big slice of pork and a mountain of frites, and a slice of pear tart. All that for £6 with some wine and a coffee, say £10.
THINGS on the ferry are dear £2.30 for a vegetable soup and the bits and pieces like coffee and ice creams in Brittany are dear. But dinner from the set menus is wonderful value. And so are the rooms. And in Binic there was a breakfast like never before. Soft local cheeses Hams and salamis. Strawberry tarts. Fresh orange juice. That morning's country bread. Brown eggs.
A day's cycling is not conducive to sparkling conversation at night. Whether or not Tom Cruise is really sexy, and why it is okay to eat steak but not rabbit, and what the name of the best guesthouse in Enniscrone is, was about as demanding as talk got. What cyclists talk about is the day's cycling. Where you got lost, whether you got off on such and such a hill, why cycling shorts are the greatest invention ever, how many miles, to the last yard, have been covered. And the leader.
Poor Aidan got what leaders always get from the followers who cannot but depend on the leader a minute scrutiny of his little ways, and a second guessing of his decisions. No milder mannered man, luckily, ever pumped up a tyre. Aidan cycled along with everyone, singing, and even talking, to himself. He measured distances in a unique Cork measurement called a "biteen". If the tour found itself temporarily completely lost he didn't get even slightly upset. The perfectly competent adults on the tour were well able to sort themselves out. It is all part of being on a holiday that is not passive.
When I left them, the fortunate clients of Rothar Tours were lying on the beach at Le Vat Andre, toasting in the hot sun, and using their cycling helmets who would have thought it to prop their heads up and keep their hair out of the sand. They had another delicious three days to go before reaching Saint Malo, ending the trip with a night on one of the two dizzyingly different ships used by Brittany Ferries one a floating hotel, the other much more like a hostel. But both French both serving a strong coffee for breakfast, and a croissant baked on board.
That would be the end of the foreign bit there would just be the track from Ringaskiddy to Cork city to cycle, and returning the bikes to Aidan's shop. And the funny thing is that's a wrench. You get fond of your bike, after a few days with it. You know each other's little ways. Which is a lot more than you can say about a swimming pool, if you spend your holiday with a swimming pool.
