9 - 5/9/2015 Rouffignac and Lascaux

Saturday, May 9

 Pam was right, today arrived with blue skies with a smatter of clouds. Norm loses the bet, but in a good cause. Our first objective was the Grotte de Rouffignac, a cave near our hotel with prehistoric drawings done by our Homo Sapiens ancestors, the Magdalenians in 18,000 to 10,000 BCE. These are the actual drawings as they did them deep inside the cave structure. A tiny electric train on tracks carries visitors deep into the cave for a viewing, a good thing since walking would be no picnic. The tour is only in French, but a rented IPod provides the gist in English. Regardless of whether this sort of thing is of interest, being up close to these well rendered drawings of long extinct animals done by someone who went to a lot of effort to create them is quite affecting. The cold of the cave and restricted access prevents deterioration.

 About 1PM we headed off for 30 km of back road driving to the famous Grotte de Lascaux, a special place because here is one of the few locations that the prehistoric cave paintings are rendered in full color and are also so dramatic in their impact. The actual cave system has been closed for decades after 1 million visitors in a short time after discovery in 1946 resulted in accelerated decay due to humidity and human contact. If that had continued our visit would have witnessed a smeary nothing. What we viewed is actually Lascaux II, which took 6 years to construct underground on Lascaux Mountain, 200 feet from the original, as an exact replica of a portion of the cave system. All interior surfaces were duplicated exactly. It then took artists five years to duplicate the paintings using pigments formulated from the components used originally, such locally found iron oxide. Very impressive. Since there are more than these Lascaux II paintings in the cave system, more recreations of other parts of the system are in the works so that ultimately all paintings can be viewed in as close an approximation of their natural environment as possible. 

 The train that took us through the caves:

This was an interesting bench outside the Rouffignac entrance:

We had lunch of pizza and beer on the waterfront in Montignac. Across the river was what looked to be the end stop for a motorcycle race - lots of vendors and people partying.  We saw motorcyclists all weekend in this area that looked to be among the participants. 

Nice statues in Montignac:

The rest of the day was spent driving in a squiggly 4 hour "loop" through part of Dordogne back to our hotel via narrow country roads, seeing picturesque structures, another walled city, castles on hilltops and a generally peaceful sensibility. This Dordogne region is so picturesque and certainly offered us our best afternoon of on-the-road sightseeing yet. The one thing, though, is cars approaching us on narrow roads at speed, particularly large Mercedes and Audis. We're not going to pull in our horns one bit, but we finally did just kept our side mirrors retracted to provide that extra silly millimetre of separation as our trusty Peugeot often passed other cars close enough for the paint on both cars to smooch. Still, the maxim applies:  There are bold drivers and old drivers, but no old and bold drivers. We'll be coming up on the 2,000 mile mark in our journey soon and want to travel many more beyond that.