Le Franco Phoney

Nothing says ‘You live in the country’ quite like experiencing the local fairs. If donkey racing at the Fête du Reblochon was not enough, last weekend’s fair in Thônes, the Foire de la Saint Maurice, topped it off. Now, just to give you a bit of background, the 22nd of September is the memorial day for this particular saint, who is the patron of many and varied things, including soldiers, weavers and, of all things, cramps. Thanks, St. M, but I still get terrible cramps in my right foot when surfing, so can you do something about that please. Eating a banana before surfing just doesn’t seem to work anymore.

Anyway, back to the fair. Thônes, pronounced ‘tone’, is a small village between Annecy and La Clusaz. Its highlights are tours of a local small cheese factory, a steep rock climbing area, and a choice of two supermarkets. Parking is free: it’s not a busy place. But that all changes with the fair. The never-used car park at the end of town, that sometimes has a truck parked in it while the driver takes a sleep break, was completely full of cars, with fair-goers making full use of the free shuttle bus to town. The roads were lined with parked cars, but I decided, being more local than many of the visitors, that I should try my luck in the Lidl car park. This involved going through two ‘No entry’ gates, which others with the same thoughts as me had kindly left open. Anyway, the signs are more of a suggestion than an order. My luck was in and I parked my car.

The fair itself offered the usual regional stands: sausages, cheese, cheap clothes and sweets. The rural aspect of the fair was reflected in the row of horses tethered outside the town hall. But three other things really made it stand out as a rural fair for me:

1. tractors for sale;
2. cows for sale; and,
3. the hay bale competition.

Yes, that’s right, a hay bale competition. Sadly, I did not have my camera to capture the moment, but the competition was a bit like a pole vault competition, except instead of people vaulting themselves over the teetering horizontal pole, they were chucking over bales of hay. I think I must have arrived at the time when competition was fierce, as the pole was high and the bales were low: someone must have made some freak high bale throw and nobody else could attain the same height. I couldn’t stand the tension in the crowd and opted for a crepe instead. Bring on the apple and donkey fête in Serraval next weekend!

The Coupe Icare (Icarus Cup) was held last weekend, just south of Chambéry. So, in our typical disorganised manner, we decided at 1am on Saturday night to spend Sunday watching the paragliders take part in the annual event. Although a strong wind at the landing area prevented many paragliders from taking off, the day was lots of fun and the entertainment was great. One wing that did take off was a tandem team with an eagle attached to the passenger’s arm. As they took off, so did the eagle, who then flew behind and around the wing as if it was a giant mum. Every now and again, it landed on the passenger’s arm again, and they stayed airborn for quite a long time.

Meanwhile, the on-ground entertainment took over. Adam and Eve featured in a show where a flying apple was offered to them. Eating it, despite God’s warnings, gave them wings, and, had the wind not been as dangerous for landing, they would have flown at that point of the show. Instead, they flapped their arms around like birds and ran around to emulate flight. Airline hostesses (not all females) arrived for the next show, before they handed out free drinks to the crowd in proper airline hostest style. Meanwhile special solar balloons, made by a Brazilian man (pictured  in a photo below) who is now an outlaw after the balloons were banned in Brazil, floated and sank above the crowd and into the distance.

Other notable parts of the day included:

• seeing the famous speed rider (a sport like paragliding, but with skis attached and using a very small wing), Michael Reignier, who spends most of winter speed riding in La Clusaz take off and sink fast with his tiny wing (but apparently landed without a problem);
• watching a replica of an antique NASA test wing be inflated (red, white and blue in photos below);
• checking out the atrociously bad fashion on offer for paragliders needing to stay warm in the air (it was so 80s!); and,
• seeing a photo I took at the Dune du Pilat in a paragliding magazine!

Last Saturday night signalled the second Balade au Clair de Lune (a walk during the full moon) in La Clusaz, which means all the street lights in the village centre were turned off and the place was lit, instead, with just the moon light and candles dotted all over town. The river that runs through town had candles placed on lots of rocks poking up out of the water, and street entertainment (bands, comedians etc.) was plentiful.

Pictured is a bike with sparks flying off it—one of the roving acts. I particularly like how, after the entertainers had asked everyone to stand back so they didn’t get burnt, a family on the right thought it appropriate to stick their kid on the road in a pusher. No escape for the kid!

Walking around and watching some of the family entertainment, I was a bit shocked when one of the guys dressed up as a television presenter (with his waist up inside a box that looked like a television) started to pretend to snort cocaine through his cigar as part of his act. I guess the kids watching didn’t get it, and according to my French friend who watched with me: “This is France! Making fun of snorting cocaine is acceptable.” I suppose I should have realised this after seeing a television advertisement one morning for shower gel that involved a nude woman and close-ups of her breasts. But who am I to judge? The night was as much of a success as the shower gel no doubt is.

August in La Clusaz means one thing: cheese. The Fete du Reblochon is held annually, and this year, it celebrated 50 years of enjoying AOC status, which means any cheese sold under the name of Reblochon must be made locally. The fete starts at midday with crazy people attempting to ski down a white, plastic sheet with ancient wooden skis in temperatures hovering around the mid-thirties. Once they’re done, this turns into a giant slide for kids, who spend the rest of the day — and the evening — rolling down it. With cows, goats and donkeys dotted around, traditional bands play traditional music while traditional dancers wear traditional costume and bounce around on the traditional stage.

Meanwhile, the locals start drinking.

A parade consisting of various farmyard animals and local floats makes its way through town in the afternoon, while displays of cheese-making, wool-spinning and ancient bread-making are going on beside the stage and bar.

Meanwhile, the locals keep drinking.

Plates of cheese and tartiflette are served to the masses, who spend their time eating, drinking and wandering around the displays, farmyard animals, wood-chopping exhibitions and entertainment they can participate in. It’s all good fun for kids, adults, farmers and city-dwellers alike.

Meanwhile, the locals are drunk…and probably serving behind the bar.

Before the sun went down this year, a donkey race was held with various high-standing members of the community participating as jockeys (a fireman, a policeman, a farmer, a ski instructor…and a few others of similarly respected jobs). Everyone was invited to bet on a jockey, but the real fun was watching the stubborn donkeys find new ways of refusing to move.

Meanwhile, the locals took the opportunity to drink some more while the bar wasn’t busy.

As night fell, the band played on and the bar was the place to be. Alas, La Clusaz is in the mountains and by midnight, most people had departed to find somewhere warmer indoors.

The locals, however, probably kept drinking after the rest of us left. The Fete du Reblochon is an absolute treat.

The first Saturday in August is not a good afternoon to drive to Annecy: the Fete du Lac — involving ninety minutes of fireworks — ensures the roads are busy from midday, with some central roads blocked off later in the day. The fireworks, however, are well worth the traffic. Grandstand seats are constructed around the city end of the lake and for those lucky enough to get a seat (they’re expensive and they sell out quickly), an abundance of entertainment happens along the lakeside, invisible to the masses of people without a grandstand seat.

I was lucky enough to view the fireworks from the closest apartment block to the lake — on a floor high enough to see the fireworks from the lake up. This year’s theme was fireworks around the world. The Australian fireworks went off to the sounds of Kylie Minogue and AC/DC, while Scotland, of course, had bagpipes. The French used red, white and blue fireworks to match their flag, but I wonder how they feel about those colours also being used on the US flag, the British flag, the Australian Flag, the New Zealand flag and the Netherlands flag, just to name a few.

I captured some of the fireworks with my camera, although the long exposure I was using meant that the loveheart fireworks did not really look like lovehearts. I did, however, capture a wall of gold, fireworks that glittered or shined on their way down (not that you can see this in a still photo), fireworks that had mini balls of fireworks explode at their ends, and the grand finale that lit up the sky for ten minutes and left a cloud of smoke when the courtesy lights came on for those in the grandstand to depart. The night costs millions of Euros and I have truly never seen such amazing fireworks as those displayed each year at the Fete du Lac.

[Show as slideshow]

July 14 — Bastille Day — in France is just like Guy Fawkes day in the UK: it involves a ridiculous amount of fireworks, entertainment for the kids, a variety of home-fireworks-related injuries, and it has something to do with independence from the monarchy.

I headed down to Annecy early and managed to go wakeboarding before the festivities began. While we were on the lake, we saw a windsurfer: a rare sight on the calm Lake Annecy.

Before the fireworks began, the kids (including us big ones) were kept entertained with wandering minstrels playing various household items as drums and rollerbladers in crazy outfits, along with fire-throwing clowns and an Indian band with twinkling costumes. The fireworks were the typical mixture of some really brilliant or pretty explosions slotted in between a range of mediocre ones, which leads me to wonder why anyone bothers with the ’stocking filler’ standard fireworks when they could just do ten minutes of amazing stuff and save everyone about half an hour of staring at a sky filled with the same old same old.

When the fireworks finished, the ‘party’ began. This mostly involved teenagers trying not to take their eyes out while lighting bangers and other small fireworks in amongst a crowd of people watching a band on the makeshift stage in the park by the lake. I took a photo of the band. They sounded like a German Octoberfest band but they looked far cooler with their green laser lights. They even managed to attract some dolphin balloons along to watch. We went for ice cream instead.

July in France is the main summer holiday month: La Clusaz has been getting busier day-by-day to the point of small traffic jams in town. The giant tartiflette pan was getting fired up in town last night for the first of many soirées for the tourist season. The mini-golf course has put its mini-Mont Blanc back on hole six and the kids love it. The paragliders and the mountain bikers have arrived to take the chairlifts up for their respective rides down. Today, however, the mountain bikers faced snow on top of their dirt tracks: in some freak cold spell during the night, snow fell on the peaks of La Clusaz and beyond. Seeing the white bright, white snow against the green grass really makes me wish I was skiing on the Tignes glacier today, but all is not lost: today is the Fete Nationale — France’s national day off, like Australia Day in Australia, but without the BBQs. So, tonight, there will be fireworks, dancing and probably another giant tartiflette. What more could a girl want (apart from more snow)?