Wednesday 25: Arles

We had a bit of sorting out to do with our tours as the AvalonGo app doesn’t work properly for NZ and Australia but our tour director is very adept. In the morning we just chilled out on the boat and enjoyed down time. The food on the boat is great and you have a huge selection so can eat as healthily or not as you please.

In the afternoon we took the included walking tour of Arles. Our guide was English and had been living in France for 9 years. She was very good, not least because she took care to find spots where we could look and listen in shade.

In summary, Arles is about the Romans and Van Gogh. They were not there at the same time! There are 4 main Roman monuments which we saw all of although there is just a plaque for one of them. The best preserved is the colosseum, which is a smaller version of the one in Rome and is virtually a copy. It got later repurposed into working people’s housing in the dark ages (easy to fortify) and was restored back to its original state in the 1800s.

It’s not as steep as it looks in the photo.

Inside the exterior wall of the colosseum

It’s not as vast as the photo makes it seem. There were a bunch of high school kids doing a gladiator class. It was hot!

This is a recreation of what was the Forum (I think). Much of the original stone got repurposed into the cathedral next door so they can’t put it back together.

The Hotel de Ville/ City Council building. It was nice and cool inside the central lobby

Van Gogh was there for quite a while. One of the Starry night paintings was done beside the Rhone river and also the yellow house and hospital courtyard.

The yellow cafe he painted. Currently closed as the owners ran a truly terrible cafe with bad food and inflated prices and they didn’t pay their taxes. The owners are being prosecuted. You’d think there would be no shortage of willing purchasers!

He was in Arles when he cut off his ear (although it seems more likely that Gaugin did it with one of his fencing foils. It wouldn’t be easy to neatly slice off your own ear!).

The thing around Mikes neck is the audio machine. You plug in an earpiece and can listen to the guide, who has a microphone, even at 30 or 40m distance.

Arles is worth a visit!

After dinner there was a disco designed by our cruise director (Christian, who is German and loads of fun) which was aimed at getting people up and dancing and having fun. He made a competition out of it where you had a list of dance tunes he was going to play and you had to predict the one that would attract most dancers. It was rigged of course but was always going to be a close call between Dancing Queen and YMCA. YMCA won but only just and probably because it was the last one he played. We all had a thoroughly good time along with quite a few other hardy souls.