Day 16: Slow Cooked

Today had been deemed to be a lie-in day. Unfortunately, something about the shape of the land, or my body, or the weather caused me to be incapable of sleeping. Whatever position I took up, I wasn't comfortable. My tossing and turning annoyed Simon, who told me to either keep still, or get up. I got up, left the tent, and immediately found a really comfy position on the ground outside.

Eventually, Simon awoke, and we set off for the town.

As we cruised through Nimes a car buzzed past me, almost touching me. This pissed me off. I exclaimed that if the cars weren't going to overtake me properly then I wasn't going to let them overtake me at all, and placed myself in the middle of the lane. Simon said that I was going to get myself killed, and tried to stay away from me. Not agreeing with his logic, I decided to pacify him anyway by moving back to the side of the road. This prompted another car to buzz me even more closely than the previous one. Now I was really angry. I was just contemplating whether to chase after the car and ram it with my bike, when we arrived at our destination. [Simon - perhaps the scariest moment of the whole journey? ]

Our plan was to follow the tourist route described in Simon's guidebook. This involved looking at lots of obscure things that "normal tourists" wouldn't find, so that we could then go on to tell people how discerning we were. [Simon - a fault, in general, with the Rough Guide. Any opinions?] However we quickly came to the conclusion that the obscure discerning objects weren't actually very interesting, and so went in search of some tourist traps.

We thus launched ourselves into the massive Fontaine Gardens. The weather was the hottest so far, and so I made good use of the fountains that the gardens were named after, placing my head under the running water. Simon found this amusing and took photos. I may have looked sillier, but he was hotter. The fountains were accompanied by dragonflies, one of the few insects that I like. Simon liked them too, and we spent some time watching them, and failing to photograph them. Besides fountains and dragonflies, the gardens also contained various Roman buildings, and an almost horizontal tree that Simon and I took turns to walk up while trying not to look down.

The main tourist trap in Nimes is its arena. This is like the one in Rome, but smaller. Being smaller than the Rome Colliseum still however allowed it to be the biggest building in Nimes, and it confidently dominated the city. Unfortunately, the arena itself was confidently dominated by internal scaffolding, seating, and a stage. Clearly the arena was still used for the original purpose for which it was built, including being a major bull-fighting venue. This seemed somehow to be the correct way for it to be treated, but made it rather less interesting as a tourist attraction. [Simon - "correct way" outwieghs tourists, definitely]

Bought Yop, drank Yop, bought kebab, spat out kebab, sat on stage, didn't get kicked off stage, wandered around a bit, went back to campsite, had early night.