Hippy Ya! [- Kate]

few weeks old but wanted to write down the hippie experience!!...

57 nights in a campervan the truth.....when you imagine trips to the beach and camping it normally consists of 2 nights or maybe very occasionally a week at the end of this time you have had lots of fun and funny experiences and feel great for being out in nature, it is also the truth that you cant wait to get back to home comforts of bed/shower etc....we feel that we have broken through the camping boundary and have complied the following:

bad points about camping:

• considering a toilet (with paper) a luxury! when free camping it is essential to use the forest as a nature toilet, hence when you get to use a bathroom you feel like the queen!

• when we built the inside of the van we were quite rushed and the planning went a little out the window and we have ended up with a tiny bed which is forces you to sleep in the most uncomfortable way and we both have mornings of pins and needles and/or cramp plus a bad back/neck/shoulders!

• not considering the fact that france and spain can have bad stormy, rainy days in the summer months we have discovered that a small retro van is much like living in a broom cupboard, when the weather is great its fine to have such a tiny home as you hardly use the van at all, spending all day outdoors and most the night, only cooking or crashing to sleep but when the winds start howling and the rain keeps coming, the last place you wanna be is crammed into the broom cupboard, especially when it contains almost everything you own.

Knowing that we would probably not make it all the way to Morocco and back in our little tin can we started on a road trip to the med coast and then up to the french alps and then back across the middle to Biarritz, all the places we havent ventured to before and its been really fun! lots of driving but we feel we have truely experienced life on the road, eating basic meals at various different locations and the fun of stopping whenever you feel like turning off the main road and exploring whatever you may find, its brilliant as when you have so many miles to cover in one day you find that each morning can be completely different to lunch time and somewhere different again in the evening. we have been in search of surf but not found anything but a small ripple, instead we have found many nudy beaches, old towns, the bluest of seas, incredible mountains, windy never ending roads up and down the alps, mini hurricane, more storms, the canal de midi, gorgeous bays where you can dive off the jetty into the sea, swimming in an icey cold lake with a waterfall, the posh people of saint tropez, altitude sickness, and to top it all off a hippy commune. We are over half way through now and just outside the cool town of Lyon, slightly annoyed that we were two days late for a arcade fire gig. Its really nice to be back on ground level as the altitude was hitting us bad, sometimes making you feel slightly drunk (good) or sicky and sore ears! we found a real cute campsite which was really old fashioned and didnt end up charging us for the two nights we stayed, we are real tired as no sleep was had last night due to a massive storm in the mountains.

Anyone that has read 'On the Road" by Jack Kerouac will understand that you become taken with the idea of people hitch hiking and so whenever we have passed people needing a lift we have always tried to accommadate them, up until last week this kind gesture took a crazy turn and before we knew it was weirder than weird.......so we see this girl outside st tropez trying to get a lift, she looks like a typical traveller, nothing too strange and she has her dog with her, so i look at boo he looks at me and we decide to stop and help her out if we can...turns out she is going to the next town north and as this is not out of our way and she seems nice we decide to take her, she gets in and now i notice that she is not wearing any shoes and has real hairy legs and pits, not a problem just noting. She starts telling us about where she lives, that she lives with her boyfriend and another couple and one more friend, they have 3 dogs and kittens, so we are approaching the town and she says that she actually lives a few miles out of town and would we mind taking her there, so we are going down this crazy off the road track we start to think this is a bit weird and we are not sure whether this is gonna be awesome or the scariest and stupidest thing ever, arriving at a run down house we meet her housemates..... the place is such a mad set up that this is the first thing to shock us...who lives like this with stuff everwhere and a garden full of old motors and overgrown weeds and all sorts of stuff all over the place and the house has been covered on one side with mud and she tells us there is no electricity or running water....the housemates all had no shoes and mud and oil on their faces and half their clothes hanging off and we are trying to act like this is normal but actually on the way up to the house we now remember her saying something about her housemates wouldnt mind if we arrived naked and we both feel like we need to know more but if we stay we may be at risk as we are in the middle of the mountains no where near civilisation and we didnt really expect to find this, they show us the garden and one of the girls plays a wooden flute and they show us the things they have been making out of tin cans and we stay for a cup of nettle tea all of us drinkin out of jam jars and they start to tell us about rainbow gatherings and how magical they are, and the guy asks me if i would think about joining some kind of hippy commune like this and I say ummmm maybe not right now! Its like a scene from the book "the beach" its all great but a bit weird and we are feeling a bit uncertain and its getting late and we finally feel like we should leave when they ask us to come swimming in the river with them and we get away safely feeling that it was more than likely gonna be a naked swim with these people. In all we were there about 2 hours it was fun to experience but altogether we were glad to be back in our broom cupboard and driving far far away from that place!