True Flavour Of France
Sun Herald
Saturday October 14, 1989
WHILE his dachshund played on the beach with my small son, the old Breton fisherman told me how all the tourists had deserted Brittany.
"They've all left - gone south. Now we have the beaches, everything, to ourselves," he said pointing at the vast empty beach and the rusting children's playground.
True, the hordes have gone south. The families on package holidays and the British yobs have deserted Brittany and northern France for Ibiza, Majorca and the Costa Del Sol (more commonly called the Costa Del Yob these days.)
Thus Brittany is indeed left for "us" - those who live there, and those who wish to enjoy its food, people, ancient forts and chateaux and magnificent coastal scenery.
If you are a Francophobe, don't go to Brittany. The food, the people, the fishing villages all conspire to make the place irresistible. And if you're at all interested in food, you'll never want to leave.
Wherever you go there are freshly caught oysters, prawns, fish and shellfish for sale. Walk to the boulangerie and pick up a fresh breadstick or two, a couple of pastries, and you have the kind of picnic lunch of which even Sydneysiders dream.
If you're too sophisticated to picnic on fresh oysters the place is littered with good restaurants, many serving top-class food for a lot less than you'd pay in Australia.
Some of these restaurants are found in the smallest, most out-of-the-way villages. We invaded a restaurant in the small town of Ducey which is not famous for anything, although it did have an extraordinary form of dog racing where husky-type dogs were pulling little carts and sleds on wheels through the streets.
Although Ducey is not an obvious tourist spot, that restaurant, in the Auberge de la Seleune, a pretty hotel next to the river, made it worth a stop. The tourist stops such as St Malo, the big coastal resort, and Mont St Michel, the fortress-abbey rising out of the sea like something out of Star Wars, are a short drive away and have less attractive hotels costing three times more.
The best way to enjoy Brittany is to get hold of a car, pack everything in and drive around, stopping wherever you feel like for lunch, dinner and a night's rest. Essential equipment is the Michelin Guide which, apart from its index of three-star once-in-a-lifetime restaurants gives a map showing good-value places which charge less than $20 a head for a five-course meal.
For those whose idea of a good time doesn't involve camping at different hotels every night and spending much of the day in the car, there are a large number of farmhouses, cottages, even converted windmills, which can be hired very cheaply for a week or two.
© 1989 Sun Herald
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