The sun also rises

Day 20
The Sun Also Rises

Not Pamplona but Le Grau du Roi, a seaside resort 7km from Aigues Mortes, to which we cycled on the last full day of our journey. Le Grau turned out to be an amalgam of Clacton and Morecambe but with much better weather and warmer sea into which we plunged having taken a tour of the yacht marina to admire the boats and scoff at the owners.

The sea was warm and everything had a very Mediterranean feel to it. Not altogether surprising.

 After outdoor showers (an idea unlikely to catch on in Keighley) and a picnic lunch we set off to cycle to La Phare de l'Espiguette an old lighthouse on thecoast 10km away. The reason why so many other people seemed to be making the same trip by bike and car became apparent when we got there: the premier nudist beach for Le Grau.

After Helen and Verity had dragged those perennially incorrigible old lechers Jim and Tom off the beach and nailed them to the bikes we trailed back to Le Grau to attend the Bull Racing in the town's bullring, a place not altogether like its namesake in Birmingham.

The Camargue has its own form of bull fighting in which the bull is the hero and the matador risks his life. 

The object of the racing is to pull tags off the bulls horns without getting gored. Some of the young men act as taunters and provocateurs and the others try to snatch the tags off the horns - no easy matter when 350kg of revved up bull is trying to catch and kill you. 
No deaths happily but one arm injury required an ambulance and one young man had his trouser seat ripped open uncomfortably close to his more sensitive parts.

Following our trip back to Aigues Mortes we had our Last Supper in the old medieval walled town and, back in our hotel, finally consumed most of the whisky that Tom had gamely lugged through France.

Km cycled: 38
Metres climbed: nil
Mechanicals: nil
Injuries: two nasty head injuries sustained (Jim & Tom) while being escorted from nudist beach.