Navigation By Cow

Often when you travel within a country you can get a feel for where you are by the surroundings and I am not talking about things like mountains and beaches. The way people dress, the design of houses and the types of crops grown in fields can just as easily give you a clue as to where you are.

For example in the UK there was a time many years ago when you could accurately navigate your way around the country by tattoo. For example if you were in the south of the country and you saw a chap with a tattoo, you would be by the coast and more than likely a large navel port, as that chap with the tat would be a member of the Royal Navy, or one of those ruffians in the merchant navy, or worse still a fishing trawler crew member. In the Home Counties and London you just did not see a tattoo, those died out when they stopped putting kids up chimneys. Then as you slowly started moving north so the tats would start to appear until you reach Newcastle upon Tyne, where all the guys are covered in them, often littered with misspelling such as MAM. If you ever saw a woman with a tattoo you could only be in one place, Scotland. But today the UK is awash with a sea of inked skin, part Maori, part Japanese and mostly misspelt.

Houses are also no help in the UK as one council estate looks pretty much the same as any other, so does all the Barrett home estates and even the executive security states look similar. The only certainty was if you saw a stone cottage with a slate roof on fire, you were in North Wales. If you saw a stone cottage with grass, weeds and wild flowers growing on the roof, you would be in the Outer Hebrides and the couple living in it would be covered in tats and have a stripe of blue paint across their faces.

But this is not the case in France, as you travel from the north to the south, or from the west to the east, the houses will change in design and colour. I also think its possible to navigate your way around France by the colour of the cows in the fields. Up north, close to the English Channel the cows are black and white and look freezing standing in a boggy field. Then there is a band of cool looking white cows, most of which look as though they have spent far to long in the gym. Around Burgundy they are a neat reddish brown colour and in the heat of the Camargue they are jet black. The male ones may only be 1.2 meters tall at the shoulder, but they are 350 kilograms of pure aggression and as fit a fiddles.

In Saints Marie del la Mare, the capital of the Camargue I spent a hot afternoon watching the French version of Bull Fighting. The French actually invented this sport and in their version the bull lives to fight another day, as its a true battle between man and beast. Man tries to put a rosette on the beasts horn and the beast tries to put its horn through the man, simple. The Spanish took this concept and thought it would be a lot more macho to actual kill the bull after torturing it first. The event took place in a bull ring, exactly how you imagine them to be, but a lot smaller and situated right on the beach with the glistening Med just meters away.

The guys who bring their bulls to take part in the fights clearly take care of their prize charges. They are also incredibly macho looking, in fact they look as though they are too genetically linked to their bull breeding program for comfort. That said they seem comfortable wearing bright flowery shirts and kissing each other in public.

As the bulls live to fight another day, they all have names and are as famous as the guys doing the fighting. In fact its hard to tell who the crowd are supporting the most, as each bull enters the ring to loud applause. In this version both bull and fighter build up their reputations and followers.

But to be quiet frank with you this navigation by cow stuff maybe complete bullshit, because as I blast through the French countryside at 100mph on my country eating BMW motorbike, I have far better things to do than run an in-depth survey of French cattle.

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