Last weekend, we drove from La Rochelle to the Ile de Ré, the car journey took an hour to reach the furthest beach. The island is protected and still looks quite wild. Since we're in November, we hardly saw any tourist. No plastic on deserted beaches.
We enjoyed a full sun, over 20 degrees and a perfect blue sky. We walked to the "whale lighthouse" on the northern beach of La Conche. Conche means a natural basin which is the second reservoir of a salt marsh. The "fleur de sel" or salt flower from those marshes is famous and goes very well with rose mustard. 🙄
Didi scratched her paws on thousands of oysters lining the beautiful beach but she enjoyed sniffing heaps of seaweed and sea tomatoes.
Sea tomatoes are strange: they're actually anemones that look quite delicate with their stringy tentacles deployed under water. At low tide, they curl in and look like smooth... tomatoes. It must be said that tides on the island are known to be very, very low. We had to walk nearly 30 minutes on the sea bed to reach the first waves.
Sea tomatoes make me feel nostalgicbecause of my quirky father, a teacher and fan of odd experiments to keep his pupils entertained: he had read somewhere that if you cut a sea tomato into four, you end up with four living tomatoes. Magical. In Algeria, we kept a very large aquarium at home that we built (well dad made the aquarium, and I justserved as his assistant to hold glass panels while we assembled it, and prayed that the glass wouldn't explode when we filled it with water). We kept all sorts of living things
in this aquarium, which we picked up while snorkeling at the weekend: tube worms (they look very cool), sea cucumbers (quite ugly), a (rabid) crab (which sometimes sneaked out of the aquarium and scared my grandmother to death), a tiny lionfish (with poisonous spikes), lots of shrimps (fun because they seem to walk in the water)…. and a huge sea tomato. I used to love sticking a finger in the middle of the tomato because its tentacles were full of tiny hooks that dug into my finger (that's how they grab small shells to eat them). It doesn't hurt at all but it's a pretty funny feeling. Poor tomato 😪. That doomed day, we took out our tomato to cut it into quarters. Only it wasn't so easy, it was very gloopy and slimy once out of the water. We both suddenly felt very bad because we didn't know what the poor thing could feel. Does pain exist for sea tomatoes? We did end up with four small tomatoes, alive, that we carefully returned to our aquarium. But after that, I couldn't stick my finger into their midst without a lot of guilt, so instead, I sometimes stroked their outter slimy skin a little.
Apparently sea tomatoes can be eaten, but because of our trauma, we never tried.
To avoid getting ripped off because of ridiculous island prices, we bought a couple of "quiches" from a baker in La Rochelle with a raspberry cake dessert, and just paid for a drink at a café on the port of St Martin de Ré, then ate and people watched.
Next stop: Cognac !
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I love Ile de Ré! Went to a wedding there once in a fortress, and we camped around the fortress. Gorgeous pictures, guys! Hope you are enjoying your adventures. Samuel.