Amanda’s Red Guide : 09/19/2006

Disclaimer: Amanda's Red Guide is based on Amanda's taste only. Occasionally she takes input from her travel companions, but more often than not, her opinion dominates her reviews.Unfortunately, she didn't write down the exact names of her dishes due to various constraints.

Lunch :

D’un Terroir À L’autre
51, Rue Ste Caterine
24100 Bergerac
05 53 27 16 37

Our duck was overcooked, but edible. My dessert, poire au vin Bergerac, at first tasted like mouth wash, but after we figured out what spice it used, it was OK.

Conclusion: Not Recommended.

Dinner :

Auberge La Plume d’Oie
24250 La Roque-Gageac
05 53 29 57 05

We had dinner at our hôtel tonight, because otherwise Hiddy Walker wouldn’t book rooms for us. And I’m surely glad that she did! Marc Walker is a great cook, and he made my best entrée and main dish of this entire trip. My fois gras entrée was silky and refined; he spread some sea salt to enhance its flavor, a technique that I applied for the rest of my fois gras exploration. My main dish, scorpion fish, was perfect! The caper sauce with a touch of lemon, the juicy fish with crispy skin and some sea salt, a little green mountain made of mixture of peas and patato and decorated with broccoli… Yummy! The cheese course was OK; some of the cheese seemed a little too old, and some needed to warm up a little more. My apricot dessert looked pretty but was incredibly sour! Yes, sour! Marc must be fond of sourness; he decorated my entrée with 3 little balls of Granny Smith apple. I’m not a big fan of sour flavor, and I just can’t understand a sour dessert.

Conclusion: Highly Recommended.

Hôtel :

Auberge La Plume d’Oie
24250 La Roque-Gageac
05 53 29 57 05

Rick Steves recommended La Belle Étoile; we called but it was full. So we called the next on the Red Guide list, Auberge La Plume d’Oie, and was told that we had to dine in their restaurant at least one night. It’s a little pricy, considering that there was a shower curtain rather than a shower door and we could hear our loud New Zealand neighbors all too well. 4 rooms total; 2 rooms facing the Dordogne river have the view and the traffic noise. Marc Walker prepared breakfast as well, and his egg dish was yummy!

Conclusion: Depends on what kind of neighbors you get.

Domme

We continued eastwardly on D703. After crossing a bridge and driving up the mountain, we found ourselves in Domme 10 minutes later.

Domme is a bastide town. According to Eyewitness Travel Guides’ “Dordogne & Southwest France“:

“Bastide Towns

Between 1220 and 1370, the counts of Toulouse and King Edward I of England, ordered nearly 300 fortified towns (bastides) to be build in southwestern France. Laid out to a set plan, they were established for political and economic as well as military reasons. Through them it was possible to bring together local populations and to maximize yields from agricultural land. A reciprocal agreement between the founder of a bastide and the owner of the surrounding land safeguarded the rights of each. The bastide was governed by a bailiff, who represented the king.”

The main road lead to the covered market, located in the center of town, was full of tourist shops, and it reminded me of Provence towns a lot. Other parts of town felt dead, while this section was swamped by tourists. Under the covered market was the entrance to caves of stalactites and stalagmites, and we happened to make it to its last tour.

Maybe because I had seen the CD that my dad made from his trip to Guilin, China, I wasn’t all that impressed with the caves. 45 minutes later, we finished the tour and I was amazed by the panoramic view of the Dordogne region.

Somehow we couldn’t find the famous Porte des Tours, which “is marked with graffiti made by Knights Templar who were imprisoned here,” and these two guys were tired by now to explore further. Well, next time then.

Bergerac and La Roque-Gageac

We continued driving eastwarly to La Roque-Gageac and only stopped by Bergerac for lunch. After yesterday’s beautiful Saint-Émilion, Bergerac’s Vieille Ville (Old Town) was a disappointment. What I didn’t know was that we could keep on coming back to it, and by the end of our Dordogne trip, we got the illusion that we knew it by heart.

After dropping our luggage at La Plume d’Oie Auberge in La Roque-Gageac, we explored this incredible rock town. The narrow D703 splits the Dordogne river and the stripe town; both people and cars learn to share it in no time. Because the town is digged from the rocky mountain, it is shallow and doesn’t have much room to grow. We tried to go up to the troglodytic fort, which was mysteriously closed way before its official closing time. So we went to the other direction to its garden of exotic plants and verified that it indeed has quite a collection of exotic plants.

Since we weren’t interested in taking the tourist boat down the Dordogne river (we saw some people riding canoes as well), there was not much else to do in La Roque-Gageac. If I thought Saint-Émilion was small, La Roque-Gageac was minuscule. Dinner wouldn’t start in a few hours, and the weather was too nice for us to sit in our tiny rooms. David decided that we would go for a ride.

“But to where?” I asked.

“East!” he declared.