Flora.

A body can travel a long way to see flowers. In my case, it involved some 9,000 kilometers. Just in from the western coast of South Africa, below Namibia and well above Cape Town, there is an arid, wide-open landscape (some 450,000 square kilometers worth) that is the ancestral home of the hunter-gatherer San, or Bushmen.

There is art to be found in the vistas there, both man-made, in the form of shamanic San rock paintings, and natural, in the form of the rock itself, the mineral riches it yields, and the plants and trees that grow upon, through and under it.

The flora in South Africa is particularly diverse: botanists divide the world's continents into six plant kingdoms. The Cape floristic (also known as the Cape floral) kingdom is the smallest, but contains by far the highest known concentration of plant species in the world. The region's main vegetation type is fynbos, which are a collection of evergreens, shrubs, and small plants with tough, fine leaves, and reeds. In June 2004, the Cape floristic region was given international recognition as South Africa's sixth UN World Heritage site. More than 9,000 plant species make up the region--6,000 of which are found nowhere else on Earth.

Well-timed, ample rains permitting, the Namaqua expanses are utterly transformed during spring (which corresponds to the Northern Hemisphere's late summer). For a brief, dream-like span of time, the flowers come, in all their evanescent glory and variety.

There is more to a land than its vistas, of course, just as there is more to a meal than the accompanying wine. In the Languedoc, however, I have heard a saying: a meal without wine is like a day without sun. With this post, I begin then, with the 'sun' of the Western Cape. I hope you will enjoy the video--it was the only way I found to adequately give you a sense of the scope of a desert in bloom.

Shawn Colvin is performing "Ricochet in Time."
Tip: Click on the HQ icon for better viewing.

Room to breathe.

If you can, allow yourself the liberty of taking the road that follows the Hérault river into the departement of the same name, across garrigue-filled plateau and through winding gorge. After stopping in Aniane and environs for some of the most exciting wines made in the Languedoc today, continue following the river, crossing it at the Devil's Bridge, or Pont du Diable. (Legend has it that, in the eleventh century, the devil nightly undid the construction work of the monks, until prince-turned-monk Guilhem promised him the first soul to cross the completed bridge. The clever saint-to-be Guilhem then sent an unlucky dog across the bridge to his fate, thereby ensuring the bridge's continued use until present times.)

Do try to pull yourself away from the soaring white escarpments, teal green water and gouged rock face around the Pont du Diable, as you will have nearly reached your destination: Saint-Guilhem-le-Désert.

The eponymous Guilhem founded a Benedictine abbey there, in the lost reaches of the wind-lashed desert. Perched on an escarpment, less promising spots to begin an abbey, let alone village, could hardly be imagined. But the (it is also said) heartbroken Guilhem, cousin to Charlemagne, left the court life and battlefield as a time-tested and valiant warrior after the early death of his youthful, second wife, to build the abbey that would later take his name.

Having spent some thirteen years successfully defending the southern borders of France (on land that had been wrested from first the Visigoths then the Moors by his own grandfather), Guilhem turned to carving out a place that would later become a popular stage in the pilgrimage route to Spain's Santiago de Compostela, and still later a flourishing touristic village with still-functioning abbey--and this after intervening centuries of benign decline and outright destruction.

But please, do be clever: avoid the congested periods in order to also avoid the Disneyland effect. Do take shelter from the burning sun under the century-old plane tree in the main square, its trunk a full six meters in diameter. Make liberal, cooling use of the fountains scattered across the village--drinking only from the ones marked eau potable. Lose yourself in the labyrinthine passageways. Peek into the well-maintained vegetable gardens of the order and other 250-some village residents.Admire the flowers growing in every possible cranny of the limestone walls, then duck into the cool of the Romanesque abbey itself. Only there will you find a small reprieve from the pressing heat and the sustained, fever pitch of the locusts.

I am fairly certain that regardless of your feelings on faith, the atmosphere of the village can be restorative, if you can remain open to the possibility.