Flamingos of Camargue

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So I had learned that I love birds generally and there are some birds that just captivate my intrigue, my curiosity more than others, and flamingos are one of them. And I didn’t know where you could see them in the wild and did some research and discovered that they’re quite predominant in the south of France and I followed this ornithological park, in the Camargue, I may be saying that wrong, and found out that in, winter, you can go, well they’re there all year round, but you, even in winter, which really surprised me.

And, we had some time to be able to go, and so we popped down for a weekend. I think we flew into Marseille or Montpellier, and hired a car and headed over to the salt marshes, which is a habitat that they absolutely thrive in. And it’s a nature park that you pay to get into, and then you have access to these beautiful, serene scenes and the chaos that unfolded there was absolutely majestic. And, there was just hundreds upon hundreds, if not thousands of puff-puffins… Where am I? Wrong place… of flamingos. And, they are just such incredible birds. They’re so funny to watch when they come into land, because it just looks like they’re not going to be able to do it.

They’re kind of their, their long, thin, gangly legs start to kind of predict the land and they, you know, kind of run along a little bit and, eventually bring themselves to a stop. But then once they are stopped and they are stood there with their full height and their elegance, erm and we saw some of them doing their mating dance with their wings out and that like, shoulder shimmy they do, to, to really show off their, their tail feathers and shake their tail feathers.

It was a really incredible thing and at part of the reserve, they actually feed them and we didn’t know this was happening. And so this golf buggy came round chanting by, you know, that kind of loud chugging noise they make, whipped by. And then suddenly there was this absolute kind of like wall of, like a wave almost of flamingos chasing this thing because they knew that that’s where the food was getting chucked out of. And there must have been 2 or 300 flamingos just chasing them across the salt marsh and it was incredible to see.

And we were staying, I’d booked an Airbnb and it was really cheap, and it claimed to be a five star hotel, and it didn’t kind of add up, really, but I think it turned out that they, did a lot of discounts over winter, and would rent rooms via Airbnb, which they don’t normally do in their high season.

And so when we checked in, it was like it was very much a five star hotel, but we’d probably gotten like a 1 or 2 star budget because we were just doing a really, cheap weekend away, and so because we were doing a cheap weekend away, my bag was all camera gear, and then Mark’s bag was, all of our clothes.

And so I, we were travelling hand luggage only so that you could take in basic cosmetics. Didn’t take any makeup. Didn’t take, at that point, I was straightening my hair, didn’t have hair straighteners, erm you know, it was a kind of change of T-shirt, clothes, wearing one pair boots with hiking boots. And that was it. And so when we checked in, they said dinner tonight is actually a five course meal and we’ve got a jazz band. And so they were like a kind of, ragtime Louis Armstrong kind of band. My husband I met playing sax in a swing band at uni were just let that be amazing. So it wasn’t too expensive, thankfully and we decided to go for it because it was quite a drive off this, kind of almost like the nature reserve, to find anywhere with food.

Anyway, over we go for dinner, completely forgetting that just because we’re turning up in hiking gear doesn’t mean everybody else is. And we walked in and everybody was in dinner jackets and fancy dresses and it was almost like a moment, well it’s a moment in life where I don’t normally care about stuff like that, but it was so out of key with how everybody else was that I just wanted the ground to swallow me up.

I could not believe that we were just walking into this event like this. It was like a scene out of a comedy movie where you actually feel that full body awkward watching it for the people in the movie. Except we were those people in real life and so we managed to find a bit for, the, I think it was aperitifs. And so we sat and hid away. And then when they called us down to the table, thankfully the table had really big, tablecloths that were like floor length. So I felt like I could just, like, hide underneath the table for the rest of the night. And so, we just laughed our socks off, going back to the room because, I mean, the music was amazing, the food was lovely, and we just had such a nice time listening to this raspy voice of a guy that sounded like Louis Armstrong.

It was, yeah, just absolutely hilarious at the same time that, we’d very, very much misjudged the tone of the event but we got up the next day and spent more time with the flamingos. And on one of those two days, this picture came into being.