Tuesday - Sunny

We were off to see some prehistoric cave paintings today, and seeing how Niaux grotte is a 30mim drive out of town there was no champagne breakfast today. Just a good omelette baguette, some juice and coffee.

Before we left we went to print off our overseas notification voting forms, and buy some more pasta for dinner, and some more ingredients for breakfast tomorrow.

We were extremely lucky to get tickets today for the Niaux cave. Visits to the cave are regulated in order to maintain an even temperature of 12°C to preserve the wall drawings. They also only have a limited amount of tours of 20 people. The 11 tours a day are also limited to 45min to keep the consistent 12°C temp.

Once the tour started there is no turning back. We were handed torches and then went through airlock and then it was dark. The caves are not lit up, another measure to protect the paintings.

The 900m walk to the Black Gallery paintings lead through big caves and narrow and tight passages. The cave floor has been left in its natural state too, pretty wet in places, very uneven and slippery on the slopes. I could hear so many people slipping and sliding.

Its called the black gallery because all the prehistoric cave paintings dating back 12000-13000 years are black, some were painted using charcoal. The charcoal paintings are the only paintings that can be dated by scientists using the carbon dating method. They were painted by the Magdalenians. The Magdalenians, who inhabited most of France, are named after the area in which they came from 10-20,000 yrs ago.

The amazing paintings were all of large animals, mostly bison, stags, ibex and horses. Most of the painting sections, the animals were superimposed on top of each other. They even used the natural formation of the rock to form up the animals back, legs even cheek bones. It gave it a real 3D look. Incredible!

There was graffiti in the caves too, well people had signed their names on the walls. The oldest graffiti was from 1602, the majority would of been from 1800's. the locals always knew about the cave but didnt know how old the paintings actually were. They came into the caves looking for minerals and oils. They also came into the caves to cut out all the stalagmites and stalactites to sell.

The tour was great the guide was very good, seemed like she really enjoyed what she did.

We left the cave and went down to the village below for a quick walk around then headed back to Ax-Les-Thermes to pick up a baguette and some snacks to have before dinner and with the couple bottles of wine that we picked up earlier