Avignon; Saturday, 25 November, 2023

I had to be up early to grab breakfast and then walk down the stairs to the bus station underneath the hotel to pick up the bus out to the small town of Vers-Pont-du-Gard and from there the short walk down to the Pont-du-Gard itself.

This nearly 2,000 year old aqueduct was the tallest built in the Roman Empire and, despite losing 11 arches to stone thefts in the 11th and 12th centuries, is still standing strong dominating the Gardon river that it strides over.

I had been a little perturbed by how an early a bus I needed to catch from Avignon to get here, but it turned out that I was one of the first people of the day to reach the site and an area that in the summer is normally teaming with tourists was completely deserted. In fact, it turns out that November is a good time to visit as at no point did it get particularly busy.

I spent a good few hours exploring both the aqueduct and the surrounding countryside with several walking trails you can follow to get right up close to the aqueduct, before heading back over to the visitors centre to have a look around the museum.

Given the time it takes to look around the site and the irregularity of the buses (only one round trip possible on a Saturday) taking in the museum meant that I would miss the last bus back to Avignon, but that didn’t matter as there was a bus a bit later that would take me on into the nearby city of Nîmes from where I’d be able to catch the train back to Avignon.

I could have leapt straight onto the train in Nîmes, but as there were still a couple of hours until sunset I decided to explore the city a bit, given it was the Roman settlement here that required the construction of the Pont du Gard in the first place.

The most obvious mark that the Romans left on the city itself is the Arena, a small Colosseum that is still standing and still in use as a venue some 2000 years after it was constructed. So I decided to have a look around that.

The tour route takes you across the whole of the site from the arena floor right up to the very top of the structure and it’s clear to see how much of the structure still survives and is in regular use – though the main seating area is on carefully constructed scaffolding so none of the weight goes back onto the structure itself.

After quite some time exploring the arena it was time to head back to the station and catch the train back into Avignon where I popped into my hotel room to freshen up before heading back out into town to have an explore in the evening.

Given the importance of the city, and the number of historic monuments it has, I had expected that the main structures and the walls might be floodlit at night, but it turns out that none of the city centre is illuminated beyond the standard street lamps, so after a bit of wandering around in the dark I grabbed something to eat and then headed back to my hotel