Sunday 18th December 2016

Very cold, misty and frosty this morning. While servicing the van before leaving the aire at Montignac I managed to absolutely soak myself with water due to a malfunctioning connector to the aire's fresh water supply. We made the 2 kilometre journey up to the new visitor centre for the new Lascaux replica cave which was only opened to the public on the 15th of December which was my birthday and we are visiting the cave on Ann's birthday - all very strange. Here are some punters waiting their turn to go into the "cave".

The prehistoric paintings in the replica cave are absolutely stunning however you are not allowed to photograph them so you have to be content with photographing replicas of the replica cave paintings!

These paintings from the Lascaux cave are really something. Here are European Bison.

Here is two aurochs - a huge prehistoric bulls.

The head of an auroch.

Reindeer.

A horse.

Another auroch.

The Lascaux cave was discovered in 1940 when some local boys were out with their dog which fell down a hole into the cave while chasing a rabbit. The cave paintings which are thought to date from the last ice age 20,000 years ago are generally considered to be the best anywhere in the world with the possible exception of the Altamira cave in Northern Spain. The cave itself has been closed to the public since 1963 due to the damage caused by lots of people breathing in the cave during visits! A less ambitious replica cave was opened many years ago and we visited it in 2014. The new replica cave is much more extensive and has a very good adjoining museum with replicas of the replicas. Here is a view of the very grand new reception area. One might ask why this was built here in rural France rather than in Paris. 

We moved a few kilometres down the Vezere vally and visited the Roque St Christophe an area of cliff dwellings which has been continually occupied by humans from prehistoric times through to the middle ages.

I felt that some of the interpretation here was extremely crude.

Here some hominids are portrayed as warding off two very large bears which are entering their cave. I can do without this this kind of thing.

We are staying the night at the village of Les Eyzies. Here's the view from our van looking to the river Vezere.

The village is dominated by magnificent limestone cliffs.

As it's Ann's birthday we wanted to go out for a meal this evening but unfortunately everywhere was closed!

Today we traveled 19 miles (31 kilometres). Our latitude here is N44.93841 and our longitude is E1.00977