大象传媒

Toulouse, la trek (48)

• Tom Fordyce
• 13 Sep 07, 11:18 AM

Condom, again - We should have known that something bad was afoot when we both woke up on Wednesday morning from jaw-clenched technicolour nightmares.

Mine involved hitting a furious Brian Ashton in the face with a misplaced spin-pass, while Ben鈥檚 saw him steal a VW campervan belonging to Steve Coogan before inadvertently driving it backwards off a cliff.

Yet nothing in the first few conscious hours of the day could prepare us for the horrors of what was to follow - a series of events so devastating that by 10pm Dirsy would turn to me with lifeless eyes and croak the immortal words: "Tommy - I鈥檓 a broken man鈥�"

The plan had been simple: fire up The Bloggernaut, load up the tunes and cruise the 100 or so kilometres down to Toulouse for the unpredictable joys of Japan v Fiji.

Spirits were so high in the camp pre-breakfast that Ben was even briefly seen running during our impromptu game of two-man touch rugby, something which hasn鈥檛 happened since he was chased out of a Dixy Fried Chicken in the late summer of 2005.

As we hit the outskirts of Toulouse a full four hours before kick-off, blasting out of the stereo, windows down, sun pouring in and freshly laundered flip-flops on our feet, there was the unspoken sense that the dismal scenes of the previous evening (broken cooker in van, food gone off in fridge, emergency midnight tea of raw pasta and chocolate digestives) were finally being erased from our minds.

Indeed, my pre-match research had been so thorough that I had even learned the Japanese for, 鈥淲e are too small for this sport. Can we take you on at karaoke instead?鈥� in order to bag some cheap laughs on the post-match blog.

The first slight sniff of trouble came within moments of entering the city boundaries, the point at which we hit a traffic-jam so severe that many drivers had grown since arriving at the scene.

As we moved along at the rate of a sloth dragging a fridge uphill, the first tendrils of doubt began to tug at our trouser-legs. Not only were there no signs for the campsite we were looking for, but there were no signs for anything rugby-related either.

Where were the Coupe de Monde banners hanging from the lamp-posts, the happy fans streaming towards the ground, the fizz and crackle of a city experiencing its first ever rugby World Cup match?

In even starker terms, where the hell was the stadium?

It would be unfair to say there are no road signs in Toulouse. There are hundreds, mainly for some place called . But for the Stade Municipal, on the day of the city鈥檚 greatest rugby moment in years?

Rien.

In the next three hours, in the fleeting moments between finding ourselves stationary once again in snarl-ups of epic proportions, we accidentally visited the following Toulouse landmarks: the hospital, the airport, centre ville (four times), the university, all major motorway junctions, the train station, the bus station and the Airbus factory.

Like tortured wasps trapped within a jam-jar, we spent 45 minutes buzzing repeatedly between junctions 18 and 19 of the Route Periphique, including 10 minutes circling a single large roundabout while shouting, 鈥淢arseille? We don鈥檛 want Marseille!鈥� at the only road-sign of note while beeping Frenchmen in dented Peugeot 205s tried to mount our rear bumper like love-starved terriers on heat.

With three minutes to go till kick-off and The Bloggernaut marooned at a never-changing set of traffic-lights in a no-mark suburb called , all seemed lost.

Then, at the 42nd time of asking, a Dirsy shout of, 鈥�Ou est la stade?鈥� at a random passer-by reaped sudden dividends. Miraculously, Ben even understood the French reply.

鈥淗e pointed that way,鈥� he said.

Fresh hope in our hearts, we floored our flagging beast and leapt forward 鈥� into a traffic-jam even worse than the previous 400.

Briefly, with about five minutes gone in the second half, we got within a mile of the stadium. That was the point when we found all the surrounding roads had been closed by the police, and that the only road open led us back to junction 19 of the Periphique.

Two hours into the drive back north, neither of us had spoken a word. Never having seen Dirsy so low, fearing for his sanity, I suggested we stop for a coffee.

We did. Ben went to the counter, picked up the jug, took aim at the cup 鈥� and poured it all over his foot.

I could go on 鈥� tell you about the desperate search for a campsite somewhere in Gascony that was still open, for a shop that would sell us food, for a restaurant that wouldn鈥檛 close the instant we parked outside, for any sort of dinner at all.

I could tell you how Ben鈥檚 brief foray into the world of gastronomy ended with frantic handfuls of cold McDonald鈥檚 chips, how the vegetarian among us was forced to eat dry Special K for his tea, how I found myself singing in the style of the late Luciano Pavarotti in a last-gasp, despairing attempt to bring any sort of a smile back to the Dirs visage.

But I won鈥檛. For as I write this, with Ben snoring like an ox in the bunk next-door, I have nothing more to give.

Tom Fordyce is a 大象传媒 Sport journalist travelling around France in a camper van with Ben Dirs.

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