Saturday 28 April Dignes-les-Bains
Today we visited Alexandra David-Néel’s home in Digne-les-Bains
But first of all we walked to a park with some Andy Goldsworthy cairns, a butterfly sanctuary and some water-based art installations.
Our camp site’s valley
Digne-les-Bains on quite a hot April day
Musée Promenade
A cool artwork with practical value.
An Asian artist made this which reminds us of a restaurant in Rosenthalerstr. in Berlin.
Alexandra David-Néel sang operas, was a feminist activist like Emily Pankhurst, was the first western woman to visit Lhasa in Tibet and drank tea with yak butter which I thought smelled quite yukky, not yakky (although none of the French sniffers in our guided tour group seemed put off).
wikipedia Alexandra David-Néel.
This portrait of the great lady is supposed to be made of yak butter.
More yak butter work. If it melts in the sun that’s fine, nothing is eternal in Buddhism.
Alexandra was quite a pretty teenager, dressed up here for some unspecified performance.
The simple house where she lived after returning from her travels, until an age of almost 101. Free guided tour in French.
Guardian article
The scholar and opera singer who sneaked into Tibet in the 1920s was also an anarchist, ran a casino and adopted a Buddhist monk
Turn subtitles on and switch to English.
