"Naours: Hi Ho, Hi Ho, etc etc" Naours by JohnnySpangles

Naours is one of those places where there is only really one thing that the place is famous for, and thus there’s probably only one thing to do when you get there. However I could be wrong and maybe its the same scenario whereby you never read reviews for Pisa’s Museum of Quantity Surveying or the Small Mammal Petting Zoo at Agra. The famous ‘one thing’ at these places tends to over shadow all ‘other things’ that a particular town’s tourist office might be desperate to promote. Therefore I’m sure that Naours has some groovy little cafes, some pleasant shrubberies or a nice cat but I missed them all whilst doggedly following the signs to The Cité Souterraine. This roughly translates as the Underground City, in case you hadn’t guessed.

WATCH OUT FOR THE MINOTAUR

The Underground city is an extensive network of tunnels that were originally mined by the dwarves from Snow White. However this was when there were many, many dwarves and the story title was known back then as Snow White and the Twelve Thousand Three Hundred and Sixty Two Dwarves. Sadly a massive outbreak of dwarf-rot decimated the population in the early 1800s and with only male dwarfs left, and Snow White not really up for it, the population stagnated. The term underground ‘City’ is a bit misleading. There are a lot of tunnels, and you will be down in the chilly bowels of the earth for a couple of hours, but don’t expect to see something the size of Rome down there…although it probably has a better night-life than Rome

THE MINOTAUR

You get issued with a wind-up torch which has the desired effect of winding-up your children as they fight over whose go it is next. At some point they’ll also discover the torch has a ‘flashing’ feature on it. This is a feature that is probably meant to be used in an emergency. However you’ll find that, once discovered, it gets used as a disco-lighting effect until the constant flashing brings one of your little dears to the point of epileptic convulsions. As well as the cave complex there’s also a rickety windmill, a watermill, a bouncy castle and some goats that are happy to eat anything that you proffer them e.g. leaves, grass, plastic bags, cameras, small children etc etc.

Most entertaining.