Castle Celles-Veves, near Namur, Belgium

On day 4 of the race the cyclists raced from Wanze (Belgium) to Arenberg, in Porte du Hainaut, thus finally entering France. This was Stage 3 of the 2010 Tour de France and it took the race through Wallonia, a region studded with castles, monuments, and beautiful villages.

Although a flat stage (i.e. a stage without any significant changes in elevation) it was a tough ride for the cyclists since a substantial part of the 213 km route was over cobbled roads.The stage was won by Thor Hushovd, but Fabian Cancellara took over once again as the overall leader, i.e. as the person who had taken the least time so far to ride from Rotterdam to Arenberg.

In the Tour de France, while a handful of super cyclists have their eyes on the main individual prize (for taking the least time to cover the distance from the start at Rotterdam to the finish in Paris), there are a number of other prizes to be won. The main contest is to identify the best all round cyclist and the best all round team. Then there are contests to identify the best sprint cyclist, the best mountain climber, the best young rider (under age 26 years on 1st January of the year of the race), and the most aggressive rider.

By winning Stage 3 Thor Hushovd took a lead in the points standing of the sprint category.

The route was very pictureque and studded with many fine buildings, monuments, and castles. The tv coverage is not limited to the camera following the cyclists. Many cameras are used and several of them from helicopters which criss-cross the country side and show the tv viewer many places of local interest.

I have chosen to draw the Castle of Celles-Veves, located near Namur. There has been a castle here since the 7th or 8th century, but the one that stands now, overlooking the village of Celles, dates back to the early 15th century. It has five lovely towers and continues to be the home of the same family since the 15th century.

My sketch is appoximately 12cm x 9.5cm drawn using a photograph by Jean-Pol Grandmont as reference.

Pouhon Pierre le Grand, Spa, Belgium

The route for the 2nd Stage of the 2010 Tour de France was from Brussels to Spa, a distance of 201 Km entirely within Belgium. This was the third day of racing, on 5th July 2010, since the first day started with only a 9 km prologue within Rotterdam. The 2nd Stage saw a horrible crash in which many cyclists, including Andy Schleck one of the main contenders and Alessandro Petacchi the winner of the previous stage were injured. Sylvain Chavanel took over the overall lead from Fabian Cancellara.

Spa is famous for its Formula1 race track, the oldest casino in Europe that has been in existence since the 18th century, and of course its hot springs. This is the region that gave the word "spa" to the English language. The mineral laden hot springs of the region were famous even in Roman times for their medicinal and rejuvenating properties.

My rough sketch shows Pouhon Pierre le Grand, built in the 19th century around a hot spring. This particular spa takes its name from the fact that the curative powers of its water was endorsed by Tsar Peter the Great in the early 18th century.

On the second day of the 2010 Tour de France the cyclists started from Rotterdam in Nederlands and raced to Brussels in Belgium. If I recall correctly the field had around 200 cyclists and it was won by Allesandro Petacchi of Italy. But the overall individual lead stayed with Fabio Cancellera who had won the Prologue on the previous day.

The nice thing about the Tour de France is that there are many different contests going on simultaneously. Although the overall prizes are won at the end of 21 days of racing, there are prizes, prize money, points, honour, and bragging rights to be won in many categories on almost every day.

Since the day's race finished at Brussels I sketched the Atomium, erected for the 1958 Brussels World's Fair. This is a steel structure made up of 9 interconnected spheres representing an iron crystal cell magnified 165 billion times. It ws designed by Andre Waterkeyn.

The total height of the structure is 102 meters. Each sphere is 18 meters in diameter and the connecting tubes enclose escalators. The vertical tube connecting to the topmost sphere has an elevator.

The Atomium is one of the most visited sites in Brussels.

Tilted Cube Houses of Rotterdam

Road cycling is one of the sports that I have recently fallen in love with. By recent I mean in the last ten years or so. This coincides with the time when we started getting live tv coverage of the Tour de France in India. We get about two to three hours of coverage every day and I make it a point to watch every minute of it. Not only do I find the contest for the many prizes that the tour offers extremely absorbing, I also enjoy the fact that the tv coverage takes me like a tourist through very many different parts of France and its neighbouring countries. I also find the commentary very interesting, for it covers not only the sport but also many interesting facts related to geography, history, architecture and commerce connected with the route followed by the Tour.

The Tour de France is an annual race for individual and team prizes. It was originally conceived as a promotional event to boost the sales of a newspaper. But it has grown in popularity, and stature to become one of the premier annual sporting events of the world.

These days the racing is spread over 21 days, usually in July, with two or three rest days thrown in-between. The distance covered varies from year to year, but on an average it is around 3000 km long. Most of the racing is through France, but the race also visits neighbouring countries briefly every year. The route goes through cities, the countryside, plains and mountains. Some of the mountain climbs are particularly steep and in the plains very strong cross winds become a major factor. The race starts from a different location each year and for the last 35 years or so the last stage has always finished at the Champs Elysees.

The race route also alternates between clockwise and anti-clockwise travel across France every year. Last year's tour started in Rotterdam and took a clockwise route around France to Paris. This year the route will therefore be anticlockwise. It begins this year on Saturday, July 2nd and I have already begun to count the hours to the start.

Last year I decided to something more than merely watch the tv coverage of the race. I decided to sketch something connected with each day's race route. It could be a distinctive landscape, or a natural feature, or a building, or monument, and do it in ink. And I also decided to stick to a fairly small sized format of around 9.5 cm x 12 cm (3.75" x 4.75") because I happened to have some cards in that size lying around. My intent was not to make these sketches very detailed, but to only capture basic forms and a sufficient amount of detail to make the landmarks identifiable. Over the next few posts I shall be sharing these sketches with you. Do let me know what you think of them

The Tour started last year with an individual time trial within Rotterdam. My first sketch is therefore one of a landmark cluster of buildings in Rotterdam - the Tilted Cube Houses designed by architect Piet Blom in 1977.

The House On Pillars

In the 1970s, after having lived as caretaker tenants for a few months in the quiet and unspoilt seaside neighborhood of Thiruvanmiyur, my wife and I made up our minds to put down our roots there. In those days Thiruvanmiyur was a suburb of Madras (as Chennai was then known) and most people thought that we were very daring and unwise to live in such a "remote" place. Although there were very few proper houses around, and an enormous amount of vacant land, it took us almost a year to find somebody willing to sell us a small plot. Land was not expensive then. In fact we paid only around US$ 350 for our plot. But the cost of construction was relatively high.

Although money, or more precisely our lack of it, was an important factor, there were a few other bigger hurdles. There were a number of permits and service connections to be obtained and, even in those relatively less corrupt days, it was a severe ordeal to deal with a very large number of minor and major bureaucrats. To add to our problems, those were the days of cement and steel shortages. In fact the cement scarcity was so severe that its supply was controlled by the Indian Government and rationed to consumers. And this of course brought a whole new set of bureaucrats into play. The shortage of materials and the consequent delays in the delivery of the materials made it very difficult to keep to construction schedules and stay within budgets.

Since steel and cement were the two major "problem" materials we decided to minimise their use in the house construction. We went in for a variety of roofing techniques, such as sloped clay tiled roofing, and hollow clay tile roofing, left our walls unplastered on one side, and went in for clay tile flooring. In addition to this we also decided to use pivot hinges for our doors and do away with door frames, had smaller but strategically placed windows, and reduced the floor to ceiling height, all in a bid to reduce costs. As a result we were able to keep to both the construction schedule and our budget. It also allowed us the luxury of building the entire house on stilts.

Since there were very few built houses around, our house was now visible from quite some distance in every direction. And unlike other houses which rested solidly on the ground the first level of our house was left entirely vacant. As a result our house came to be known in the neighbourhood as the "thoon veedu" or " house on pillars".

Some years later, when we had a few more neighbours, Chennai experienced particularly severe flooding, and the locality where we lived was also flooded. Although we had water in our plot, under the house, and all around us, we were unaffected by it. A number of people thought that we had been very wise to have anticipated this event and planned for it. Actually it had never occurred to us that the area could be flooded since that had never happened within living memory. We had built our house on stilts because it was located a little further away from the sea than what we would have liked, and we wanted to ensure that we had a good view of the water.

Thiruvanmiyur Beach

When we first moved into this part of Chennai we lived in a newly built house right on the seashore, as caretakers for the owners who were living abroad. We had one elderly lady living next door, and a locked up empty house on the other side as our immediate neighbors. There was also a fishing village nearby and much of their daily activity took place on the beach right in front of our home.

The access roads to this area of the city were not well developed, and the entire area used to be desolate at night. Many of my friends and relatives thought that we were mad to leave "civilization" so far behind, but my wife and I loved living here.

Originally the house owners were supposed to come back to India only several years later, but suddenly their plans changed and we had to vacate the house for them. It was then that we decided to build our own home in the same area. We were sort of pushed into taking the plunge a little earlier than we otherwise might have, but in the end it proved to be a good thing for us. Land prices and construction costs suddenly soared, but only after we had bought our land and built our house.

Today, over thirty years later, this part of the city is very much sought after as one of the nicer communities to live in. The high cost of land has resulted in most of the housing being in the form of apartment buildings. As a result, although the beach is relatively unspoiled, it is very crowded in the evenings.

Another big change that I notice is in the type of fishing vessels. In the 1970s the local fishermen went out to sea in catamarans. The word catamaran comes from the Tamil "kattu maram" which means tied wood. The fishermen used to go out to sea on raft-like boats made by tying a bunch of logs together. You can see what these catamarans used to look like in my sketch painting. But now, most fishermen use fiberglass boats, and quite a few of them even use mechanized boats.

The fishing village has grown and therefore there are more boats beached up on the sand these days. And Chennai being a very hot and humid place the beach is an extremely popular open space for the entire community.

Unfortunately this beach is now threatened by an unwanted development. There is a proposal to run an elevated roadway for many kilometers over this beach. The objective is to cut the driving time for people going from the city to the southern suburbs of the city and to a tourist destination to the south of Chennai. The fishing communities, the residents of many of the affected neighborhoods, and environmentalists have all protested but is so far unclear whether these protests will even be heard.

Breaking the silence

Every New Year I make a few resolutions. I write them down on a piece of paper and at the end of the year I check to see how many of them I have actually managed to keep. At the end of 2009, amongst other things I resolved to post to my blog more frequently than I had done in 2009. Although, when I checked at the end of 2010, my success rate with the rest of my resolutions was reasonably high, this was one resolution where I had failed miserably. I had managed to post only twice during the entire year.

Meanwhile my wife, daughter, and a few friends who had been following my posts had all been at me every now and then asking me why I had stopped posting stuff. The point was that through my blog I wish to share not only my thoughts, opinions, information & trivia, but also at least one of my sketches with every post. And unfortunately, during the first half of 2010, as it happens to me during the first half of every calendar year, I had not found the time to do much sketching. By the time I was back at my hobby, it had already been many months since I had posted anything, and inertia had set in.

Re-activating my blog and posting regularly were therefore on my list of resolutions once again, this time for 2011. But again, a third of the year 2011 went by before I have finally got down to it. Hopefully I will be able to sustain it this time.

During my extended period of blogging inactivity my daughter tried to nudge me back on track with a Brahma Book which is the Indian version of a moleskin sketchbook. I started using it promptly and I carry it faithfully with me every single day. The sketch that I am sharing is one of the first that I did in this book. It shows my home, located in a quiet seaside community in Chennai. Unfortunately there is a distinct possibility that it may not remain calm and quiet very much longer. More of that in a subsequent post.