T O D A Y Surreal Gourmet Dinner and a video with a tasty trout recipe (11/14/97) Mondo Weirdo By Andrew Brown A charming -- and cheap! -- French château (11/14/97) T A B L E_T A L K And the wine was delicious! Travelers discuss the best places on the planet to drink in the Table Talk's Wanderlust area. R E C E N T L Y Open Lands By Mark Taplin Travels through Russia's once-forbidden places (11/13/97) The Aussie way of Wanderlust By Tony Wheeler Lonely Planet founder: Why Aussies are traveling fools (11/12/97) Road Warrior Roger Black Tips and tales from a globe-trotting print and Web designer (11/11/97) Descending the Congo By Jeffrey Tayler He wanted to canoe the Congo, but didn't count on the storms, mosquitoes -- and cannibals (11/10/97) Esther Dyson, road warrior By Don George The Net's most frequent flyer shares her travel secrets (11/06/97) - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Your virtual travel agency - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Browse the Wanderlust archives - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -		This week's Mondo Weirdo relates a magical interlude in the kind of French château you rarely hear about: old, still somewhat crumbling -- and affordable! What's your favorite travel discovery, or most amazing on-the-road tale? Send it to wanderlust@salonmagazine.com. it was a pity that the children hated goat. They were delighted to sleep in a medieval stone-flagged castle chamber -- learning quickly how to get down the broad spiral stairs, worn down by tramping feet until they sloped like a river bed -- but when they were told what was for supper, they refused to eat. "Just kidding," my wife said, without missing a beat: She told them solemnly that "chèvre" was the French for lamb, not goat. They were hungry enough to believe her. Everything else about the château de Chémery was perfect. It is quite easy to stay in extravagant and perfect châteaux in the Loire valley, if you have the money, but my English snobbery demands something else -- somewhere old, ordinary and cheap. This place, which had a moat, a fax machine and a history dating back to the 13th century, seemed perfect. It is set in the dusty flat country where France begins to seem strange as well as foreign to an English eye: The perspectives are too long, the roads too straight, the bluffs above the rivers too steep. Fruit that normally comes with its taste shrouded in cellophane is suddenly revivified. Tomatoes turn into revelations. The first vineyards start at this latitude, a little south of Paris. Some wines are famous, like St. Nicolas de Bourgeuil, the best red in northern France. But most of the vineyards here are small and domestic. Enameled signboards hang where the farm tracks come down to the road, advertising goose liver or goat's cheese. The village of Chémery was dustier than usual, since the main street had been dug right up. As in most French villages, the main street is also the main road, so to reach the village, we had to follow a long diversion down narrow roads straight as a pin with right-angled corners, through woods and then out onto the potholed center of the village. Nothing moved but a chicken scratching in an overgrown garden. I drove carefully round a few potholes to the outskirts of the village, and found the château by its towers. For centuries it had been a farm and then a rock star's retreat, but it still had the towers essential for any Loire château: gray, round, with conical slate roofs, so they look like squat sharpened pencils rising from the ground. The drawbridge was down, across a green and soupy moat. It did not look even safe enough to drive a car across. The owner of the château was an architect, Axel Fontaine, who had bought it 10 years before when it was almost derelict, as parts still are. He hopes to restore it and make it into a museum of costume. But in the meantime, he and his wife take in guests for bed and breakfast. They live in the oldest part of the building, where there are still traces of 14th-century wall paintings in one room, which also has a grislier souvenir of the Middle Ages: a model of the soldier whose skeleton was found bricked up inside a wall in 1850. Guests stay in more modern and less haunted rooms inside the main tower. The larger room has feather beds, as in the fairy stories. No wonder princesses couldn't sleep on them: They were so soft that the sides seemed to close in on us when we lay down. The smaller room had more comfortable beds -- and a deep narrow window, handy for shooting arrows through. The afternoon slid languorously into evening, as plump carp jostled at the surface of the moat beneath the window. The owners showed us around the château, or at least those parts that are safe to walk in. Slowly, they are transforming the château into a museum of clothing. Every inch of wall in the children's chamber was covered in prints of historical costumes and uniforms. In the cavernous stone room next door stood a spinning wheel, a loom and a four-poster bed, all looking quite decayed, as if they had been waiting there since the end of the age of fairy tales. Some traveling actors dragged their horse-drawn cart over the drawbridge and across the crunching gravel of the courtyard, preparing a show of La Fontaine's fables for the village. The smell of herby goat chops frying drifted around the old tower. The mummers' performance was almost entirely silent. They stalked and strutted in grotesque costumes and headdresses, acting out fables that originated with Aesop in the 6th century B.C. The characters were foxes, crows and ants -- the only humans were a gang of robbers with a donkey. Each story concluded with a rhymed moral, just as in Aesop. But these were the last sententious strokes of the hammer on a nail already driven in. Even without any French, the stories were clear enough: They were as dramatic as the frog who tried to puff himself up to the size of an ox, appearing three times from behind the cart until the last time he was puffed up 10 feet wide. This was still too small, a cackling crone on a step-ladder assured him, so he ducked behind the cart for one last effort -- and a tremendous bang scattered his costume all around. As night fell, they performed the last fable, which was brought right up to date: The grasshoppers sang and played all summer, while the ants all around them toiled. When winter came, the ants retreated to their nest; the grasshopper starved outside. They begged the ants three times for food and shelter. Three times the ants refused. The third time, the grasshoppers, cackling wildly, brought out a huge, old-fashioned bug spray, and squirted it down the chimney of the ants' nest. The ants allowed them in; everyone sang, and socialism triumphed. When it was over, the exhausted children vanished into their feather beds. Around them, in the high and distant corners of the room, only friendly ghosts lurked. "Actually, goat does taste good," muttered the elder, and then they slept. -- Andrew Brown