Nimes has a rich history dating back to the Roman Empire and with several famous monuments (more on these later), it has been dubbed the most Roman city outside of Italy! We braved the rain which seemed to have followed us from Grenoble, to search for a boulangerie to enjoy breakfast and discuss potential plans for the day.
First stop was to the tourist office where our hopes of visiting the famous three storey aqueduct Pont du Gard were dashed due to limitations of public transport although to be quite honest the weather was pretty bad for visiting an outdoor tourist site. Instead we chose to visit the Arena, which we could see from the tourist office, as our first activity.
The Arena of Nimes, is known as the best preserved roman amphitheatre. As we approach the arena we are impressed by its outer facade. Continuing around the arena, we eventually arrive at the entrance deciding to buy the 3 monuments of Nimes pass and also add on the Arena escape game.
We are handed a leather folder containing an iPad, notebook and a few other bits and pieces. After watching a short video, we are required to find the 10 enigmas scattered around the arena in order find the hidden treasure. At each enigma, we are required to solve a puzzle. Using a pretty average map of the arena, we stumbled across the first enigma and the girls were hooked into the game.
There were two enigmas that stumped us. Luckily Andy had earlier spied a cheat board near the start which helped us. Enigma #7 required us to complete a jigsaw puzzle which we did easily but couldn't see the relevance. Once Andy returned from a sneak peek at the cheat board he pointed out on the completed puzzle picture the letters TAP in the background!
Enigma #8 also had us scratching our heads. Katy was leading and found this one first but got a nasty shock when she turned the corner to where the enigma was and came face to face with a life like statue of a sick looking man (it represented the Black Plague.) She was really spooked and refused to return there. For this one the clue was something like charity can help but not heal. A chess board with letters was on the wall adjacent. We entered all combinations of the letters into our iPad but nothing was correct. We noticed that the man had his hand out and in his hand was a green area. It turned out that the you had to put a coin in his hand which triggered a recording (in French of course) giving more clues as to the chessboard letters. We got there in the end and Katy was very happy to move on.
Finally we cracked the code to unlock the secret door to the treasure but then had to locate the door too. It took several goes to find the door but we got there entered the code and the treasure was revealed to us!!
Not this door!
The escape game took just over an hour and had us clambering all around the arena mostly avoiding the rain! It was a great choice. We had intended on doing an audio tour of the arena too but by this stage Katy was still recovering from her encountered with plague man and had had enough of the place. So our family divided - Ella and I chose to stay for an audio tour while Katy and Andy headed off to explore the old town.
Exchanging the iPad for audio sets, Ella and I began the tour. The Arena which took 39 years to build, is perfectly elliptical in shape, measuring 133m long, 101 m wide and 21 m high (one of the answers to our escape game!). The outer facade is made up of two levels of 60 arches. The inside arena is 68m by 38m surrounded by 34 tiers of seats that could accomodate 24,000 people.It was rather cold standing still listening to each instalment and after hearing about some rather gruesome stories about animals and prisoners being sacrificed within the arena, we'd both had enough and decided to cut the audio tour short. Had we continued we would have learnt more about the gladiators followed by the subsequent uses of the arena including - fortress, a community including houses and chapels and finally to bull fighting and music concerts.
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