Below us lay the Plateau du Soleil. It was an ocean of Helianthus annuus , stretching for miles. Every flower, every single one, had turned its face in the same direction, creating a vast, tessellated carpet of gold and brown. The air was thick with the dusty, honeyed scent of pollen. It was the kind of view that demands silence. But silence wasn’t what we got.
Our arrival on our rumbling scooters caused a ripple of curiosity, not alarm. A woman with silver hair piled on top of her head approached us. She was perhaps seventy, with the posture of a ballet dancer and a necklace made of river stones. “Visitors!” she announced with delight. “Did Bernard find you? He’s our scout. He takes the old Ciao to the ridge every morning to look for lost travelers.”
We followed the dirt track.
We exchanged glances. “Did we just hallucinate a nude Santa on a moped?” asked Marco, who was filming everything on his 4K handheld rig.
But the magic of the format is that it captures the peripheral. In the background of one shot, a man tried to light a camp stove with a flint, his concentration absolute. In another, two women played chess, their fingers hovering over carved wooden pieces. A child—a toddler who had not yet learned that clothes were a thing—chased a grasshopper with a shriek of joy. The footage was crisp. The colors were surreal: the violent yellow of the sunflowers, the pastel blue of the sky, the warm earth tones of human skin. -Candid-HD- Scooters- Sunflowers and Nudists HD
The track opened into a clearing that felt like a painting by Henri Rousseau after a particularly good mushroom trip. There were dozens of people. They were playing badminton. They were grilling vegetables on a solar-powered barbecue. They were reading dog-eared paperbacks in hammocks strung between low-hanging willow trees. And they were all, every single one of them, naked.
“He’s… memorable,” I said, trying not to stare at a point just above her left shoulder. Below us lay the Plateau du Soleil
“Beautiful lines,” he said. “Like a naked woman.”
“You got the shot?” he asked me, nodding at Lena’s camera. The air was thick with the dusty, honeyed scent of pollen
There was a pause. Then he blushed. “No pun intended.”