About - Provence-Beyond

Frequently Asked Questions
Provence-Beyond (Beyond the French Riviera) ®

Who is Beyond?: Beyond is not part of any government, group, organization, town or tourist office. Provence-Beyond (Beyond The French Riviera) is a completely private Web, and for the most-part unfunded.
Beyond went on-line 4 years ago, in Oct 1995, as a small personal project to share our passion with back-country villages and nature of Provence. The web grew, expanded and improved, until it took on a life of its own.

What is Beyond About?: The places beyond the normal tourist attractions of the coast.; The small perched villages of the "back country".; Mountains, gorges, river valleys, lakes and wilderness parks.; The birds, flora and fauna typical of this wild region.; Astronomical observatories, local museums about history or archeology.

What is Beyond NOT About?: The French Riviera beaches, discothèques, nightclubs, jazz clubs, casinos, and the things you find in the normal guidebooks. You should use these guidebooks as well - Beyond doesn't replace them, it gives you something extra ... beyond the guidebooks.

Beyond Travel Services
During the years, we've had numerous requests for specific, detailed travel information, including "where to go and what to see" and hotel and restaurant requests. Trying to reconcile the time and effort required for each request with our zero-budget and near-zero-staff, we started our very-low-cost Travel Services.: Beyond's Current Events Calendar service provides the detailed information for fetes, brocantes and markets and other events in the Beyond region. The annual events calender is still available for free.; Beyond's Lodging Listings gets you an up-to-date list of hotels and other types of lodgings for the towns of your choice.; Beyond's Detailed Travel Information answers your questions about driving route instructions, bus and train connections and any other related information.; Once you're overwhelmed with the wealth of information and photos from Beyond's pages on towns, villages and other interesting sites, our Personalized Itineraries will help you with where to go and what to see in the time you have available.

Where is Beyond?

Provence-Beyond (Beyond The French Riviera) lives in the town of Grasse in the South of France, and is sponsored by UUNET France (www.fr.uu.net) and by

ACCES Consultants (www.acces-co.com): BP 29, Center ABS; 06901 Sophia Antipolis, Cedex; tel: (33) 492 94 48 49; fax: (33) 492 96 98 30

Phone Numbers - Details on the Phone page.

Brochures?: Can you please send us brochures or other information on the region?; All the information we have is visible to you on the Beyond Web site. We have no printed material, and no general information other than what you see here. If you have specific questions that fit the context and spirit of Beyond, we will do our best to help, especially if you take the time to say something about Beyond.

Lodging - Accommodation?: Do you maintain a list of hotels where we can stay?; Order our Lodging Listings service and we'll send you up-to-date lists of hotels, including (where available) stars and prices.
Gîtes de France.: In Beyond you will find address/phone/fax numbers where you can get catalogues or other information for the Gîtes de France. Please contact them for more information. Our Gîtes section also has some specific examples, but it is done only to show you what the Gîtes are like.

Browser - What Web Browser (Viewer) Works Best?: Our Web conforms to HTML+ version 2.0, which includes such things as colored backgrounds and tables. In order to remain accessible to a wide audience, we have not coded for the newer features HTML 3.0 or Netscape 4.0 (or Netscape/Explorer 5.0). Beyond is tested on Netscape and Explorer 4.x.

What Happened to the Colors - I Can't Read Some of the Pages: If you have serious problems with the colors, such as pages looking like they've not completely loaded, or are mostly black, check that your monitor is set to 256 colors (or better). If set to only 16 colors, you may experience problems.

Are There Cyber-Cafés Where I Can Check My E-Mail?: Much of Beyond is non-sophisticated, which is its charm. There are a few Internet Cyber-Cafés in the larger cities, listed on our Cyber-Café page.

Do You Reply to E-Mail?: We reply to all e-mail (if possible).; Mail messages are usually checked at least twice a day. We try to reply within 24 hours, unless we're off on a Beyond research mission for a couple of days.
[Autumn 1999: I'm sorry but we no longer reply to all email. If the email is inappropriate to the content and spirit of Beyond (such as "send us brochures for St Tropez"), we can no longer take the time to reply. Omitting your name or not offering a minimum level of politeness also affects our decision to reply.
Why Didn't You Reply to My E-Mail?: Please be sure to include your correct e-mail address in your message, along with your name. The automatic return address in the message header does not always work. We have had some mail requesting information where the return address simply did not work (and we tried several different variations in an attempt to reply).; Some schools or universities (and some companies) shut down their computers at night or during weekends. This will prevent returned e-mail from working, and we cannot continue trying to resend all "undelivered" e-mail continuously on the chance that it might eventually be accepted.; Also, we're human. Sometimes we forget, or lose the message, or do some other silly thing. Try us again. We even answer most of the "silly" messages.

This is a French Web, Why isn't it in French?: Provence-Beyond (Beyond the French Riviera) lives in France and is very much about France.
Beyond is in English because the webmaster's (Russ') native language is English. We would like to offer a Version-Française but, with several hundred pages in a Web that's constantly growing and constantly changing, it would require a large staff to do the conversion and a small full-time staff to maintain it. Beyond is at least bringing this wonderful part of France to the Anglophone world.

How Do I Navigate in the Beyond Web?: Beyond is organized into different levels, with separate sections for the main categories.
The top button in the upper-left corner of every page takes you to Beyond's Home page.
The second button in the upper-left corner of every content page takes you to the next-higher level (that section's index page).
Your browser's "Back" button takes you to the preceding page (where you came from).

How Do the Navigation Click-Maps Work?: On the PACA map, click on a department to zoom in on the department map.; On a department map, click on the map to zoom-in to that area of the department; click on an edge of the map to go to the adjacent map.; On an area map, click on the colored names or symbols to go the Village or Site page.; Click-Map Graphical Instructions.

Graphics-Photos - Why are the Graphics Grainy?: Large, high-resolution graphics are beautiful, but take so long to load that we generally don't want to wait for them. We have hundreds of original photos in Beyond. As a compromise for loading speed, most are JPG/JPEG compressed and the size is carefully limited. (The clickable maps and a few other exceptions are compressed GIF format.)
Some large-format photos are available for screen backdrops (by popular request). You can find them in the Screens section.

Copyright - May I Use the Contents of Beyond for Myself?: The content of this Web, including all photographs, is copyrighted. If you wish to use any content for further distribution, please request written permission. If that's too much trouble and you want to distribute for non-commercial use, please acknowledge us
(Provence-Beyond - http://www.provence-beyond.com) as the source.
For information about commercial use or higher-resolution photographs, please contact us (see above) or e-mail us.