We kicked off out of Freiburg with a train to Basel in Switzerland, and from there caught a train to Geneva and from Geneva to Lyon. The Basel to Geneva leg was the prettiest; we travelled through numerous rocky valleys decorated with red and yellow trees.

Swiss bliss

We came into Lyon in the late afternoon. The Lyon-Part-Dieu station was a bit seedy, which was a shock after the tidiness of southern Germany. We hadn’t been delivered to the central train station as we’d expected, so after a bit of confusion trying to work out how to get to our destination, we caught a bus to the centre of town which crawled around for rather a long time.

So far we hadn’t gotten off to the best of starts with Lyon. However when we got to the middle of town we found it quite charming. We checked in and had a brief wander about the bridges over the Saône river and had dinner in a French cafe.

Going ultra cheap (a mere 16 euros each), we had a set menu of kangaroo stew with coffee and tart for dessert. The kangaroo was perhaps an odd thing to be served in France; it was casserole grade meat and a bit on the chewy side so we can’t say it was tres magnifique, but it was dinner. We were however quite amused by the poor staff trying to translate the entire menu for a group of Chinese tourists.

My Skippy the Bush Kangaroo impression.

We only had the following morning in Lyon so we had to be quick about seeing the place. We got up, checked out, darted across the river, picked up some breakfast at a patisserie, ate a bit, then visited the Lyon Cathedral, a reboubtable gothic affair - not too flashy, but solid. We then caught a funicular up the hill and visited the Basilica of Notre-Dame de Fourvière, a piece of late 19th century/art noveau extravagance. According to our guidebook the Bishop of Lyon promised the Virgin a very nice church if the city was spared by the invading Prussians. Since the church was built, I guess this bribery had the desired effect. The church is wall to wall, floor to ceiling mosaics, and is impressive enough, but it seemed a bit overkill to me. The patterned ceilings it reminded me of the Notre Dame church in Montreal, except that church had a nicer colour scheme.

We walked along the ridge for a few minutes to have a gander at two Roman theatres, and then caught the funicular back down the hill. There’s a museum of Gallo-Roman culture, but we didn’t visit it - after all the ancient crap we’ve seen in Turkey, Germany, Britain, Rome, and Greece, we didn’t think we’d get much out of yet another museum, and this from the location of Asterix and Obelix and the other indomitable Gauls! We’ve changed, man.

We fought our way up the local cafe district and managed to secure a table and, even more miraculously, actual food. We both ordered a salade lyonaisse, which we assume is a local dish - if not, it’s an extraordinary coincidence. This salade consists of eggs and chopped up bacon with some lettuce and a small bucket of mayonaise thrown in. It was pleasant enough, although the bacon was a bit too rindy for our tastes. Certainly filled our stomachs, though. This was topped off with a chocolate mousse, of which we had no complaints whatsover.

Salade Lyonnaise: porky in every sense.

After lunch we caught the impressively efficient Lyon metro out to the west of the city to visit the Lumiere museum. The Lumiere family brought numerous innovations to photography in the late 19th century, the most important being the invention of cinema in 1895. The museum contained much of the important Lumiere paraphenalia and showed the earliest movies. What impressed me is that these films have been preserved, even though they’re of exceptionally boring things like people getting on and off trams and jumping on horses. You’d think by 1910 someone would have said ‘no one wants to watch that any more’, and chucked in a bin. I guess even 100 years ago there was some interest in posterity for film.

The museum was located in Antoine Lumiere’s old mansion, all dolled up art nouveau style, so the building was a treat as well. Perhaps the best thing about this museum is that it is unique, unlike all the museums of ancient things and the numerous alte and neue kunsthauses we’ve visited, and which are now blurring in our memories.

Me with Antoine Lumiere’s giant wooden cock.

We returned to the train station to reclaim our luggage and catch a train out of Lyon and down to Avignon. We arrived at Avignon in the late afternoon, and dragged our luggage from the train station to the town centre. The atmosphere here was more mediterranean, and touristy, with beggars on the footpath every 50 metres or so. We’d been expecting Avignon to be a bit more villagey, so we were a little underwhelmed. The feeling of disappointment intensified when we checked into our hotel, which was a touch too cosy for our liking.

Our first task in the early evening was to do some laundry. Our hotel gave us the location to a laundry that, as it turned out, did not exist. We referred to our guidebook, which sent us across the old town to a location that did exist. While the washing machine did its thing we looked around for promising eateries and found none, so we ate at subway, where picking salad in French proved an entertaining experience.

The next morning I had a bit of a strop over how exhausted I was. We had been travelling for four weeks and I was starting to find the travel routine more monotonous than invigorating. Our solution was to take it easy for the morning and go out in the afternoon.

We started out slowly by having afternoon tea at a local posh hotel. The place was 5 star (according to Sally it was a mind-boggling 400 euros a night to stay there) and we had the cheek to wander in in shorts and t-shirts, but we were treated well.

Afterwards we visited the famous bridge of Avignon (so famous it has its own song!). This ediface was founded on the exhortations of Saint Bénézet, who got the word from God, and came down from the hills to tell everyone what needed to happen. On meeting some scepticism from the locals he miraculously managed to move a large rock, which apparently enabled him to gain resource consent for the bridge’s construction.

Today the bridge stretches out into the Rhone, but doesn’t quite reach the other side. We walked about on it and listened to our audioguide, which jovially told us about all the crazy carry on related to the history of the bridge.

Avignon’s primary claim to fame is that it was the seat of the Pope for several decades in the 14th Century. Our next destination was the Palais des Papes, the palace from which the popes ruled. This complex wasn’t particularly attractive, being a series of towers strung together in a semi-defensive fashion. The various halls, chambers and chapels were only sparsely decorated (or only sparse amounts of decorations had survived). We had an audioguide for the palais as well, but unfortunately the rooms all seemed to serve rather tedious administrative or religious functions, and audio descriptions of this sort of thing isn’t that exciting. Indeed, the overriding feeling the palace conveyed was one of boredom. In the end we went up to the roof and took photos of the sunset. One the sun had gone we left the palace complex and visited the adjacent garden and took more photos of the pont du Avignon in the twilight.

Our next objective was dinner and we walked down some likely streets until we found a Vietnamese-Chinese restaurant. Picking dishes described in French was proving impossible until an aged lady on the staff proved to have a magnificent command of Cantonese. After that, everything went swimmingly and we had a great meal.

The next morning we caught a bus from the Avignon bus station, the dingiest, dodgiest looking place you can imagine - it made the New York bus station look positively congenial by comparison. Our destination was Pont du Gard, the best-preserved Roman aqueduct. We wended our way around the countryside for some 45 minutes, which gave us a bit of time to take in the Provencal landscape. I have to say that, although people do bang on about Provence being so marvellous, it looked a bit dessicated and drab on this day. Admittedly it was overcast, but I was left with a suspicion that much of the romance of the place is probably provided by the the local grape crop. Certainly, compared to the seasonally psychedelic woodlands of Bavaria it was a touch underwhelming.

As for Pont du Gard, well you can’t call that underwhelming. Even before we got to the aqueduct itself, the visitors’ centre was quite breathtaking, and the main event certainly did not disappoint. We took photos from one side, crossed the river via the bridge adjacent to the aqueduct, took photos, climbed a hill to a lookout, took photos, got mildly lost trying to find our way back down, took photos of a nearby cave (palaeolithique), took more photos of the bridge, crossed back, walked up the hill behind the aqueduct, and then walked back down again. I think we may have taken a photo or two then, as well.

It was a classy area. The local rock was none of your yucky greywacke or limestone like back home, oh no. It was marble! I half expected to see the limb of a god to be sticking out of the ground.

The reason for our thorough perambulations around Pont du Gard was that the next bus wasn’t until well after lunch. We assembled at the bus stop when this vehicle was due, in the company of a small collection of asian tourists. The bus didn’t show up for half an hour, however, causing us a bit of consternation. Had we got the timetable wrong? Was the bus cancelled?

Happily the bus did turn up eventually and we were transported to Nîmes, another town sur la Rhone. Our chief reason for visiting Nîmes was its splendid Roman arena, more complete than the Colosseum in Rome, if somewhat smaller. We were conducted around this edifice by an english electronic audio guide, which went into more detail than perhaps was necessary about how animals were murdered, criminals were executed, and gladiators fought each other to the death. I felt a knot in my stomach I hadn’t experienced since CLAS207 (Roman Social History) - a sort of nausea at how hideous the romans were.

ARENA OF DEATH.

Worse still, bull fights are still conducted in this arena, so there’s an awkward continuity from the past to the present. Not terribly elevated by the place, we ended up hurrying through the tour to get out as quickly as possible.

We wandered up Nîmes’ main road, and had a look at a gallery designed by Norman Foster (him again). It wasn’t that flash, looking a bit like a public library putting on airs. Nearby is a fairly intact Roman temple dating from the time of Augustus, only slightly marred by a group of French youths hanging all over it.

From there we walked over a canal and into a garden littered with modern copies of classical statues, and a nice ruin of another Roman temple. With dusk falling we returned to the station, passing through the narrow, winding streets of the mediaeval old town. This part of the city was actually rather good. It was Halloween, and people were getting up in their outfits and we found two city fountains pumping out pinky-red water. We weren’t sure whether this was a municipal Halloween measure, a private prank, or if the fountains really needed their water changed.

FOUNTAIN OF BLOOD.

Our cheer vanished when we reached the train station. We needed a seat reservation to travel back to Avignon, and we joined the ticket queue. 45 minutes later we had missed two trains, but we had our tickets - and another 50 minutes to wait. Does it need saying? Hell, why not: the French rail system is pretty hopeless, and if you compare it to the German rail system it comes off as almost Italian. There, I said it. Almost Italian.

We came back to Avignon at about 8, tired and annoyed. We ended up getting takeaways from the Viet-Chinese restaurant from the night before, because we couldn’t face going through the slow motion carry-on of French service.

The next morning brought Sally a new cold, and we checked out of our hotel rather later than we wanted, and made the long march to the train station. We bid Avignon farewell. There are some nice parts to the town, but at the same time all the evils of tourism have been visited upon it, and we were quite glad to leave.

Our destination was Arles, most famous for being the brief of haunt of van Gogh. It’s another town on the Rhone. We arrived around midday and dragged our luggage for a kilometre along cobblestones, a surface guaranteed to frustrate and irritate. We eventually sweatily reached our hotel and checked in. We then went in search of lunch and had a delicious meal at a nearby creperie. Now full of crepes, we then went on a bit of a walking tour of the town, taking in Roman ruins, narrow ‘old town’ streets, and spots where van Gogh did a bit of daubing. The most notable of these places was a spot in the mental hospital where van Gogh spent a bit of time after attacking Gaugin and then chopping off his own earlobe. The courtyard of the hospital was quite nice, and still painted yellow like it was in van Gogh’s day. A further sight of note was the place de la republic with its obelisk and depressed Heracles fountain, where the lionskin-donning demigod was having a perpetual chunder:

Blurgh.

At one end of the square was a mediaeval romanesque church featuring a freaky relief around the entrance.

The chief pleasure of wandering around Arles is that it only took a couple of hours to see everything. When we were done we returned to our hotel and had a bit of a break. Our room wasn’t large in area, but the ceiling was perhaps 15 feet high, so volume-wise it was quite spacious.

Outside the skies opened and a thunderstorm took up residence. We waited as long as we could but there was little let-up in the weather and eventually we had to face up to the prospect of venturing out in search of food.

We’re not sure if it was the weather or that it was All Saints’ Day (a public holiday in France), or both, but all shops and most restaurants were closed, and we practically had the centre of Arles to ourselves. We ventured down the narrow streets, rain gently falling on our umbrella, while above us the sky would flash and thunder would follow. It was rather exciting.

We ended up eating at (yet another) Vietnamese establishment, almost the only thing open. Afterwards as we walked back we enjoyed more lightning. I say we, but Sally’s not that fond of thunderstorms. However, I managed to prevail upon her to do a circuit of Arles’ Roman amphitheatre so we could see lightning flash over it. This theatre of death is more ruined than that of Nimes, but still functions as a bull ring. Consequently we didn’t visit it earlier. In a thunderstorm hoever, the place’s sinister nature became something of an asset. Indeed, the night felt a lot more Halloween than had Nimes and its pink fountains the day before. Eventually Sally managed to get me indoors, but I continued to listen to the thunder rumble away into the late evening.

The next morning we reluctantly checked out of our lovely hotel and got a taxi to the train station. Our destination? Nice on the French Riviera.

We caught the train to Marseille, and a further train from there on to Nice. The comparatively flat Provencal countryside gave way to hilly, cliffy land on the coast. The hillsides were dotted with stylish beach houses (no crappy cribs here), while the towns boasted numerous multistorey condominiums, with their harbours festooned with expensive pleasure boats.

By pure coincidence we happned to be rolling into Nice at the same time that a G20 Summit was being held at nearby Cannes. Cannes was completely locked down and no protestors were allowed in, so G20 protests were being held in… Nice. In consequence we weren’t sure what things were going to be like when we arrived in Nice.

G20 protest poster (we assume) seen earlier in Avignon.

We exited from the train station in Nice to find the environs to be a hellish warzone. This was nothing to do with the G20 protestors, however, it was just the nature of the place. Alcoholics, gypsies, and alcoholic gypsies were sprawled in clumps over the pavement while all around shops sold crappy souvenirs and kebabs, and little of any merit was to be beheld.

Never that happy to find that our destination was a dump, we grumpily dragged our luggage into the centre of town and checked in to our Ibis hotel. We then walked out to the Musee Marc Chagall. Chagall was a Russian-born painter who did a lot of religious paintings featuring simple, graceful figures painted in luminous colours. It was charming, in a childlike sort of way. The museum wasn’t very large, however, and we ended up churning through 9.50 of entrance fee in 20 minutes. The quality of the exhibits was high, but it would have been good if there were more of them.

A daubing by Marc Chagall.

We caught a bus further up the hill and visited the Matisse Museum. This institution contained a few Matisse paintings, a few of his coloured paper collages and a lot of pencil studies for paintings, as well as some furniture he used to have and other artefacts.

After being to a few museums dedicated to a single artist we have become a bit wary of them. The issue is largely to do with how representative the art on offer is. If the artist was prolific (e.g. Magritte) or worked in a medium where pieces can be easily replicated (eg Escher with his lithographs or Rodin with his bronzes) all should be well. With Matisse, however, all his good stuff is in the best museums around the world, and this museum, although dedicated to him, is left only with interesting scraps, and is therefore unsatisfying. Happily the museum was free, so we have absolutely no grounds for complaint. Also, the toilet was good.

After this we walked around some gardens and surveyed the city from a lookout. We also ventured into a posh cemetary where we were promised Matisse’s grave, but we couldn’t manage to find it. Still, the crypts of other great and good families of Nice were pretty impressive.

At dusk we caught a bus down the hill and visited a Japanese restaurant our guidebook had recommended us. Although everything was done up in a Japanese style there were puzzling gaps in the menu and the staff were a bit surly. Sally explained this: the restaurant was run by Vietnamese; in fact every restaurant be it Chinese or Japanese or Thai or Vietnamese seemed to be Vietnamese-owned/operated. There’s a similar phenomenon in Wellington, where many Japanese restaurants are owned and (at least partially) staffed by Chinese. In any event we had a rather unsatisfactory meal, and left vowing to give the asian meals a rest for a while.

After dinner we strolled about the main avenue. The centre of town was a bit more pleasant than around the train station. There were police everywhere; apparently 15,000 gendarmes were in operation for the G20 conference and it seemed a good number of those were in Nice. Of protestors themselves, there was no sign whatsoever. Disappointingly.

Back in our hotel room we watched on BBC World the spectacular self destruction of Greek PM George Papandreou, who affronted the EU by taking the compromise they’d carefully stitched together to spare a Greek default and announced he’d be putting it to the Greek people for them to approve. Until then they hadn’t had any choice in the matter, and even now the choice was between accepting the package and financial oblivion.

There was frenzied journalistic speculation it was all internal Greek political brinkmanship, but it seemed to me like upping the ante from tragedy to comedy (both Greek inventions, of course). The main outcome of all these shenanigans was that the G20 junket was looking likely to be dominated by Greece and its hilarious hijinks.

The next morning we set out for Antibes, about half way between Nice and Cannes. It was 20 minutes by slow, slow train, and we were able to observe police stationed on every overbridge. At one point we saw a convoy of police cars and a big black car with the Italian flag fluttering off it and we fancied that perhaps that great Italian lothario Silvio Berlusconi might be on board, but who knows?

Antibes is a charming enough little fishing village that has been transformed into a giant marina for rich boys’ boats. Amusingly the local real estate agents post pictures of yachts rather than houses (does this happen in Auckland??). We wandered around idly and attempted to get near a giant statue of a nomad made up of letters, but access was locked off.

It’s for sale, if you’re interested.

We next visited the Antibes marche, or market hall - in this case a marquis over stalls selling veggies, spices, cheeses and other French comestibles. Sally pointed out that she had this romantic notion about these markets, but when we actually visited them she found nothing she could practically use and/or wanted to buy. Fancy a string of onions?

We eventually reached our destination, a Picasso museum. This would be the third such museum we’d visited. After the disappointment of the Matisse Museum the previous day I was a bit suspicious that this museum wouldn’t be that good - indeed the previous Picasso Museums we’d visited hadn’t been that great either. The  works at this museum were largely created by the Picasso in Antibes over a short period in 1946. At this time he was in a cheerful mood on account of the War being over, and the subject matter of the paintings on offer were chiefly fish and fauns and satyrs and suchlike. There was also some ceramics, which were gaily painted. It was all rather jolly.

Equally as interesting as the artwork was the museum itself, an imposing stone building almost flush against the water’s edge. The day we visited was overcast and the wind was howling in, and we looked out windows at a sea fair frothing over. As you can imagine, it felt much like being at home, and I was rather taken with the overall vibe.

Rather abruptly at 12:00 the museum closed for two hours. Those French and their two hour lunch breaks! We’d seen all the Picasso works so we weren’t unduly outraged. We weren’t sure what the Japanese G20 delegates who had just turned up would have made of it though.

We surveyed the town for a restaurant and settled on a Italian place. We went all out on the three course meal, and had rather a good time. Then we sauntered back up the windy hill to the train station, stopping now and then to admire the models in the boat builders’ offices. Then we were on a train and heading west.

Our destination was Monaco, the famed site of a rally, a grand prix, an outrageous tax haven, a casino, and a second rate royal family. You can be sure that I have never in my life had any interest in visiting Monaco, but Sally was keen, and well, we were in the area…

The train station was an impressive underground lair, but soon we were out among the amusement park rides near the marina. The marina itself proved to contain a number of ridiculous boats. It is odd that while I don’t have a nautical bone in my body, I am attracted to the romance of having a luxury boat, just to be able to live on it. Indeed if I had one I doubt I’d ever leave shore. I’d just hang out there.

From the shore we looked back up the hill at Monaco’s theatre-like bowl. It was a giant cascade of terraces hosting ghastly luxury high-rise apartment blocks. It was an odd sensation looking over the place, because it was like being in a James Bond film, or a lower-grade action flick, perhaps something by Luc Besson, possibly starring Jason Statham. Turn round to the marina though, and suddenly we were in a John Woo production, possibly starring Chow Yun Fat as Tequila, the cop who breaks all the rules. In any event, you couldn’t call Monaco subdued.

Monaco: just like Wellington, really.

Sally makes a friend.

We kept to the shoreline and ended up face to face with the imposing Oceanographic Institute, which (we found out later) was at one point headed by Jacques Cousteau. We got an elevator up the hill, walked around the old town, stood outside the palace, and puzzled over the dreadful uniforms of the palace guards. We then decided that a visit to the casino over at Monte Carlo would probably be a waste of our time, so we opted to return to the train station and head back to Nice.

That evening we had a further look around the centre of town, and had a nice meal at a restaurant where we were the sole diners. It was a bit unnerving, but the proprietress was nice enough and there was Mozart and plenty of him over the speakers. There was a tranquil feeling of all-was-wellness. When we settled the bill the owner insisted we must not tip her as we should save our money for ourselves. They’re a funny bunch, the French: some won’t give you the time of day, and some are extraordinarily friendly and generous.

The next morning we were due to leave Nice but we realised we’d rather neglected the best part of Nice itself: the waterfront and the famous Promenade des Anglais. We had a little bit of time and we scooted down past the clumps of armoured police and along the impressive Place Masséna, with its fruity sculptural group of Apollo with horse hair flanked by campy wing-helmeted blokes and their horses/cattle. We crossed the road past one of those giant rust iron sculptures that are de rigeur these days, and made it to the beach. The water was azure, as advertised, though it was quite rough, and rain was beginning to fall. It’s unfortunate that all the times we had seen the Riviera shore up close (in Antibes, Monaco, and now Nice) it was high tide. What we could see of the beaches though was quite stoney, a far cry from what you imagine - golden beaches laced with lithe topless beauties…

Fruity.

We trudged back to our hotel to collect our baggage, and the rain got going in earnest. We marched back to the station and it was fair pelting down. We mounted the train, banished our coats to the luggage rack, and settled in for 2.5 hours’ travel back to Marseille. The most notable part of this trip was how sauna-like our carriage became as everyone’s wet clothing emitted steam and train’s heaters remained locked. It was late teens temperatures outside so it was a bit tropical by the end of the trip - so much so that we had to take refuge out the back by the toilet. It’s testimont to how bad conditions were in the carriage that we preferred the urine and cigarette stench of the toilet instead.     
Our second trip was to Carcassonne, a town nearish the Spanish border famed for its castle. This ride took about 4.5 hours. The carriage was at least a reasonable temperature, but it was a bit wearying. The countryside remained pretty dry, with grapes the main crop. It was interesting to discover the variety of grape vines cultivated, ranging from big tree-like vines to spindly little vines that you could scarcely imagine being able to muster a single grape.

At stages the rain was quite torrential and there was even a bit more lightning. I hadn’t really given much consideration that late autumn might be a bit of a problem weather-wise. Still, choosing between rain and torrential torrents of tourists, and I’ll take the rain any time.

Our train was half an hour late arriving, and we got to Carcassonne after dark. We caught a bus up the hill to the castle, and ventured in, as our hotel was inside. From this you might imagine we were in some grand keep, but actually the area within the castle walls is quite large and accommodates numerous elderly but non-military buildings. In one of these we spent the night, in a room on the top floor.

Sally had been ill now for several days (in fact she hadn’t really been right since we arrived in Germany). The next morning I went out and raided a chemist for cough syrup, flu tablets, and tissues. After vigorous application of these medicines Sally was well enough to venture out.

The castle city was as interesting as it sounded, although the souvenir shops took the gloss off a bit. The main part of the castle was 13.50 to get in, and we’d been advised it wasn’t worth the money. Instead we wandered around the defensive walls and cobbles and soaked up as much mediaeavalism as we could. It wasn’t too bad (especially the magnificent old church), but the weather was still a bit rough and we realised that we’d been in France for a week and only seen sun in Avignon. Indeed now 5 weeks in we were starting to tire a bit.

La Cite in Carcassone: buttressed.

We had a nice dinner in a restaurant within the castle walls. Sally realised that we hadn’t had any wine in France so we ordered up half a litre of house white. Sally went easy on the vino for various reasons so I was left to tackle the lion’s share. I can hold a half pint of beer a bit better than I used to, but I’m out of practice with wine and didn’t so much walk out of the restaurant but cheerfully float.

The next morning just after 7am, in darkness and yet more rain we left the castle for the train station and made our way out of Carcassonne. This concluded our French travels. It might be the time of year but we didn’t find the south of France very glamorous at all - generally grubby and often frustrating. On the upside, it was always fascinating, and we got a few good laughs in.