France
Our journey into France was split into two trips, one as we
made our way down the west and into the north west of Spain, and the other
coming up from the south east and heading via the east into Geneva. We decided
to write it in one go to save covering it twice.
Our trip down the west was really very brief as we were trying to get to boom in
Portugal as quickly as we could. We got the ferry from Dover to Calais late at
night, docking in at Calais at around 11pm. Which meant the first time I had to
drive on the right hand side of the road it was pitch black and I was thrust
straight onto busy motorways full of haulage trucks and cars thundering along
at 130 km/h (the speed limit on freeways in France!) It was a suitably
terrifying and traumatic experience and I was exceedingly glad to pull into an
aire about 30km south of Calais.
I must explain at
this point that the French have this awesome system set up especially for people
travelling in motorhomes, called “aires”. An ‘Aire’ is essentially a spot where
motorhomes can pull over for the night for free. These vary in size, location
and facilities. Ranging from just a gravel car park on the side of a minor road
with a couple of bins, to huge great service stations on the toll roads with 24
hour access to toilets, showers, drinking water, sewerage for camper toilets,
playgrounds for kids and sometimes even wifi and electric hook-up. All for free
(well, sometimes you have to pay for the showers and electric hookup but
usually only a couple of euros). At first I was astounded to hear about this
system coming from England where nothing is for free and anyone in a campervan
is branded a pikey and seen as a plague on the landscape. When I first brought
my camper I tried to pull over in one of the larger service stations on the M6
on my way back down from Scotland, thinking that I could sneak a few hours
sleep hidden among the truck drivers. But it turns out the entire car park
was covered by security cameras that take your license plate details as you
enter and unless you have paid to park your vehicle there you will be
automatically issued an 80 pound fine if your vehicle is parked on the property
for more than two hours. This is a widespread occurrence now in England, people
don’t want to think that anyone is getting something for nothing, not even car
parking, so they have installed hi-tech monitoring systems to penalize anyone
stepping out of line. Which Andi and I found out the hard way in Sterling in
Scotland, after we were issued an automatic fine for parking in a Waitrose car
park, for ten minutes more than the allocated time as we looked around the
castle there. We later did some research and found out that these fines have absolutely
no legal justification whatsoever and if you continually write letters of
protest in reply to any letter they send then they have no option but to cancel
the fine. You do have to reply to their letters though or the fine will get
passed over to a debt collection agency and eventually end up in court where
you cannot do anything about it and will be required to pay a penalty. There
are even lawyers out there who will do this for you for substantially less than
the fine. We had no option but to instigate one of these lawyers as we were on
the road and couldn’t get a hold of the letters to reply to them. It cost us 16
pounds and our fine was cancelled. So if anyone reading this has been issued a
parking fine by a company such as “parking eye”, DON’T LET THESE BASTARDS TAKE
YOUR MONEY. You can save yourself the entire fine for just the cost of a few
postage stamps, look it up online, there’s even template letters on there you
can send them if you have the time.
Sorry, about that
slight sidetrack, I believe I was talking about the aires system in France and
how surprised I was that such a system exists. There is even a free app for
your phone that will tell you exactly where they are all located. So armed with
this app on our phone we drove for an hour or so into the darkness from Calais and
camped up for the night alongside a few other campervans for free.
What definitely
wasn’t for free in France however were the roads. For those that don’t know, France
(and indeed pretty much all of Europe apart from England, Germany and Sweden)
have an extensive system of toll roads which have to be paid for at toll booths
or with electronic tags. These roads cover all of the main highways and if you
don’t take them you have a rather long and roundabout route through many small
towns and villages ahead. But if you do take them you will end up spending
roughly the same price on tolls as you will on fuel. At times it can be a bit
of a conundrum which is the lesser evil. I guess the way I could illustrate it
to people from England would be to ask you to drive from Norwich to London, but
if you use the A11 and M11 it will cost you an extra 20 quid. At first this
might seem outrageous and you would much rather escape the toll and go on other
routes instead, but then take a minute to think about exactly how you would
navigate the journey to London from Norwich without using those roads. It will
take you almost twice as long, and probably end up costing the same anyway with
the extra fuel you would use going through all those small towns and villages,
not to mention you would hardly be able to go a direct route. I guess it all
balances out though and a lot of the money for these aires comes directly from
the toll roads, but we largely chose to drive without using the tolls. You end
up seeing so much more of the country that way anyway. You can hardly stop off
at a bakery for a fresh croissant and a coffee in some charming little country
town in the Dordogne if you are blasting along the toll road at 130km/h. At
some points we had no option but to use toll roads though, especially on the
journey down through France as we were a little pressed for time. To put it into perspective just try to
imagine that you need to get from Calais in the north east of France to san
Sebastian just over the border in the south west, a journey of well over 1000km
and roughly the distance from Plymouth in Cornwall to Aberdeen in eastern
Scotland, without using any motorways or major roads, and you need to do this
journey in just 3 days in order to be at a psytrance festival haf way down
Portugal on the right day, then you have a rough image of the journey we were
trying to accomplish here. There wasn’t a lot of time for sightseeing in other
words. Obviously those reading this from Australia won’t really be able to
appreciate the journey I’ve just described as the road network in Australia is
a very different animal from that in western Europe. 1000km might not sound
like a lot in 3 days (after all Andi and I managed to cover roughly 800 a day
on our trip across the Nullarbor), but where as in Australia you have a
massive, sprawling city that covers about 75km from one side to the other, you
might then get 2 large towns and 3 or 4 small ones over the next 1000km or so until the next massive, sprawling city. In Europe there is a large town/ city/
village/ general settlement of some kind literally every 10-20km, each with
their own set of roundabouts, traffic lights, one way systems and other such
obstacles to slow down your progress. Not to mention that a fair few of these
places might actually have something you want to see in them as well.
So the first day we
drove pretty much exclusively on non-toll roads and it was very slow going. Our
aim was to get roughly in the region of Tours and the Loire valley in order to
see a French chateaux the next day. The Loire valley is known as the chateaux
region, 200km or so south west of Paris, and is where princes, dukes and
notable nobles established their country estates and towering renaissance
palaces. The whole valley is full of some of the most extravagant and
ostentatious architecture in the world today and the entire area is now classified
as a Unesco world heritage site. We
chose to look around the fabulous 16th century chateaux at
villandry. Built in 1536, it was the last of the great renaissance chateaux
constructed along this valley. It was originally built by Jean Le Breton who
was, rather ironically, the finance minister for France at the time (what a stringent
use of tax payers money it was too). It
remained in his family for the next 200 years until it was purchased by the
Maruis de Castellane, the kings ambassador, who redesigned and refurnished the
inside of the property to 19th century standards, which is largely
what is seen on the inside today. He also made the rather rash decision of
destroying the entire French style gardens and replacing them with an English
style park all around the property. This move was carefully undone however by the
next owner, Joachim Carvallo, who was a brilliant scientist working alongside
the noble prize winner Professor Richet. Joachim brought the property in 1906
and gave up his career in science to devote himself entirely to restoring the
gardens to their former renaissance glory. He heavily researched French
renaissance styling and carried out archaeological surveys on the property to
ascertain how the gardens would have looked. Together with his wife he also
amassed a large collection of 17th century Spanish art, only a fraction
of which remains in the chateaux today as it was unfortunately broken up by
inheritance.
Had we read the
booklets they handed us upon entering the grounds we would have seen they
recommend touring the inside of the chateaux first before making your way into
the gardens, we just rushed straight to the gardens however but I feel that the
gardens are the more spectacular item on show here so shall start with photos
from the chateaux instead. Remember, this was built by the French finance
minister using tax payers money, makes the modern day scandal of MPs claiming
the odd cooked breakfast at the tax payers expense seem a little insignificant:
The inside was just as lavish:
We now move onto
the gardens, carefully remodelled by the current owners grandfather when he
brought the property in 1906. It now takes a team of gardeners, year round
devotion to maintain them to their current standard. Apparently there is 54km
of box hedging! The first pictures here
are taken from the vegetable garden, a lot of what you can see is edible, even
the trees are fruit bearing trees of various sorts. There is of course the
occasional flower or rose bush to add a bit of colour, but the majority can be
eaten, and is in fact used in the kitchens and cafe at the chateaux:
The rest of these pictures are taken from around the
remainder of the gardens, but aren’t necessarily edible:
I just had to add this one last photo which was taken just
over the road from the chateaux and right next to the aire we camped in the
night before. It is essentially a large vending machine, but instead of a large
selection of brightly packaged packets containing pretty much just pure sugar
in a slightly different receipe, each doorway contained some kind of fresh
local produce. It might be half a dozen free range eggs, a freshly made fruit
juice, a kilo of apples, a homemade chutney, a punnet of strawberries, or any
number of other fresh goodies, all from farms and orchards in the village or
surrounding area. You just put your money in, pressed the number box you wanted
and the door swung open. I thought it was a fantastic idea anyway, and
thoroughly hope to see more of this kind of thing:
After Villandry we made our way south and eventually stopped
for the night at a property belonging to the father of a friend of mine named Sol
whom I met and lived with in New Zealand. As we had posted on Facebook that we
were crossing into France a couple of days before he answered our post
informing us that him and his family were staying there for the week and we
would be more than welcome to come and join them. The joys of Facebook hey,
everyone knows exactly what you’re doing
and where you’re going which does have its upsides when travelling.
Sol’s dad had
brought an old barn and farmhouse in a tiny little village called Saint Sornin
and is in the slow process of doing it all up and making it into a holiday/
retirement home. Unfortunately I didn’t take photos but it’s a really nice plot
of land on top of a hill with long reaching views over the surrounding countryside. We sat down
and had dinner with his family and drank some kind of homemade French wine that
tasted a little like port but was apparently brewed up by some crazy French guy
who lives a few houses down. It tasted pretty good. Unfortunately we were again
on a bit of tight time schedule and left Sol and his family the next afternoon
and crossed over the border into Spain and San Sebastian that night.
We arrived back in
France just over 3 weeks later via the south east and spent our first night in
an aire near a little city called Avignon. We made the decision to go and see Avignon
purely because we had a highly amusing conversation with a 76 year old
Englishman who approached us at a campsite in Spain by sticking his head
through our door as we were cooking dinner and asking in a thick west-country
accent “where’s the cold beers at then? You got any cold beer in here?” he then
sat down on the floor of our van and began to tell us pretty much his whole
life story; from his service in the Airforce in Singapore and Kenya, all about
his 3 kids and 9 grandkids, stories from driving around Europe as a pensioner
and the fact they wouldn’t let him tow a caravan in France anymore because he
was too old, and plenty of mentions about his wife not letting him drink enough
beer and his fridge running out of gas so his beer was no longer cold enough.
But somewhere in amongst his ramblings was the very strong recommendation that
we go and see the city of Avignon on our way through towards Switzerland. So we took the advice of this rather pickled
pensioner and gave Avignon a look.
The small but
picturesque city of Avignon sits on the banks of the river Rhone in southern France,
with the central portion sitting inside some immaculately well preserved 14th
century stone ramparts which surround the entire inner city along with the
equally well preserved Palais de Papes, built around 1310 to house Pope Clement
V when he abandoned Rome and settled in Avignon. It became the seat of papal
power for the next 70 years until the seat finally returned to the Vatican. The
whole of the city inside these walls is a Unesco world heritage centre and retains
a large amount of its historic feel. Obviously modernisations have been made
since the 1300’s, but there is still plenty of very pretty architecture to gawp
at and countless little lanes and cobbled streets to get yourself lost down on
a bicycle:
The other point of interest in Avignon is the “Pont
d’avignon”, a stone bridge which was built across the Rhone in 1185 and rebuilt
several times before all but 4 of its sections were washed away in the
mid-1600s, never to be replaced again. The rest of the bridge still stands to
this day and is a major tourist attraction:
Next up on our journey through France was the city of
Grenoble, the gateway city to the French Alps. Its proximity to the Alps is all
too obvious, nestled in between two mountainous national parks on the north and
south, and with large hills rising straight out of the Drac river to its
immediate west it is a wonder that the city itself has found such a flat plain
to populate. In all honesty, we didn’t really feel too attached to Grenoble
itself. There didn’t seem to be anything extra special about its centre. Don’t
get me wrong, there was nothing wrong with it, but it didn’t seem to have the
instant appeal of the last few cities we had visited. The location was of
course stunning, and there was a cable car over the Drac river to the top of
the nearby mountain which was an awesome location for a spot of lunch
overlooking the city, but even with the cable car ride and mountain top lunch
it only held our attention for half a day:
Our next stop however, we both instantly fell in love with;
Annecy. Annecy is about 80km further north east than Grenoble and is only 20km
from the Swiss border. It sits beside one of the cleanest and purest lakes in
the world, lac d’Annecy. The water is a lush transparent turquoise, we both had
to have a swim and it was like swimming in bottled mineral water, I’ve never
swam in water quite like it. It was surprisingly warm too considering this is
now very much Alps territory:
The water leaves the
lake and passes through the medieval old town of Annecy via an ancient canal
system, still just as clear and turquoise as the lake itself. The canals are
lined with restaurants, bars and high class delicatessens and chocolate shops.
It was absolute bliss just wandering aimlessly around its narrow streets and
canals on a warm summers evening:
I guess what the
French are famed for more than anything else is a love and passion for fine
food. We definitely found this to be the case. In France if you want to be
labelled as a baker it’s not quite as simple as buying your own bread oven and away you go. There
are extremely strict regulations in France on what constitutes “bread”; you
have to abide by certain fat contents, moisture contents, yeast contents, sugar
contents, the bread itself must be prepared and cooked from scratch on the
premises it is being sold at, or if brought at a market it must be sold by the
person who baked it, and it goes without saying that artificial preservatives, bleaches,
flavourings, or emulsifiers are a big no-no. You can still go into any
supermarket and buy yourself a loaf of highly treated, artificially whitened
and heavily preserved, sugary long life bread which will stay in roughly the
same condition if left out on the workbench for a week and a half if you so
wish. But if a place calls itself a bakery, then you can rest assured that the most stringent quality
controls are in place. As a result the bread you buy in these places tastes
better than any bread you will have tried before, but will go stale if left
uneaten until the next morning. In England if your bread goes stale within a
day you would probably take it back and complain, but in France this just means
that you have brought good bread. Most decent cafes or sandwich shops that do
not make their own bread will have it delivered fresh several times in a single
day, and some will even have a little clock on the back wall telling you the
exact time when the next fresh batch will be delivered, just in case you are
that fanatical about the freshness of your bread that it still has to be warm
out of the oven. As stereotypical a scene as it is, it was a common sight to
see people biking around little country towns in France with a single baguette
sticking out the front basket of their bicycle. Bread is not something that you
buy and keep in a cupboard, it is something that is eaten within an hour of
being created. They take their food very seriously in France.
It goes without
saying that this care for good food does not end with bread, certainly anything
you buy from a bakery will be just as fresh and high quality, the croissants
you buy in these places are equally as impressive, light and airy but at the
same time slightly crispy on the outside and soft and delicate on the inside,
they seem to dissolve in your mouth. Cheese is also a very serious business,
with well over 500 varieties produced in France, from classics like Brie and
Camembert to local varieties only available in regions or even single shops.
These cheeses are the perfect complement to that loaf of very high quality
bread you’ve just brought. We both love a good blue cheese, nothing like a nice
bit of mould on your cheese to increase the flavour. But we saw cheeses in
little market stalls which were literally covered in a grey fur. There were
actual hairs, some almost a centimetre long, sprouting from these cheeses, you
couldn’t even see the white or yellow of the cheese itself, just a complete
covering of grey, furry mould. This was even a little off-putting to me, and I’m
usually keen to try anything. We got one of the not-so mouldy ones, which still
had a covering of grey mould although the hairs weren’t quite as long and you
could see glimpses of cheese underneath. It was one of the most flavoursome
cheeses I’ve ever eaten. Much like the deli-meats you get in continental Europe
which have been hanging and curing for three years and have moulds growing on
the outside, the flavours have been so concentrated over time that if you can
bring yourself to put food with lumps of living fungus growing on it into your
mouth then you are rewarded with the most delicious flavours you will ever come
across.
On our travels we
have mainly lived very cheaply and brought food from local markets and cooked
ourselves in the van. We have always tried to buy local specialities where
possible, and frequently visit bakeries on the road in every country where a
cheap, but locally prepared and instant snack can be brought. But in every
country we have visited we have made the effort to go out for at least one
evening meal in a restaurant that looks as “local” as we can find. If the menu
isn’t written in English, that’s a good start. And if its written in chalk on a
blackboard rather than on a printed menu, then thats even better. Obviously
deciphering a foreign menu takes time and patience, but armed with google
translate or a language dictionary, this is the best way to find out what the
true locals eat in these places, and something Andi and I have both enjoyed. We decided to go out for our meal in France
in Annecy and spent at least an hour (including sitting down for a beer in two
places to suss them out) wandering around Annecy looking for the perfect place.
We eventually found a place that fitted the bill. Even though it was empty and
the place next door was packed, it seemed the place next door was full of
American tourists, and served a lot of pizza. We went for the much smaller
French looking place with menus written on little individual blackboards placed
on each table. It turned out to be a great decision, and in all honesty, the
best tasting meal I’ve ever had in my life. I’ve never been to fine dining
restaurants where as much effort is put into the presentation of the food as it
is into the actual cooking of it, as I’ve never been able to justify the cost
in my eyes. But Andi has eaten at Vue du Monde, which is a very exclusive and
expensive restaurant in Melbourne, serving fine French food, and she claimed
the flavours here to be equal to anything served there, but at about an 8th
of the cost. It seems that what we would refer to as “fine dining” in England
or Australia and pay through the nose for, is just what the French would call
“food”. There is a reason why nearly every fine dining restaurant the world
over bases its menus on French cooking. They really know how to cook.
The other thing
that the French are supposedly infamous for is rudeness and arrogance towards
tourists, particularly in the service industry. Once upon a time I might have
thought that this was just a vicious and unjust stereotype perpetrated by the
English simply because they did not like the French. But I’m just going to
include this little piece of information, as it is my all time favourite story
about the French, which I learnt from the good man Stephen Fry (legend),
through one of my favourite TV shows, Q.I: It turns out there exists a condition
called the “Paris syndrome”. The Japanese have a slight obsession with France
and particularly Paris it would seem. They view Paris as the absolute epicentre
of worldwide culture, class and that certain “Je nais se quoi”. As a result thousands of
Japanese tourists flock to Paris every year to revel in its gloriously chic
atmosphere and cultural superiority. Unfortunately what they find when they get
there is a little different to the magical fairy tale image they have concocted.
It turns out the French are notoriously rascist, and particularly hate the Japanese
for some reason. The poor Japanese tourists are so shocked by the rude,
arrogant, discriminate nature of the French waiters, taxi drivers and general
service industry members, who have been known to shout, swear and even spit at
the terrified Japanese, that they go into an acute form of shock, known as “Paris
syndrome”. I promise you I’m not making any of this up, look it up if you so
wish, there is a genuine 24 hour help centre set up in Paris simply to guide
unsuspecting Japanese tourists through their traumatic time in Paris, and
another centre in Tokyo which offers counselling to any that are still
suffering from some kind of “post traumatic Paris syndrome” upon their return.
I find this absolutely hilarious, but thankfully we encountered nothing like
this in France (although we never went to Paris; things may be different there),
on the contrary we found the French to be warm and welcoming and would always
smile at our feeble attempts to decipher menus and ask for things in French
before correcting us and helping in
English. I think this is the key to keeping the locals amiable, at least try to
converse in their native language, you are in their country after all. I know
that English has effectively become the international language, but if you go
into a fine French patisserie and ask in broad English for a “bacon butty”,
only to find the French baker look at you in confusion, if you then attempt to
order the exact same thing but in a much slower, louder form of English, you
are highly likely to find your food spat in. Not to mention a rather cold and
unwelcoming service.
We only really
intended to skip through France on the way into other countries on our travels
but I would really like to go back and experience more of it. It was such an
easy country to travel around in with its widespread system of aires and fine
fresh foods on every corner. I could easily have spent a few months travelling
only around France, there’s a lot to see. Plus I must admit I have a slight admiration of the French as a whole. They seem to have adopted a government
which actually puts the interests and welfare of its people before its corporations, they are even ruled by the French socialist party at the moment. I know
socialism is seen as a bit of dirty word in the “west”, thanks largely to the
American propaganda machine which has labelled the socialists (and their more
extreme cousins the communists) as a deadly threat to our way of life and the “free
world”. I also acknowledge that any attempts to create a truly “equal”
socialist society, has resulted in some of the most brutally oppressive and
severely totalitarian regimes that this world has ever known. But I put it out
there that a little bit of socialism isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Obviously
the French government isn’t a compete socialist society, but is rather slightly
more socialist than the neo-capitalist, corporate controlled governments that
we seem to have running England and America (and much more recently Australia
now that that absolute cretin Tony Abbot has taken to the helm and is steering
Australia at full speed into a privatised, extorted and corporately owned business
where if you want any kind of social service you’re going to have to pay for
it. But it’s ok, at least we’ll all have “family values”). After all it is the
Americans, in their infinite wisdom, that refer to the NHS and other free
healthcare systems as “socialist healthcare”, and we all know what a fucking
catastrophe their idea of healthcare is, one that if you don’t have the money
or insurance then you may as well just die quietly on the street outside the
hospital. I think that the French have got the right idea of taking an interest
in their citizens first (plus I think their citizens are some of the first to take to the streets and tell them if they dont think their government is taking enough of an interest in them). The government in power at the moment won a landslide victory
with their major policies being to increase tax on corporations and salaries
over 1million Euros and increase the minimum wage. They have long had
restrictions in place on the working week, stipulating that nobody can be
forced to work over 35 hours per week if they do not want to, but interestingly
get paid for 38 hours of work. Obviously if you are a large business owner then
France would be a bit of a headache to do business in, but for the everyday
person life is pretty good in France. They seem to value quality of life far
over making large sums of money, and I think this is where their fanaticism for
quality food comes from. They don’t want people to eat mass produced garbage,
pumped full of chemicals to keep it looking good and lasting for longer so that
large food companies can keep it on shelves for longer, sell more and make
higher profits. They would rather that the everyday person can get hold of
decent, healthy, wholesome food, made by small scale local businesses and as a
result have very tight restrictions on what passes for “food”. Also the whole
aire system has been set up at great expense (albeit probably funded largely by
tolls) by the government as they realise that their own people like to travel
around in campervans so they think to themselves “how can we make their life
easier?”, rather than the English school of thought “how can we get money out
of them for this?”. I guess in the same way that our healthcare system could be
branded as socialist healthcare, the aire system could be branded as “socialist
camping.” Its simply free camping and facilities that have been provided by the
state, a very novel and decidedly communist idea.
