Around France with Family and Friends

Europe » France
October 17th 2012

Published: October 17th 2012

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flying kiwis

Sacre Coeur in Montmartre

gloriously beautiful sitting proudly on its hilltop overlooking the city

France will be remembered for relatives and friends.

After arriving in Paris by Eurostar, which didn’t quite live up to its promise of luxury travel, we did four days solid walking around the City of Light.

Central Paris is beautiful, designed in the late 19^th C by M. Haussemann so all buildings are the same colour, style and height with a grid and diagonal street design. BUT this does get confusing when you’re trying to work out where you are, as street corners look very similar!

The Seine is the ideal reference point – serene, restrained, lined with historic monuments. Take a walk along the Seine and across its bridges to breathe the history of Paris.

This time we also did the Pompidou Centre – not an attractive building, but housing the best of 20^th + 21^st century art. More Kandinskys than you could shake a stick at, Picasso, Matisse, all the usual suspects.

A temporary exhibition of Gerhard Richter provided that special art gallery pleasure – an artist who we didn’t know and found fascinating.

Paris is art and food…we accidentally came across a restaurant called Bouillon Chartier, blundered in and found

The right bank

perfect for a peaceful walk along the Seine

out it’s a Paris institution and we were lucky to get a table along with four Germans who were slightly surprised we were seated beside them. It was so good we went back again the next night.

Maybe it was a right bank/left bank thing, but we felt Paris had improved in a couple of basic but très important ways since we were there in 2000.

There was a marked decrease in merde de chien (excuse any incorrect French – the netbook doesn’t run to le spellcheck Française) which made walking on pavement and simultaneously looking at beautiful buildings safer. We even saw one Frenchman pick up after his dog – très bien!

The streets seemed cleaner (we were woken each morning by the cleaning truck) although the French still smoke like trains and flick their buts anywhere. There were nice, automatic, FREE! public toilets - better than London where you have to have “the knowledge” of the few and far between public conveniences.

The nicest thing was that people seemed nicer – in hotels and cafés they seemed happier to speak in English and looked less likely to spit on your shoes

La Tour Eiffel

just from the outside this time, but always beautiful

if you couldn’t parle Française.

We picked up a leased Peugeot and proceeded to drive around France on the wrong side of the road. I’m convinced it’s just as scary for me as for Rhys – I’m on the side where there should be a steering wheel, but instead there is a ditch I’m sure we’re about to run into.

Our first drive was to near Le Havre to meet cousin Michel and his wife Martine. I’d met Michel once when I was young before we left for NZ, so it was wonderful to be treated like honoured guests, fed and wined with delicious local fare and taken on guided tours of the local beauty spots – check out the pics of Etretat.

We then made our way down to Bordeaux where Michel’s sister Edith lives – who I’d also met when in England.

Again the VIP treatment, including a tour of a Margaux region winery that taught us a lot about French wine making and the traditions they have to work within, although they are embracing new world methods such as stainless steel vats.

We had a wonderful afternoon driving

The Centre Pompidou

Paris' ‘inside-out’ contemporary art gallery

through premier wine country in Edith’s little Peugeot with the roof down!

On our way south we had a week in the Dordogne valley, near the famous Lasceaux caves with 17,000 year old prehistoric rock paintings. But Michel had alerted me to the fact that you can’t see the actual cave paintings – just reproductions made in the 1960’s on the walls of a nearby cave. A facsimile.

Well, I’m not into copies, so we looked for an actual cave to view art from the earliest artists ever known.

Not prepared to queue for an hour outside Le Font du Gaume to possibly get a ticket for that day (the cave drawing industry seems a little over-hyped… maybe because all the caves are privately owned) we settled for the Grotte (cave) de Rouffignac up another valley, where you travel for a kilometre into the 8km long cave network on an electric train, which sounds kitch, but considering the uneven surface and pitch dark, I found considerably comforting.

You pass claw marks on the cave walls and hibernation dens made by prehistoric bears, which were the first inhabitants of the caves, then see amazingly beautifully

Wassily Kandinsky

Containing many wonderful works such as this

drawn animals such as mammoths, horses, bison, ibex, and hairy rhinoceros, drawn with ‘crayons’ of manganese on the walls and ceiling of the cave.

Estimated at 14,000 years old, there is also graffiti from 16^th century cave explorers, but as they didn’t know what a mammoth was, they ignored the art works till 1956 when the cave was officially investigated.

The most beautiful and impressive drawing in Rouffignac is a series of mammoths, lined up head to head in an obvious frieze of repeating motifs. Prehistoric interior design. Brilliant.

The commentary by the tour guide was in French but we had an ipod type translation. Something I notice in France is the passion when art is spoken about. These cave men are definitely considered artists – the guide was speaking and gesticulating wildly about composition, delicacy of interpretation and technical skill. Art is something everyone should appreciate, whether done 14,000 years ago or today.

No photos of the cave trip as photography is banned…you’d think that rock drawings would be out of copy write after 14,000years…

The Les Eyzies area where we were staying is crammed full of fascinating places - well, let me re-phrase

centre Pompidou

Even the café is a work of art

that…fascinating if you are fascinated by pre-history, rock art and geology. There is the ultra-modern PIP - prehistory welcome centre, built in 2010 in to showcase 400,000 years of human history, including 15 UNESCO World Heritage sites.

Cro-Magnon man was the term first used for the prehistoric skeleton found in the Cro-Magnon rock shelter in Les Eyzies, and has now used to describe Homo sapiens sapiens or modern man who arrived and settled in Europe in the Upper Palaeolithic period between 40,000 and 10,000 years ago. (yes, I got that off the brochure).

Rivers have carved the landscape in the Dordogne, so we thought we’d better do the other main tourist thing here and hire a canoe to float downstream while 10 centuries of history glide past.

The canoe brochure had all manner of conditions – must be able to swim etc (er…hem!) but our safety instructions consisted of being deposited 14km upstream in a dented, rusty old van by a non-English speaking old guy in a grubby t-shirt who leapt out of the van without a word, ran down to the river, hauled a canoe across the sand and waved us goodbye.

We did have

The madness of Montmartre

artists peddling caricatures in the middle of the street

life jackets and as the Dordogne is only waist high in most places I wasn’t too concerned, my only problem was Rhys yelling, “paddle - paddle!” all the time when all I wanted to do was take photos of the gorgeous medieval hill villages floating past.

Next was a change of scene to the south of France, near Montpellier, at a timeshare hotel complex that seemed to be rather the worse for wear from the recession.

The upside was that Moya had been able to take a week’s break and a cheap flight from London to stay with us…and our 2 brm unit had a spa pool!!! No kettle, no toaster, but we didn’t care… it had a SPA POOL!!!

We were also in the wine region of Laungedoc-Rousillon, and I discovered Picpoul de pinet, the local white and the closest to NZ sauvignon I’ve come across in France, where what they call sauvignon is more like a chardonnay. I tried having a conversation with one cellar door madame about this and was just met with a Gallic stare of un-recognition. Nouvelle Zealande? Wine?? Je ne sais pas.

Moya tried her best French, but down south

le Moulin de la Galette

The only remaining windmill in what was rural Montmartre – now a restaurant, of course

they obviously pride themselves in having not a word of English, so we had to resort to the international language of wine – mmm…(two fingers) of that…(three fingers) of the rouge, oui…(bank card transaction)…merci!

The downside was that when we took Moya to the airport at the end of the week, she was going back to her new life in London, while we are on the homeward leg of our Europe Odyssey. Snif. Still – she is a good excuse for us to come back and do the things we didn’t manage to do this time.

Our last stop in France was to visit a très charmant couple we’d met in Matarangi when they were staying there during the rugby world cup last year - they were parked outside our place trying to find a good internet signal and I’d brought them out a glass of sauvignon (as you do) and a few more drinks and a barbecue later we had an invitation to visit them in Nice.

Henri and Marie Christine not only hosted us and took us out to lunch, but gave us the use of a flat in the centre of Nice near the

THAT windmill

it still goes round, but the bumping and grinding is all done on stage

old town (La Vieux Nice) with its charming maze of streets, plazas, interesting cafes and churches.

Nice and La Riviera are truly stunning, with the high hills fringed with the evidence of man’s ability to colonise the most challenging landscape, then plunging into the deep azure Mediterranean, or le Grand Bleu as it is affectionately called.

An ordered and sophisticated playground, Nice still has the charm of the old town to offset the glamour of every known designer label, complete with fur coats in shop windows – not for the locals who would hardly need a cardigan in the balmy climate, but for wealthy Russians coming here for sun and shopping.

With amazing views around every bend in the coastline, we couldn’t help but like Nice more than we thought we would.

We hope all those we’ve stayed with will be able to make a trip to NZ - we can’t wait to be able to repay all the kindness and generosity we’ve experienced.

French hospitality? il est très superbe!!

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