Marseille, Cassis and the Calanques

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I wake with a knot in my stomach. Today we're booked on a tour which includes a boat trip. The last time this happened Issy ended up wanting to kill the captain, most of the crew and half the other passengers. Hopefully this time will be slightly better.

Issy decides she wants to conserve her energy for the tour, so I set off for a quick wander around Lourmarin on my own. I go into the twelfth century Chateau de Lourmarin. Some of its rooms are set up as they would have been a couple of hundred years ago, and others have museum pieces on display. It's very attractive, more akin a large house than a castle, and provides good views from the second floor over the village and the surrounding countryside.

I walk back through the village. Someone looks like they've been taking their pet pig for a walk. They've left it outside a restaurant with its lead tied around the leg of a table. It looks very content. It's got its head down and it's running its snout over the ground in search of any morsels that someone might have dropped from the table.

We make sure that we leave for Marseille in plenty of time to get to the tour, but as we get closer our GPS' sense of direction seems to desert it. I'm not quite sure of the value of a GPS without a sense of direction but we paid a lot for it so I'm sure there must be some. Within a few metres of telling us to turn right in a few kilometres it directs us to turn around. I'm not sure this makes a lot of sense, but we decide to persist. We make the U-turn and go around a long circuit before finding ourselves back where we started. We repeat this exercise three times looking for clues as to what we're doing wrong or where we should really be going, but all to no avail. I'm starting to lose my sense of humour. All this time I thought that only watching football and playing golf made me want to throw my toys out of the cot, but it seems that I can now add listening to the inane rantings of a GPS to this list. I find myself wanting to do unspeakable things to it, which probably isn't all that helpful.

We spy a sign out of the corners of our eyes pointing to the hotel that we need to get to, but soon find ourselves going around the same familiar circuit yet again. It's now only a few minutes until the tour is due to leave, so we decide to park the car and walk. Issy's phone tells us that the hotel's only a few minutes away by car via a tunnel under the harbour. It seems however that this is closed to pedestrians; they instead need to walk several kilometres further around the waterfront. We find a taxi rank. If a taxi turns up in the next few minutes we might just get there in time, but it seems that we're in a taxiless part of town. I ring the tour company. They say they can wait ten minutes for us. A few minutes later they ring back to give us the option of joining a later tour. Disaster averted yet again, although our collective blood pressures might beg to disagree.

Our guide is Marie, and our fellow tourists are a couple from Toronto. The tour starts with a drive through the old port. This starts to look very familiar, and we soon realise that part of the route includes the seemingly endless circuit we spent a long time driving around earlier listening to the inane burblings of our beloved GPS. Marie tells us that Marseille was founded by Greek sailors. It became a key departure location for refugees in World War Two, as the Nazis found it very difficult to find people in the maze of streets. They eventually solved this issue by blowing up the whole area with dynamite. It was rebuilt shortly after the war ended. We stop briefly outside the twelfth century Marseille Cathedral, which looks very similar in style to the Siena Cathedral, with its characteristic horizontal black and white marble stripes. The tour is supposed to include another old church, but we're not sure the mourners at the funeral that's in progress would appreciate the intrusion of a bunch of picture-snapping tourists so we move on. Next stop is a large war memorial overlooking the beach. I'd never associated Marseille with luxury, but the restaurant next to the memorial seems to suggest otherwise. Its patrons are dining on sunlounges under umbrellas, and taking occasional dips in the very inviting looking emerald blue water.

We drive up a steep hill to the Basilica of Notre-Dame de la Garde, which sits atop Marseille's tallest peak and dominates the city's skyline. The views are spectacular. Marie tells us that the Basilica is generally recognised as the symbol of Marseille, and was the site of a pivotal World War Two battle after which the city was retaken by the Allies. The original 13th century church was destroyed in the 16th century, and a fort was then built here in the 17th century. The current church is built on top of the fort, and was consecrated shortly after it was completed in 1864.

We head along the coast into the Calanques National Park and on to the village of Cassis, which sits around a small yacht-filled harbour surrounded by restaurants. Marie tells us that the massive cliffs overlooking it are the highest in Europe. It's clearly very popular with both tourists and locals; the streets and beach are packed. We get into a small boat for a cruise around three of the spectacular Calanques, or "fjords of the Mediterranean", which are all surrounded by tall white cliffs.

We drive up a steep road to the tops of the cliffs overlooking the village. We could see a single small cloud forming on them in an otherwise cloudless sky from down on the water, but this now seems to have become much larger. Strong upward air currents seem to be making it even bigger still as we watch on, and it looks really spooky. It's obscured most of the view that we came to see, but it's a great sight in itself. We assume this is a common phenomenon, but Marie tells us that this is the first time she's ever seen anything like it.

It will be too late to eat by the time we get back to Lourmarin, so we decide to dine in Marseille instead. We find a restaurant with a menu in both French and English. The waiter speaks some English as well, so for the first time in three days we'll have some idea what we'll be munching on before it lands on the table. I order mussels in a blue cheese Roquefort sauce. It's very rich, very French and very nice.

We program the GPS to take us back to Lourmarin in the hope that it might have magically regained its sense of direction in the past few hours. It hasn't. It repeatedly tries to take us onto a freeway which either doesn't exist or is closed for maintenance. It's now dark, we don't know which direction is which, we don't have a map, and our only available navigation tool seems to be working off a faulty roadmap. We decide to just drive on in any direction to get way from the endless loop we're in, but no matter how hard we try we're always directed back to the same non-existent freeway. Along the way the GPS decides it might also be amusing if it took us along a street that's reserved for trams, into a construction site which it tells us is a roundabout, and the wrong way down a one way street. It's not helping that I can't see; the windscreen keeps fogging up and we can't work out how to clear it. An angry local pulls up next to us and tells us that our lights are on high beam and are blinding our fellow motorists. We hear a siren behind us. This is it; I'm about to be arrested and the GPS has inveigled me into breaking enough road rules to warrant spending several years in a French dungeon. I wonder if Issy will visit me; I hope she doesn't have to rely on the GPS for directions. Luckily for us the siren's an ambulance. We try to break out of the loop, but find ourselves back in the port next to the restaurant we were in a few hours ago. This all seems real, but it must surely be a nightmare; hopefully we'll wake up soon.

We think that the GPS has retained just enough of a sense of direction to tell us whether we're travelling north, south, east or west, so we hatch a cunning plan to just keep driving north along whatever roads we can find, in the hope that if we're able to get far enough away from the imaginary freeway we might have a better chance of being directed to a route that consists of actual roads. We arrive back in Lourmarin at 1am. It was supposed to be a one hour drive and we've been in the car for four hours. We're both brain dead.

I dream that I'm reading a newspaper. "GPS Murdered. A GPS has been found murdered in Marseille. The body was pulled from the harbour at 1pm today local time. A police spokesman said that it had suffered severe trauma and appeared to have been struck with a blunt instrument multiple times. A sixty year old Australian male has been taken into custody. He's understood to have made a full confession, but shown no remorse for his actions. Australian consular officials are assisting ......" I wake up. Alas it was only a dream.

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