|
Le cyclotourisme: Ten weeks of cycling through France
by Dermot Whittaker
France is nearly as big as the United States east of the Appalachians and is as varied in every respect--culture, language,
terrain, climate. I doubted I would see the half of it, but in winter 1991, I determined to make the attempt by touring bike,
with 30 pounds of gear, 10 weeks, and 1300 dollars. I left Boston in January and returned in April, with less than a dollar's
change in my pocket. These were slow months for tourism in France; if you are not particular and just want to see the country,
you might consider a trip in winter. I never waited in line (except in Paris), never found the youth hostels full (except
in Paris), and enjoyed weather in the south that was tolerable and often pleasant.
I started and ended at the Brussels airport. In northern Europe’s brief winter daylight, Brussels lay under smog, its
streets filled with litter and aggressive drivers. Everywhere, concrete architecture was slipped in between older buildings
of more serene design. This was my introduction to Europe. In Brussels, fifty dollars fed me bread, cheese, and apples, and
housed me in an urban hostel for two days. Heedless of the frigid weather, I chose early one morning to bike the sixty miles
to Lille, France.
Winter in Europe -- wet, windy, and sunless -- would discourage any cyclist. In northern France, temperatures hovered around
freezing, and the dampness made it hard, once one was thoroughly chilled, to get warm again. In Lille that year, February
temperatures were the lowest since 1963, resting between 10 and 20 degrees Fahrenheit. Even Canadians, used to a much drier
cold, admitted defeat and did as I did -- trained south to the Mediterranean as soon as possible.
I left Lille on a couchette, or sleeper, (my bike to follow in two days) and woke up in Marseilles with the sun shining
for the first time in a week. I was $130.00 poorer and had to give up any notions of eating in cafés, but my transportation
for the next eight weeks would cost me nothing. I covered seventeen hundred miles by bike and saw dozens of cities, starting
with Marseilles.
Marseilles is situated along France’s mountainous southern coast. The city rises steeply around a Mediterranean port
about as big as Boston Harbor. A brown haze often hung off the coast, but when the sun shone, the Old Port, with its battened-down,
bobbling summer craft, was a heartening sight after the cold, gray north. One could assemble a picnic lunch of cheese, olives,
bread, fruit, dates, croissants, and beer in the time it took to stroll down a narrow street full of shaded markets. The three-hour
afternoon closing common throughout southern France and Spain was not the rule in Marseilles, where some stores were even
open Sunday morning. I picnicked on the sunny slopes surrounding the cathedral Notre Dame de la Garde, the city’s obvious
landmark and attraction, with its gilt statue of the Virgin shimmering with reflected sunlight from the church roof.
Marseilles’s steep, congested streets were no place for a bike tourist, so I left for Cassis, a vacation port village
fifteen miles to the east. Along the coast road, the Italian language and cuisine were everywhere, even sixty miles from the
Italian border. Italian culture seems to suggest to French people what French culture suggests to us: an atmosphere of sophistication
and easy living. French advertising -- for coffee, sweets, clothes -- played on this Italian theme frequently. Cassis on Ash
Wednesday was quiet, the glassed-in waterside cafés encasing locals and tourists alike. A forty-minute hike from Cassis led
to a small, rustic hostel built on cliffs far above the village, overlooking the sea.
This was blasted country -- mountainous, sun-bleached, treeless. A German hiker claimed that a wind-blown fire raged east
from Marseilles recently, destroying what trees and brush had held on to these mountains. His account was believable. The
dead wood spared by that blaze and piled about the Cassis hostel was the only source of heat there. Yet nearby, in the deep
ravines that led to the Mediterranean and its Calanques (as the inlets along the coast are called), the trees and ivy grew lush and green, even in February.
For three days, I hiked the gorges, read an old copy of The Little Prince, listened to the German hiker practice his
accordion, talked about the ongoing Gulf War, and waited for a lull in the howling and continuous wind. This wind, the mistral,
was a winter blast funneling down the Rhône Valley from the north. It easily penetrated four or five layers of clothing and
made cycling through the mountains unpleasant, sometimes nearly impossible. On the first still day, I took the opportunity
to head to Aix-en-Provence and Arles, two principal cities of the Bouches-du-Rhône.
The tidy, touristy Aix was pretty and appealing, but I found Arles, which lies west of Aix across the fertile plain of the
Rhône delta, more interesting. With a gritty, river port feel, Arles seemed oriented to its own local culture, oblivious to
Paris. A whole city block sat upon Roman foundations. This dim, moldy crypt was accessible through the Museum of Christian
Antiquities. The man most celebrated in Arles, esteemed higher than its famous resident painter Vincent Van Gogh, is Frederic
Mistral, a nineteenth-century poet whose efforts to revive the Proveçal language and culture bore fruit throughout the south
of France.
The countryside along the coast, from the mouth of the Rhône to the Spanish border, was mostly flat and covered with vineyards
where pruning was going on. Acrid smoke from the burning debris stayed in my nostrils all the weeks I biked through this country.
This smoke was co-scented with purple sage or the mimosa blossoms which hung like clusters of yellow grapes. I pedaled from
Arles, past the university city of Montpelier, past the grimy, industrial seaport of Sête, to Perpignan, where I stayed before
and after a brief sojourn in Spain.
Perpignan was once the grand capital of a medieval principality: the Palace of the King of Majorca is still the city’s
principal sight. The Palace is a modest Gothic castle, well-preserved and decorated in a colorful, freewheeling manner. It
is surrounded by a huge star-shaped citadel designed by Vauban for its defense in a later age of artillery. Citadels like
this lie at the center city parks throughout France, but in Perpignan the military still trained recruits here. A bereted
French officer drilled his band of newly shorn inductees in the shadow of the Palace.
Perpignan was a comfortable place to relax before riding over the Pyranees. I left one warm morning, heading south along
the Mediterranean coast road, a serpent, ascending and descending nine separate mountains. On a windless day, it was a safe
but tiring ride. Here was the Mediterranean coast cyclists dream about -- neither polluted nor congested, but simply accommodating,
with chaste white hotels beside a placid blue-green sea. Nestled in the frontier town of Cerbére is the last stop of the SNCF,
the French railway, station and platform sheltered beneath a steel-and-glass canopy attributed to Gustav Eiffel. Train passengers
pass through mountain tunnels to reach Spain. The cyclist's way lies back and forth along steep roads terraced in each mountainside, a twenty-minute struggle
to the top and a few minutes dizzying descent before, eventually, I found myself, knowing no Spanish, in a very different
country.
“This is Catalonia, not Spain,” read the graffiti on the rock face I sped past on my way to the first town of
Portbou. The message was written, tellingly, in English, but the message was clear for all that. The scenery in Catalonia
was forested and hilly inland, sun-bleached and rocky along the coast, and flat for eight miles as I neared the first major
city, Figueres. In 1991, Figueres was well-off, even up-scale. The city is home to the Salvador Dali Museum, a stupendous
maroon bastion decorated with bread loaves and crowned with immense brown eggs and golden mannequins. On Sunday, it was crowded
with visitors. The collection of work by that inventive and dignified artist included his portrait of President Lincoln and
his Mae West made of furniture. On special exhibit were printed Dali illustrations for Sigmund Freud’s eccentric work
Moses and Monotheism, with an introductory text by Dali himself. This place was my favorite of the many local museums
I visited France and Spain.
I took this week's diversion in Spain, I confess, to save money and was chagrined to find Catalonia prosperous and no place
for a scrounger. But it was worthwhile to take a break from France and meet a new people. The Catalonians were earnest and
direct, friendly and helpful, though more reserved than the French. Mass in Spanish was a simple and serious affair, more
comfortable to a New Englander unused to the frankly emotional devotion of French churches and services. And in Spain, riding
to Orlot one hot afternoon, I met with a question impossible to imagine in France: Could I spare something to eat? This question
did not come from a beggar but from a traveler making his way between towns on foot. He accepted half a loaf of bread with
a serious nod and continued on his journey.
After spending a week in Catalonia, I returned to France and made my way down the Garonne River toward the Atlantic. I first
had to contend with more mountains before reaching Carcassone. Approaching that city, I rode through some of the wildest country
I had seen in France, desert-like, with every kind of gorge and canyon under the hot southern sun. Most memorable were the
lush foothills, les Fangasses, some fifteen miles from Carcassone.
The hostel in Carcassone was located in the Cité Mediéval, a somewhat preserved, somewhat restored medieval castle, now filled
with shops and galleries. The March wind howled through the place as low, gray clouds raced past the battlements overhead.
Downtown Carcassone, about a mile from the castle, was built more to eighteenth and nineteenth century plan.
I next came to Toulouse, a university town that I loved immediately. Its broad boulevards, nineteenth-century architecture,
and river (the Garonne) all conspired halfway through my trip to remind me of Boston, my home. It was the first city of the
south that bustled. It was inexpensive, with art and music at every turn. The large student population explained the
appearence of Iggy Pop ("Iggy le Myth") at a local club. I passed from Toulouse downriver to Agen, cycling through
the countryside east to Bordeaux.
H. L. Mencken, who believed the thoughtless ugliness of American architecture most revealed our national character, once
said that a peasant of the Continent never put up so much as a cow-shed without investing it with some grace and dignity.
Eighty years and two world wars later, I found much of the French and Belgian countryside as grimy and tacky as any backwater
in the US. The paysage, or countryside, was at first my biggest disappointment as a bike tourist.
All of this changed when I reached the Garonne. The hilly land on either side of that river was deep green, and the farms
were neat and well-kept. Cattle and horses were raised there, as well as apples and grapes. As I pedaled north along the Atlantic
Coast, I found the farmland very much like the spacious, rolling countryside of western New Jersey or Virginia.
Bordeaux was a sprawling place, grubby in the outskirts, a typical nineteenth-century city with a large and beautiful public
garden built around an artificial lake at the city’s center. French and tourists alike had warned me of Bordeaux’s
reputation for being high bourgeois and a tad cold to strangers, but I noticed none of that, not even camped out with a sandwich
in one of the grassy downtown parks watching the hurrying, well-dressed crowds.
Bordeaux was home to the Musée National de la Résistance de Bordeaux, a three-story building near the cathedral, containing memorabilia of France’s clandestine war against what memorial
plaques referred to as “the Nazi barbarism.” Jean Moulin was the Prefect of Chartres who twice withstood Nazi
torturers' efforts to make him betray his friends and country. He worked closely with Charles De Gaulle in coordinating underground
assaults against German military targets. The museum displayed detailed maps of resistance operations, radios used to secretly
receive and transmit information, underground printing presses, signal lamps and parachutes left from night deliveries by
British planes, examples of Nazi propaganda, and grim relics of the detention camps.
I headed north toward La Rochelle by way of Saintes, a small city along the River Charente. Of interest in Saintes, aside
from its several churches, were the Roman antiquities, including a triumphal arch and a large amphitheater, both open to the
public at no cost. Everywhere in France, Roman ruins reminded one that Gaul had been civilized and cultivated for centuries
before its bloody, miserable travail in the Dark Ages.
I made La Rochelle on the Atlantic coast by mid-March. I was curious to bike the Il de Ré and to see the fortifications at St. Martin on that island. I visited the island in cold and fog, cycling the four-kilometer
bridge that connects it to the mainland, paying a two-dollar toll for use of the bike lane. The bike lanes (sometimes shared
with farmer’s tractors) made the island’s flat landscape perfect for cycling. It was easy to compare the Ile de
Ré, which is some twenty miles long and three miles wide, to the more familiar Cape Cod, though its stone farmhouses and ports
were centuries older than the Cape’s. Sandy beaches ran along its southern and eastern shores, and a lighthouse stood
at its farthest extremity. The beaches were littered with small, patterned snails and mini-nautili. I saw few clams, but oyster
beds were common. The unfamiliar weed which washed up in great piles along the shore was rusty in color, “seaweed red
and brown” shaped like small oak leaves. The grassy, green weed of the New England shore was nowhere in sight. The island
never seemed quite as desolate and empty as the outer beaches of Cape Cod. One could not say, as Henry David Thoreau said
of the Cape, that standing on that shore was like being on the deck of a ship at sea. In a storm, however, the highly exposed
Il de Ré would probably seem wild enough.
After spending the entire day exploring the island, I had the eerie experience that evening of turning to Dumas’s novel
The Three Musketeers (my main reading on the trip) and finding a description of the whole Il de Ré, including its walled
fortifications, in a chapter entitled “The Siege at La Rochelle.”
The Loire Valley, where I headed after a stop-over in Poitiers, was enjoying a rainy spring. I was forced to make my way,
cold and damp, through sometimes heavy showers for the better part of two weeks. Keeping the bike chain well-oiled became
a routine. The chateaux this country is known for appeared unexpectedly along the many country roads I took to avoid
increasingly heavy northern traffic. My cycling now took me through small forests of pine or cypress.
Nearly every day in late March, strong winds buffeted the few cyclists on the road. My six-hour ride from Beaugency to Chartres,
facing a cold and continuous downpour, seemed hopeless. As I neared my destination, however, the sun shone timidly and the
cathedral of Chartres, only three miles distant, appeared through the mist. After a hot shower and dinner, I soon forgot how
miserable I had been. But I still have a clear memory of the cathedral, which one can easily take to be a monument to God
and not man. Dark, gigantic, lighted through twelfth-century stained windows of gem-like hues and composition, detailed with
the work of scores of sculptors and crafters, the place did seem to embody the medievals' creed and the power of the Christian
God as they understood and worshipped him. Chartres was in a class by itself, clearly. At least on this first trip, I came
to prefer the Romanesque style, exemplified by Poitier’s Notre Dame de la Garde.
I eventually made my way to Paris, staying south of that city in a hostel in the suburb of Arpajon. I had hoped to make day
trips to Paris by bike, if the weather permitted. It never did, but continued to rain and blow for four days in the customary
spring manner of northern France. I look forward to a return visit with more time and money, and in warmer weather. One needs
one life just for Paris, or so said a German visitor who gave me a lift into the city. I saw Paris once more a couple days
later as I passed through it on my way north. I had a little over a week to make my return flight from Brussels.
I got along fine as a bicycle tourist, covering forty to eighty miles on a given journey and resting a day or two between
trips. I carried tools, books, and clothes in two panniers, with a lunch and little else in a rucksack. In 1991, my helmet
attracted numerous stares. The French often found such a precaution ridiculous, but I was glad of it when the inevitable accident
occurred: a stray piece of metal caught in the spokes and stopped the bike cold, sending me to the pavement immediately, head
first. The helmet was scratched somewhat, but I escaped the hassles of injury and medical treatment in a foreign country.
The wind proved the worst inconvenience to a cyclist: blowing hard against a rider, it could add another hour to a seven-hour
haul between cities. In the rolling, treeless hills outside Toulouse, I was blown right off the bike -- at a standstill --
by spring gusts of up to sixty-five miles per hour. At times it was all one could do to walk a bike upright through the south.
And anywhere a cyclist goes in the world, rains can be chilly and the sun, hot. Old sneakers are still my favorite for cycling,
but my feet deserved warmer shoes in northern France.
The panniers were difficult to stow away in most cities, where hostels did not open their doors until five in the afternoon.
The railway station lockers were off limits at the time on account of the Gulf War and the fears of terrorist bombing. The
great convenience of cycling was in being able to stop at will to investigate the local curiosities: an English chapel dating
from the Hundred Year’s War (with two English caretakers) near Auvilla; the Communist Party headquarters in Arles with
its lone, informative functionary; the municipal abattoir at Salon-en-Provence where the butchers cheerfully chatted and tossed
steaming entrails. My encounters with the French, almost universally welcoming and polite, are my most vivid memories. In
every case, I had only to stop pedaling.
My last week was spent in northeastern France’s rolling, green countryside that had been transformed by the First World
War seventy-five years before. Whole towns, like Chauny near the River Somme, were completely rebuilt after the war. Post
offices, train stations, and schools wore a stylish, but also sad, 1920s deco look. I wondered to see so much farmland plowed
and planted, half expecting to find shrapnel and shell fragments along the roadsides. A gruff and formal farmer told me it
was the best farmland in Europe, all of it in use. But he was suspicious of my inquiry, and I could not easily suppose that
so many tons of high explosive had greatly improved the soil.
I noticed everywhere that each French town had raised a memorial to its war dead: the smallest village might list twenty
sons lost between 1914 and 1918. I often stopped cycling to read these tributes. One could devote a whole summer to the dozens
of large military cemeteries in northern France, some containing the graves of tens of thousands of fallen soldiers: Frenchmen,
British, Canadians, Australians, Americans, colonials . . . and Germans. On tombstones, one finds the Star of David among
Germany’s First World War dead and Arabic inscriptions above the French words “Mort Pour La France”
-- ”Died For France.” In a day’s ride from Chauny to Arras, I passed the graves of many soldiers. With the
mopping-up operations underway in Iraq, a German caretaker in one cemetery asked me laconically if I did not prefer le
cyclotourisme to la guerre. In the huge British cemetery in Arras, the headstones displayed, besides a soldier’s
name and age, the name and insignia of his regiment and the date of his death. Beside the field of some four thousand graves
stood walls twice the height of a man and as long as a soccer field on which were listed the names of forty thousand soldiers
whose bodies are presumed to lie in the surrounding countryside, the best farmland of Europe. Thousands of these men were
killed in a single day. Their tragic courage, about which we have grown somewhat glib, can seem pointless only in the context
of this great indiscriminate destruction.
At last I returned to Lille. The city in the first week of April was warmer and leafier than when I had left it in February.
I celebrated Easter Sunday in the city’s Cathedral of St. Maurice among a substantial but not overwhelming congregation:
as everyone notes, the French are no great church-goers. Lille had its own star-shaped citadel and surrounding park where
the French walked, with their children and dogs, all Sunday afternoon. In the evening of my last day in France, I sat near
the Church of San Sauveur, near Lille’s law school. That small Gothic church, almost a chapel really, remains my last
memory. It was a quiet place that might have kept a photographer, a painter, or a writer at work for a week. Thinking myself
only a tourist still, I left the church, and the next day France, heading for Brussels airport, and home.
Copyright, Dermot Whittaker, 1991, 2006. |
|
