The Paris Power Strut

“What kind of a holiday is this? It’s not a walking holiday, for god’s sake!” Most people on a city break in Paris see the sights and share hand-holding moments and romantic dinners. Lisa and I were doing the Paris Power Strut – a seven-hour walk in a guidebook, – a long-daydreamt ambition.

It was our last day in Paris. We had intended to start early as we needed to leave for the airport at six, but we were late leaving, and chasing time. We rushed past Bastille but stopped to swoon over a cat being taken for a walk in Place de Vosges. We pause to find the cheapest property in the local estate agent: two million euros.

Through the Marais, then uphill for a mile through ‘colourful’ Belleville, with its unidentifiable animals hanging skinned in restaurant windows. On to Parc des Buttes Chaumont for a break on a bench for pain Suisse and tarte Normande, while a runner passed us again and again in laps around the lake.

We left tourist Paris far behind, and walked (fast) into the unknown, past boys playing ping-pong in parks, over railway tracks into streets of cous-cous shops, butchers and beauticians. Then lunch. We blow behind schedule with a menu of paté followed by a fish called panga with aniseed shallots, and wine, of course.

Sacre Coeur is up some steps. Lots of steps. We shook hands as we paused atop Paris, posed for photos with gargoyles, mused how we’d like a street, or Metro station named after us, and pushed on. Brushing aside portrait artists, we descended from Montmartre through the back-end of Pigalle, skirted Opera and pass lions slaying pigs in the Tuileries. My post-lunch indigestion really started to hit but I grimly forced myself on, clutching my stomach along the Seine, past coaches dropping tourists off for boat trips, onwards to the Eiffel Tower.

Or at least under it. And now increasingly both concerned about time and in pain. Poor navigation on my part meant glares from Lisa who correctly says we should have taken a left. We are almost running, weaving in between pedestrians and Friday finish chaos, all the way along Boulevard St. Germain, over a bridge and back to our hotel for six.

We make it to the airport in time. It is only as the plane banks away from the city, the Eiffel Tower illuminated below, that we can relax and say ‘we did it’.

Moriani

The apartments didn’t quite look like they did in the brochure.

Lisa, Rudi and I were going to be spending a week in Moriani-Plage on the east coast of Corsica. Having arrived too early to check in, we had plenty of time to get a bad feeling about the place. We plonked ourselves and our bags down on the hotel beach. Too hot to step on the sand, we got sunburnt and increasingly concerned at the massing thunder clouds that threatened to annihilate us before we even had a chance to neck some cheap wine to make it all more bearable.

We got into a routine. We swam in the pool early each morning before it got too hot and too busy. We spent the day hiding from our fellow package holidaymakers, trying to keep up morale by constructing ringtones, making up quizzes based on stories about Jennifer Aniston in Look magazine, and drinking. We sat still, sweating, sighing, mosquito bites tingling, gnawing. There was no air conditioning, but by night we kept the windows closed to keep the bugs at bay. The alternative was to be terrorised by a hellish combination of whining mosquitoes and the frog chorus bubbling from the sewage drain separating our apartments from the adjacent building site.

At 5am, in a strange way it was almost bliss. An ocean sunrise filled the dawn, rays filtering through palm trees across the room, catching the nearly-finished bottle of cheap brandy and abandoned glasses. But dawn is the only time when it was cool enough to sleep, so we shut our eyes again. An hour later the jaunty whistles of a builder from the site hatefully woke us up. Then it started, the sound of the crane swinging dangerously over us. At least a lump of concrete on our heads will end all this.

But, somehow, we made it through our allotted week without bailing, sweating out the days plotting our revenge on the owners of the apartments by secreting away a particularly pungent cheese behind the kitchen units. As the bus pulled away from Moriani-Plage, we swigged wine from a plastic bottle, for the first time in a week not to blot out reality, but in celebration.

 

Manganu

Lisa and I make it to Manganu, a mountain refuge on the GR20 long-distance trail in Corsica. I look ridiculous in my too-tight £1 Primark sunhat and a canvas bag wrapped sling-like around my sunburnt arm. The guardian of the refuge enquires about my apparent injury. I wave away his concern: “It’s nothing serious” I reply, suggesting to him and the GR20 veterans sitting outside the hut in their pants that I fell down a crevasse.

Keen to wash away the sweat and the sunstroke, we queue for the shower, share a romantic drip of cold water and retire to the honeymoon suite, our tent, encircled by a moat of horse poo and pairs of pants hanging on bushes like a shrike’s larder.

2am: we wake up in wet crisp packets. Our highly-rated bivvy bags in which we’d fallen asleep in a deadening fug of red wine shortly after dark-fall now slosh cold sweat with every toss and turn. I have not had a good night’s sleep since we left home.

I so want to be asleep like the lone Frenchman snoring from a nearby tent. Having realised that I am awake, and encased in cold water, a further horror strikes. I need the loo. Ignoring it is not an option. I have to get up, leave the tent in the black, in bare foot, in horse poo.

I don’t want to see stars. I don’t want to my eyes to be open, however beautiful it is. The dark shapes of looming mountains, the layered sky, the Milky Way draped across the stars, the fear of pee edging inexorably towards my feet.

I hold Lisa, keep her warm and tell her we’ll make it ‘til morning – we have brandy.

A bird sings in the misty mountain dawn. It’s like the morning after in a horror film. I think we’re going to make it.

GR20ers head off into the combat zone once more. We still have long, long way to go: 17 miles of mind-melting insomnia. But as we breakfast on bread and jam in the sunrise, resting on warm rocks in a rushing torrent, talking to lizards, we realise that we don’t want to leave. We share moments of bliss, when everything is perfect, when we lay our heads down and close our eyes and the only sound is silence.

(June 2012)

Ferry ‘cross The Med

Giant jellyfish swarmed in the sky.

Lisa and I were slumped in the cafeteria of the Sardinia Regina Express II, half-way through a six-hour ferry crossing from Nice to Calvi in Corsica.

After a debilitating night’s non-sleep in Nice, it was blissful to be on our way in the sharp light and new hope of a holiday morning. We bagged deckchairs, put our pale faces up to the sun and lost sight of land as the Riviera disappeared in a blue haze with our memories of yesterday.

Half an hour later we were in woolly hats. What had been a bracing sea breeze became a concern. Muffled tannoy announcements warned passengers to stay off deck and not to use the lifts (that there were lifts on ferries was news enough to us). Then came the worrying inquiry as to whether there was a doctor on board. A woman we later met on Corsica  told us that her ferry from Marseille had been forced to turn back because two passengers had been ‘beheaded’. Or at least so we understood from a year of failing to learn French with Michel Thomas.

Health and safety forced us inside, right into the horror of a man attempting to comfort his wife as she threw up down herself. Balancing bravado at being a seasoned Calmac sailor and regret at not packing seasickness tablets, I ordered a coffee from a jolly crew member. Barely five-foot tall, resplendent in his Butlins-style Corsica Ferries livery of yellow jacket and dinner suit trousers, he appeared unperturbed by the ferry’s slow earthquake shudder. Ham baguettes wrapped in plastic lay unloved on the shelves, takers for lunch few, allowing the crew to congregate for an extended break and a smoke in the lee of the lifeboats.

A couple slept with their fallen hair touching across the plastic table. Three marine biology students, two young men and a woman, prevented from partaking in cetacean studies, notebooks empty of dolphins, passed the time by making roll-ups.

A stagger to the toilet, as if six pints down, ran the gauntlet of the afflicted – the lower decks a hospital tent in Sebastopol. I was no Nightingale. There was nothing I could do for them. I just cowered from the vomit slopping under the toilet door and shut out the harrowed sounds of the sick.

Adjoining the cafeteria, the ship’s lounge, where ‘Captain’s Cocktails’ were listed on a blackboard, the Saturday Night Fever dancefloor scattered with staccato shoots of light from the mirrorball as the ferry jarred its way on in a jerky slow dance. There were no takers for the ‘floor, no band struck up, yet the music played over the tannoy. There were no more announcements.

Back at base, in my sleep-starved state, the ceiling lights of the retro-futuristic cafeteria fuzzed through my head and hovered over the waves in a heaving, rolling, wallowing nightmare.

We made it, fortunately without any beheadings. But the jellyfish will always be with me. Next time, we’ll fly.

An Alcoholic Abroad

Everyone’s laughing at me. My southern English phonetics render the required Basque-lilted pronunciation an impossibility. It should be a peaceful morning wandering around the agreeable old Basque town of Bayonne. Lisa and Rudi are off shopping for the morning. That leaves me free to drink. All that stands between me and the bar is the need to change traveller’s cheques.

I queue up repeatedly, which at least gives me time to practice my lines over and over again while a sweat develops in various unsavoury places. No luck. Not possible here, old chap, but here are directions to somewhere that will. Listen carefully: left, right, straight ahead… right, got that. Appear cool, calm and confident. Just nod, mumble ‘oui, oui, d’accord’ and stride purposefully out the door. Turn left, right, umm… I’ve forgotten everything. Where the heck is the blasted bank then?

Gotcha! At last, travellers’ cheques secured with half my drinking time elapsed. Time for a celebration – only one thing for it: beer. Resorting to alcohol is, of course, the natural reaction to a traumatic morning on foreign soil. Then everything will be fine, unless you’re a bit dodgy in the downstairs department. But that’s the seafood, surely.

Prior to the onset of stress, sweat and paroxysms of self-consciousness, I had been dreamily planning to prop up a quaint local bar with a Pernod, chatting to some monolith-nosed, beret-toting local about Didier Drogba. Maybe I was in too distant a daydream when I tripped up a tot whose spectacular fall and screams prompted a polite, yet seething and derisory response from its mum, and similarly scornful stares from passers-by, who all seemed to be immaculate old dears in gold lamé sandals.

Having somewhat lost belief in my ability to even order a drink in a bar without severe embarrassment, there’s only one place to go: Monoprix – France’s super supermarket where there is, despite the name, more than one price. Two cans of Desperados for lunch. I hand over my euros, smile awkwardly and off to, errr, where do I go to drink my joyous tequila-flavoured lager? A park bench, that’ll do. Public drinking, and drunkenness, seems acceptable in this wild frontier land. The locals sport eight-packs of Kronenberg and heat-struck dogs slumped at their feet that look like they’ve had a few too.

So sitting alone on a park bench with a can at 12.30pm is perfectly respectable. Look, I’m reading a phrasebook. I am attempting to integrate into your culture; at least I’m trying. I’m not ignorant; I’m not wearing white socks and sandals like the teacher in our hotel from a posher part of Edinburgh than us. He does, however, have the advantage of being able to speak the lingo like a pro (not to mention the ability to roll his Rs).

A tramp asks me for a cigarette. That’s the company I keep on holiday in the south of France. Cannes… Cassis… back to the yacht for a Crème Yvette? My associates are wild-eyed roughs fresh (well, not exactly ‘fresh’) from the carnage of nearby Pamplona’s bull-running madness. At least I get to practice my French: “They’re menthol, is that ok?” I ask, stupidly. What am I thinking: “This guy’s got standards? Perhaps he’s a cigar man?” Hang on a second… Oh no, I need the loo.

Senses rocked, idyll shattered, beer-induced spell broken. The nearest one’s at the tourist office. Five minutes max, relax, it will be fine. Ahh, made it… shit, it’s bloomin’ locked. The tourist office staff are too busy watching the bull running on TV to think about opening the toilet. It’s too embarrassing to ask for help. Oh well, stiff upper lip and all that. I’ll just have to hang on. At least that’s a vague option. It isn’t beyond my control. Little do I know that that particular joy will follow tonight’s fish soup. For now, let’s just crack open another beer, feel the sun on my face, and head for the kebab shop.

 

(written July 2004)