Transit Cities - Toulouse, Angers and Le Mans

First impressions really do count! While travelling through France, I have found that the general impression of a town or city upon arriving (clean/dirty, nice/rude, peaceful/hectic), tends to hold true for the rest of your stay although small things/some people and places can improve on that first impression.

After leaving Carcassonne, I began my leg up the western coast of France towards Caen, to the west of Paris and about 900 km from Carcassonne. I had to get to Caen on the 20^th as I was staying with Mathilde only until the morning of the 24^th when I would take the train to Basel to spend Christmas with my Uncle Brian and Aunt Caroline. From Carcassonne, I caught a train (with only 2 minutes to spare) to Toulouse, arriving at dusk and made my way through a very busy, very dirty city to the hostel which was just around the corner from one of the main churches.

Avoiding copious amounts of dog excrement, I walked through the alleyways and checked into the hostel for the night. This was my first hostel stay of the trip (after my week in Melbourne in March staying at ‘Back of Chapel Hostel’ which was awesome), I had high expectations of hostels in Europe however when I got to my dorm, only one bed out of 8 was occupied and it was a sick Russian who just lay in bed and sniffed the whole night, gaining himself the nickname ‘sniffler’ as he wasn’t interested in talking at all so I didn’t learn his actual name. The one upside was that the hostel was significantly cheaper than my accommodation up till this point and close to a metro line, which I took the next morning to get to a metro station on the outskirts of the town to catch a lift to Toulouse.

In the cold rain and gusty wind I stood outside the metro stop on the outskirts of town waiting my Covoiturage lift to turn up, when he did I was pretty happy. A really nice Mercedes 4 door salon car rolled up and the driver Gerard and his wife introduced themselves, this time I didn’t have to carry my bag on my lap which I was very happy about and I had heaps of space.  I was however sharing the car with Angelique, a fashion student from Toulouse who was heading to Paris to have Christmas with her family. The car ride was far from quiet and actually very interesting as Gerard had worked in the Airbus factory in Toulouse where they assemble the A380 Airbus and so we talked about that and also after being in Carcassonne, and looking at the castle museum there I found out that Angelique had made most of the historical costumes there while studying a unit of historical fashion.

We stopped three or four times at service stations to stretch our legs, to get coffee and so the others could smoke outside of the car. Gerard was really nice and even bought me lunch before we got to Angers which was pretty good.

One interesting thing I noticed while we drove in the rain was that nobody really slowed down or adopted a more conservative over taking style and yet during the entire journey (around 620 km) I didn’t see a single crash or person sheltering under a bridge from the weather, unlike some Perth P Platers in winter. One reason for this may have been the two small tracks I saw just to the side of the highway near Bordeaux and half way between Bordeaux and Angers, they appeared to be free to the public and quite popular as when we passed I saw a lot of cars testing their brakes on the wet skidpan etc.

Gerard was kind enough to drop me off right in the city centre of Angers which isn’t that big anyways but it certainly beat having to find a bus to my accommodation, which I hadn’t even found yet as there weren’t any hostels open so I went hunting for a cheap central hotel. I found a nice looking hotel just uphill from the Christmas markets and narrow hilly streets filled with people doing last minute window shopping, there was nobody behind reception but a sign saying they’d be back at 5. I was luckily 1^st in line out of 4 or 5 people and logged into the hotels wifi (I saw their password on the reception desk) and reserved the last single room available online. This worked out perfectly for me and not so well for the other travellers when the receptionist returned, by which time it was dark outside. The room was pretty antique and the bed more of a springy hammock than a bed but I would be gone early the next morning so after walking the centre-ville and getting dinner I was straight to bed/hammock.

For anybody reading this who knows me even remotely well, you would know that I am ‘slightly’ interested in motorsport, especially F1 but also the World Endurance Championship (WEC). The most famous race in the championship and also in the world in the 24 Hours of Le Mans, run by the Automobile Club d’Ouest on an 8.4 mile long circuit, the Circuit de la Sarthe, just outside of the city of Le Mans in the Loire region of France south west of Paris.

For the past 3 – 4 years, I have camped out in my grandparent’s living room for 24 hours in early June to watch the 24 Hour race live via Foxtel. Even though the race wasn’t going to be run while I was there I decided to go to Le Mans to see the town and also the Museum of the 24H du Mans. I took a train from Angers in the morning to Le Mans, arriving around 10. Given my high expectations of the town from the footage I’ve seen on TV and in movies about the race, I was disappointed to see it looked quite run down and even more disappointed with the towns people when I went to see the square where the winning team’s drivers get bronze imprints of their hands in the pavement below a monument to the race and found the handprints filled with dirt and dog waste and the monument graffitied on one side. Obviously the town puts on a huge cleaning effort just before the race; regardless the town’s people don’t seem very enthusiastic about the one event that puts them on the map and attracts 3 times their population for 1 week a year.  This quite royally annoyed me to say the least as it is still my aspiration to go see the race live and it’s not so easy from Perth so the townspeople are very lucky in my opinion.

After seeing the square, I headed off to the actual permanent section of the 13.5 km long track that consists mainly of public road during race week. This involved a 6.7 km hike both ways with my bags to get to the museum and have a good look before catching a train to Caen to finally meet Mathilde!

It was quite a cold but sunny day in Le Mans but by the time I had finally made it to the main entrance to the track I was hot enough from walking that I was only in my 1^st layer t-shirt and got a funny look from the museum guide when I entered. She was really nice though and let me store my bags inside the staff room while I used the museum book to take a 3 hour self-guided tour exploring the different sections of the huge aerofoil shaped museum which had a huge amount of memorabilia from the drivers and teams in addition to the dozens of cars on display. I took so many photos I had to ask the museum guide to let me plug my charger in and charge my camera half way through my time in the museum. After the museum, I was about to leave the outer track complex to walk back to the train station when I heard a car on the small, permanent circuit so I jumped a fence (woops) and managed to get some photos of an Audi R8 LMS from the first corner grandstand :D

The trek back to the train station felt a lot shorter as I was going through my photos and the sun wasn’t so high in the sky anymore. Getting into the train station I found that my train to Caen had been delayed, so

Carcassonne – UNESCO Heritage Castle and City

Up until my journey to Carcassonne, I had been exclusively using Covoiturage to get between cities, however between Montpellier and Carcassonne there were no rides up for offer and so I had to use the French train service for the first time.  After leaving the apartment, I headed to the train station where I quickly found out why Covoiturage is so popular, the train ticket was 32 Euros!! The train arrived on time and I got on-board and had to sit on my big backpack in the common area by the doors as all the seats were taken, the train kept heavily accelerating and braking every five minutes as we stopped at small concrete platforms on the outskirts of towns. 

Despite all the stopping and starting the train was quite fast and soon I was in Narbonne, a coastal town where I was supposed to transfer trains. As I waited around in the terminal, I watched the departures screen suddenly change to say that my train to Carcassonne had been cancelled, so I went over to the Information Desk and asked why the train had been cancelled and when the next one was… She was very helpful, not! “Such is life, take the bus outside” she replied in French, waving her arms around before slamming the window shut.

So outside I went, and picked the bus stop with the most number of disgruntled looking travellers, to wait for the bus to Carcassonne. After around 25 minutes, the rail replacement bus turned up and we departed from Narbonne. The one advantage to the train being cancelled was that after leaving the streets of Narbonne, the view was quite spectacular and it was interesting to see the influence of nearby Spain on the countryside. There were a lot of joint French and Spanish signs and also the buildings in the valleys that the road cut through were lined with farmhouses with very shallow angled roofs covered with alternating yellow and orange-ish coloured terracotta tiles, this was quite different to the architecture in Avignon and especially Montpellier.

Around 4 pm, the tower spires and huge Gallo-Roman walls of the Carcassonne castle appeared atop a distant hill and even from a distance the sheer size of the ancient walled city was obvious. It only got more impressive as the bus got closer to the city and then disappeared as the bus navigated down the narrow roads and over an old viaduct to finally come to a stop at the station. Due to the delays caused by having to take the bus instead of the train to Carcassonne I was running late for meeting Mark, a British ex-pat who hires out apartments on Airbnb in Carcassonne and also owns a restaurant there too. I managed to make my way quickly through the commercial city centre, still over 1500 years but not inside the walls of the ancient city on top the hill overlooking the rest of Carcassonne, and met Mark underneath a Roman era archway. He then showed me to the apartment that I had booked on Airbnb back in September, $50 AUD a night for a top floor 3 bedroom apartment!!

Very quickly I was settled into the apartment and had made use of the kitchen to make myself a little bit too much instant coffee, leading to me doing all my washing in less than 2 hours and hanging it out to dry and also deciding at 8 PM to go walking and take some photos from the Pont Vieux (a medieval bridge that spans the rivers) and also from the grassy slopes beneath the old city that overlooked the city. Even with my hiking shoes and only a camera I slipped a few times on the steep, slippery grass slopes and it made me realise that even before an attacking army ever made it to the walls they’d struggle with all their heavy armour and armaments to even get up the surroundings of the old city walls.

Around 10 I headed back to the apartment past a small restaurant where I had a steak and vegetables, a good break from pain au chocolat and caffe. Thankfully the temperature was still positive and the streets still felt quite safe and well illuminated on the walk back to Boulevard de Roumans, the large street only 5 minutes from the Pont Vieux where the apartment was situated.

Day 2 in Carcassonne, I woke up early hoping to beat the crowds of tourists, even in winter the Cite de Carcassonne is a large tourist attraction. I made my way up the hill and through the old gates of the city, still standing since almost 100 BC when the Romans first fortified the city on the top of the hill. Archaeologists can identify which parts of the walls are of Roman construction as instead of the huge blocks of stone used by the French after 600 AD, the Romans used hundreds of thousands of small rectangular red bricks.

The Cite de Carcassonne that sits on the hill has stood for over 2000 years, not without sustaining significant damage however, and consists of 2 rings of walls that span over 12 km long and contains more than 50 towers as well. Unlike many fortifications in France, the castle only makes up about 1/5^th of the area inside of the walls, with the remainder consisting of wooden and stone frame double storey buildings and 2 huge cathedrals.  After walking through the main gate from the direction of the ‘new town’, I headed first to the castle which has been restored, like the rest of the old city, over the past 200 years. These restorative efforts were spearheaded by Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc who spent much of his life in the 19^th century restoring the Cite de Carcassonne but also planning the expansion of the new city below the ancient Roman walls.

I bought a ticket and audio-guided tour of the castle, the first stop on the self-paced tour was the old dining hall of the Counts and dignitaries who would have resided in the castle since its construction in the 12^th century. This huge room, with its lead lined windows, huge fireplace and high ceiling now houses a projector screen displaying a video about Eugene’s restoration of the Cite and also the rise and fall of the Cite over its existence.

The city always existed as an important trading post but also a strategic border garrison on the French-Spanish border, that is until the late 16^th century when truces were made and trading was dominated by Spanish ships along the Mediterranean coast.

This was also coupled with a revolt of the towns people against the then ruler of Carcassonne who evicted the majority from the fortified walls, these evicted towns people then set up ‘ville basse’ (the lower city) which soon also became fortified and much more vibrant in terms of trading.

Eventually in the 17^th century, the Cite de Carcassonne would suffer the same fate as the Chateau des Papes in Avignon and be used as a barracks and occupied by squatters until the restoration by Eugene Voillet-le-Duc.

After watching the video on the restoration of the Cite, I then walked up onto the walls and looked out over the rest of the Cite and also the ‘ville basse’. The amount of thought that went into designing impenetrable castles, Carcassonne was only ever conquered by siege, never by brute attacking force, was incredible. Every single design choice in the castle was obviously made to enhance the security of the important people at the very crux of the fortifications, for example the main gate house on the outer side of the moat is open on the side facing the castle so that if it was overrun the attackers had nowhere to hide.

The castle’s rooms now house ancient artefacts from both Roman and Visigothic times, including fragments of Roman pottery and a huge Roman milestone. Taking photos and reading and listening to all the tour guide posts, it took me well over 2 hours to explore the castle before making my way out and walking around the buildings that form a huge maze inside of the walls. There were lots of jewellery and food stores and the obligatory souvenir stores, it was now around 1 pm and the streets were filling up with tourists, mainly from China and Japan following tour guides around and taking photos of everything (I’m not one to talk though). I had a quick look at the two major Basilicas of St Nazaire and St Celse built inside the walls back in the 6^th century, it is just crazy to think that these huge structures, whilst modified over the ages, have stood for so long and been a gathering place for hundreds of thousands of people since their construction.

Finally I left the Cite de Carcassonne and went into the centre of Ville Basse, where I had a late lunch/early dinner and watched enviously the people ice skating in the Place de la Republique. It was only 8 days till Christmas now and the city was filled with carols, people doing their Christmas shopping and the ever present smell of Vin Chaud and cooking marrons.

The next day I spoke to the family back home via Skype and then hurriedly packed my bags and headed to Toulouse late in the afternoon to start a 2 day, 700 km journey to spend a few days with my awesome friend Mathilde and her family in Caen!!

Rating: 5/5; awesome historical ancient city and a great festive atmosphere in the Ville Basse.

Montpellier

Montpellier, it's the 8th largest city in France and the fastest growing over the past 25 years (thanks Wikipedia). After the lovely picturesque and much smaller cities of Dijon and Avignon, it was also a reminder of how crowded and dirty life is in larger cities. When I arrived, I was dropped off by Phillip with 3 other students at a shopping centre on the outskirts, thankfully this time it was situated at a busy tramway station and I quickly made my way into town (trams are great because unlike buses the driver is secluded and so it’s much easier to fare skip :D). 

Probably due to the old infrastructure and fast growing population, the city is shrouded in scaffolding and the sounds of construction works were always present, my first impressions as I took the tram towards the town was that the city is huge. The main CBD is dominated by apartment blocks but also large open plazas and monument sites, perhaps I was just used to the clean and less impoverished streets of Avignon but I was amazed at the black market sellers and amount of beggars on the streets while I walked to the apartment I had found on Airbnb. When I arrived at the apartment, I was met by Semiha who showed me the room and also explained what the best attractions would be for me to look at the following day. The apartment was very contemporary with lots of stainless steel fittings, hanging bookcases (impressive) and big paintings, my room whilst pretty large only used the stainless steel aspect from the rest of the apartment and so felt a lot like a prison cell. With the Wi-Fi not working, I wasn’t there long before heading out to have a look at the city by night and to swing past McDonalds and use their free Wi-Fi to contact family and friends and plan a walk the next day and also ahead to my stay in Carcassonne. Then it was off back to my prison cell to sleep as, like Avignon, I had two nights in Montpellier but the final day I would need to be at the station early to get to Carcassonne and so the next day would be my only chance to see Montpellier. 

8 AM and I was up and out the door (Airbnb hosts usually give you keys so you can come and go as you please without waking them), first stop was the Tourism office and to see the Christmas markets and the huge theatre that is actually partially beneath a large open space called the Corum, this is effectively the centre of the city and one of the sides of a large pedestrian only part of the city. The old buildings bordering the long rectangular Place de la Comedie, which was just next to the Corum, were impressive however the graffiti over them and the empty McDonald’s bags floating in the large ‘Fountain of 3 Graces’ ruined the grandiose feel that may have once struck travellers before me back in the city’s heyday.

After this I walked through the old city, past Montpellier’s oldest three churches which were large but weren’t to the same level of workmanship in their design as what I have seen in the remainder of France so far. There were however a few nice twisty, narrow alleyways and hidden squares which were very nice and had less of a modern, touristy feel about them. Just like Paris, going back a few streets from the main touristy boulevards really helps with finding less expensive, more authentic food.

I exited the narrow alleyways near the huge Palais de Justice/Cour des assisses (Courtroom), which is located just inside the city walls and near an ancient old roman archway that has a striking resemblance to the arc de triumph. This quite pretty archway was one of the nicer monuments in Montpellier, probably spared the graffiti and beggars due to its proximity to the Courthouse, and is one of the main gateways out of the old city walls and lead to a large open area where an ancient viaduct brought water into the city via a sheltered set of wells inside a building, named quite originally, the Palace of Water.

After walking the length of the old town, I made my way back to the first tram line I could find and hitched a lift back to the City Centre to try see the major museum, the Fabre Museum. Upon arriving, the museum appeared open however I quickly found out that the all the major museums in Montpellier are closed on a Monday… Very disappointing.

It was getting reasonably late though so I headed back to the accommodation, where the Wi-Fi  was now working and planned the rest of my trip until arriving in Caen where I would spend 4 days with my friend Mathilde and her family.

Exactly a week after leaving Perth, and after seeing both the highs and lows of 1400 km of France, I was ready to take the train to Carcassonne, a UNESCO Heritage Listed Medieval City for the nights of the 17^th and 18^th for the next stage of my trip.

Rating: 3/10, with museums closed and widespread construction works.