Marseille & the South coast of France
Alan's Log:
Joan's Log:
Marseille to Cannes
April 12th, 2008
Route from Marseille to Cassis
Not to be used for navigation
Marseille
"It's dirty...It's a pit...The crime!...Ugly..." "Don't go there!" We had heard quite a few negative things about Marseille; I knew it was once and still is a major port
and fishing is a big industry; I knew
that my hero, Julia Child lived here in the 1950's and loved it; I also
knew that it was birthplace of bouillabaisse, the legendary French fisherman's
stew, which we were both anticipating trying. It turned out that Marseille is charming. It happens to be the oldest city in France, founded by the Phoenicians in 600 BC. It is also France's second largest city and yes it may be dirty, but so are London and Lisbon for that matter, and it certainly is not a pit or ugly, as for crime...I think you'll find that in any large city. Also €3.05 Billion of EU money is being spent on a large-scale revitalization project to improve the port area, so don't mark it off your destination list.
The first thing you learn about Marseille is that it is vast, probably bigger than Barcelona. Secondly it is dirty. To enjoy Marseille you have to keep an eye on where you walk and what you touch, and you have to embrace its grubbiness. It pays off. We were in a certain amount of culture shock coming from Barcelona where the street crews are out washing the streets EVERY night. Here the Mistral wind blows and trash floats around everywhere but the people here seem to be able to ignore it all and go on with their lives and so did we.
Ah the people! It feels so different here from Spain and yet we are only a couple of hundred miles away. There is a wonderful melange of races and colors in Marseille. People from all the former French colonies around the world live here and contribute to the culture and to the food. There is an enormous variety of shops, restaurants and flavours. Barcelona was so, well so homogenous and so Spanish!
We spent a week in Marseille. We wandered around the Vieux Port where fishermen still sell their catch directly from the boat. We ate Bouillabaisse; twice - the tourist one and the real one. We walked and walked the streets and particularly enjoyed the Panier district near Vieux Port. Mundane work intervened for a few days as we did our paperwork, filed our taxes and emailed them to the IRS from the local McDonald's internet connection - the joys of 21st Century travel! I did boat chores and serviced the winches and Joan shopped for clothes and shoes and wine and cheese and pate etc.
For me Marseille is memorable for the peals of its church bells every half hour, and the laughter and squeals of happy children. Every hour was a celebration for the bellringers as they competed with one another to produce peal after peal of wonderful sounding hand-pulled church bells. It all appeared to be 'live' with no recordings and no amplifiers. During the day the sound of happy children playing in school yards concealed by high walls, echoed through the narrow streets of the Panier district.
We really enjoyed our week in Marseille, I especially loved The Panier (The Basket) the oldest section of the city. Narrow streets, which become steps amble up a steep hill; the old buildings are various shades of faded pastels, primarily buttery yellows with bright blue shutters and window trim. I took lots of photos which will be future paintings.
The French really get it when it comes to food. Shopping in an average grocery store in Marseille is like shopping in a ultra high-end gourmet supermarket back in the States. They place such an importance on quality, great products and presentation. I felt like a kid in a candy store! I couldn't help but stock up on cheese from the Perigord region, fig confit, lavender-scented honey, French butter! Herbs du Provence, vinegars, olive oil, and good French mustard. If you haven't figured it out by now, I'm way into food, I have been for about 35 years. Its much more than a hobby or pastime, it's a major creative outlet for me. I love reading about it, shopping for it, cooking it, and eating it! I have at times seriously considered making a career out of it, I still might. The first thing I want to know when we arrive in a new place, is where is the supermarket and when and where is the fresh market. Marseille did not disappoint me and I have a feeling it's only going to get better. So, I'm pretty much in heaven here, the painting and cooking opportunities are endless.
About that bouillabaisse...the origins of which began here in Marseille many years ago as a common fish soup prepared by the fish-wives with the left-over scraps of what wasn't sold that day, and has evolved into the much celebrated item on every menu, in every restaurant in the old port. We ended up going to a highly recommended restaurant, Chez Fonfon, a little beyond the old port in the cutest little story-book fishing village of Vallon des Auffes. We forgot our camera!!! What a shame, because sunset, when we arrived, was an incredible photo opp; just visualize rows of brightly painted little fishing boats, in a tiny harbor surrounded by quaint buildings lit by the golden evening light.
Bouillabaisse is traditionally served in 2 courses, 1st a rich brown fish broth is served with a basket of toasted croutons, a small bowl of fresh garlic, and a bowl of rouille (a spicy, garlicky pink-colored sauce). The garlic is rubbed on the crouton and spread with the rouille, then the crouton is floated in the broth. Yum! Then a platter of about 5 kinds of fish arrives, to be eaten separately or combined with the broth. We combined ours. As wonderful as it all was, it turned out to be too much for us. Too expensive, too much garlic, too much fish, too much broth. We OD'd on it! The next day was a major garlic hangover. The cure for a garlic hangover? Eat more garlic! Not too hard for us.
Aside from obsessing about food, we also went site-seeing. At the very top of the city's highest hill, standing watch over Marseille and overlooking the sea, is a cathedral. The Basilique Notre Dame de la Garde. It's not that old as churches go in Europe, only about 170 years old. We...world travelers that we are, took the little tourist choo-choo train up, rather then hike the 2 steep miles to the top, and were rewarded with breath taking 360 degree views of the city and harbor.
Aix-en-Provence
Another day we took the bus to Aix-en-Provence, a beautiful and sophisticated city with tree-lined boulevards, elegant cafes, softly-colored buildings accented with bright-colored trim, fountains, and hoards of university students, which added a nice Bohemian under-current. Catching the bus couldn't have been easier. We decided to go to Aix and the first bus stop we came to (right at the head of Vieux port) has buses leaving every 15 minutes for Aix! One was waiting as we approached the bus stop so we hopped on and for about €3 we were whisked to Aix in comfort with only 3 or 4 stops en route.
We wandered around the lovely old quarter, looking for something cheaper than the bistros on the main street Mirabeau and stopped for a fantastic lunch at Chez Denis on a tiny side street. The menu featured only two starters and two main course choices, all sounded excellent and so in we went. For €11 each we enjoyed a lovely lunch of Starters: Gratin of Mussels with Saffron/Warm fresh chevre on toast with dried ham and Main Course: Duck breast with mustard sauce and mashed potatoes/Pasta with scallops and white wine sauce. For dessert Joan enjoyed homemade nougat ice-cream with mixed red berries on top . To die for she said!
Then we spent several hours walking it off in the Musee Granet which houses an enormous art collection, including 9 Cezanne's (Paul Cezanne is a native son) BUT 3 were out on loan, oh well...the rest of the art made up of it.
The Calanques (Sormiou, Morgiou, Port Miou)
We were keen to move east from Marseille towards Monaco. En route we would pass the Calanques of Provence. These deep-cut bays into south-facing limestone cliffs are reminiscent of Norwegian fjords but much smaller and in the summer the area attracts thousands of hikers, bird watchers, tourists and sun-seekers. We would be out of season, but perhaps this was an opportunity to see the beauty of nature unencumbered by its tourist trappings. We departed Marseille in a brisk 18kt breeze and sailed south and around Cap Croisette heading east. We made a lunch stop at Calanque de Morgiou. It is pretty ,with a small port and village at the head, but too small for Moonstruck to get in and the wind was gusting down the calanque and for once our anchor would not hold, so after lunch (Morbier, Chevre and wonderful pate with a cheap but good French Cremant (what they call champagne that is made outside the Champagne DOC) decided to move further along the coast where we found Port Miou.
Port Miou
is
misnamed as it
is in fact a long, narrow calanque with no harbour or town. We intended to anchor
but mooring balls have been installed where we would have anchored,
so we tied up to a buoy for the night and led a line from
the stern to a ring in the cliff wall, only 20 feet off our stern. On the
far side of the calanque was a high limestone wall, with strangely linear seams.
It turned out this calanque has been a quarry for over 2000
years. Roman galleys had tied up here and quarried stone to build the empire.
Much more recently stone was quarried here to build the Suez Canal.
The quarry is now silent, the machinery is long gone and all this harvesting has left
remarkably little trace. A stone wall or two; what appear to have
been loading ramps or chutes; a small abandoned chateau and an amazing place to hang out,
hike, or it turns out, make love at sunset (not us Mom!).We did not hike (nor make love at sunset) but we did take a walk along the ridge of the calanque and got some nice pictures of the bay. Later we enjoyed our dinner on board. Roast lamb. Joan pointed out a couple on the rocks just above us. They had found a beautiful spot to watch the sun going down over a lone sailing yacht...Moonstruck. When she stripped off her pants I also started to take notice. Several minutes later the sun set over the cliffs, the breeze became noticeably chillier, the couple disengaged and beat a retreat. Dessert was somewhat of an anticlimax.
Cassis
The next morning, a short hop around the headland to Cassis. Home of a renowned sweet white wine and a tiny harbour, only just big enough for Moonstruck. It is our first Med harbour. Until now we have stayed mainly in purpose-built marinas from necessity. But now we are entering the Mediterranean of the Romans and the Greeks and of harbours that have sheltered frail craft for millennia. Cassis is small, and tight and it's difficult to maneuver inside. We were instructed to wait outside for a while to allow other boats to sort themselves out. It was a bright sunny day and while we waited we could see early season sun-seekers staked out on the wind-sheltered beach and cliff ledges just outside the harbor to the west of the village. We med-moored (stern to dock, picked up a bowline from the dock laid to a mooring off the bow) and took time to admire the view of the harbor.
It was a crystal clear, bright sunny day. The sky was blue with not a cloud (the pix were taken later during the week). Humidity registered 24% in the harbor - astoundingly low for a coastal town!
A booby had made a nest on a pile of rope on the bow of the adjacent boat and spent the afternoon anxiously scanning the sky for his mate. There is a beach next to the harbour and between the two is an open area for the serious game of boules.
Reality bites
'Laverie' means Laundromat in French. We had been unable to find one in Marseille. In Cassis Laverie meant eight old washing machines (four broken), two decrepit dryers (one broken) and a dark, dirty room with no place to fold, or sit. Joan rates laundries and her rating for this one is not fit to print. We have two weeks plus of laundry that would not wait, and I know Kevin would expect me to be wearing clean underwear for his wedding on Saturday. So we washed and washed. The dryer was defective, so we strung ropes up and down the length of Moonstruck (inside because it was looking like rain) and I reminded myself that this was no worse , in fact it was far less worse, than the typical business meeting........Provence Villages & Kevin & Penny's wedding
Our good friends Kevin & Penny live in France, in the Dordogne valley and invited us to their wedding. It can't be that far to drive we thought....So we rented a car and spent a couple of days dawdling through Provence on our way to their village. We were way "out of season" and of course the famous Provence lavender fields were not in bloom, and the weather was iffy at best. We made the most of it. We bought cheese and fresh baguettes and ate a picnic lunch perched on a wall overlooking a hillside village. We did manage to see the cherry trees in bloom, as well as a number of lovely Provence villages between rain showers.
We had no idea it would take us so long to drive to the Dordogne, there wasn't a direct route by major highway, so we ended up in a frantic mad dash, pushing our tiny rental car with its lawnmower engine to the limit, driving flat out through a blur of the most beautiful, rolling, rural farm-land and adorable villages, as I concentrated on the map for hours on end. We made only 2 quick stops in 7 hours, one for gas and one for well...you know. In the pouring rain, under an umbrella, on a country lane and a passing car honked his horn at me!
By the time we arrived at Kevin and Penny's lovely old stone farm house we were 2 hours late, and the last guest who had stayed behind to help clean up after the Vin d'honour (where traditionally the hamlet gathers to toast the bride and groom) was just getting ready to leave for the reception. We followed her, thank goodness, or we would have never found it. We arrived at the reception just as the fine French champagne started to flow!
The next day we were able to spend some more time with Kevin & Penny at their 'new' home. Four years ago they moved from the first farmhouse that they restored to another in a lovely hilltop village. It was an old falling-down farmhouse and barn that had not been lived for nearly 100 years. The work they have done is incredible. For starters the barn's roof was leaning over towards the house, so off came the roof tiles, the lateral roof supports were cut, the roof was pulled straight, then reattached to the barn and the lateral supports and the tiles put back on. Then a concrete and glass tower was built to connect the two buildings. The barn floor is comprised of slabs of rock about 3' in diameter and 6" deep and of course they needed levelling, so all had to be removed by hand and lever and reset. In four years K&P have turned this wreck into an adorable warm home with an unparalleled view over the Dordogne valley.
The Dordogne region is quintessental French countryside at it's finest, and one of the reasons why I am completely in love with France. Beautifully maintained little farms producing the best goat cheese in France, probably the world, yards full of chickens and ducks, old mills, the best antique shopping ever! (when you see a sign that says Brocante - stop!) There are clusters of tiny hamlets, medieval villages, stately chateaux, and fairy-tale castles on hill-tops. What you won't see are McDonald's or any fast food restaurant of any sort of commercial advertizing signage, other then little handmade signs for chevre or honey and eggs, I love that! If you go there, stay in a chambre d'hote (a French B&B) they are all over, very resonable, and are usally in a centuries-old farm house.
We spent 2 days in the scenic Luberon area of Provence, famous for it's wonderful hill-top villages, cherries, lavender, and where Peter Mayle lives and wrote his books about the area, most famously in 'A Year in Provence'. Understandably, it is also an artist's Mecca. I have wanted to spend time in this area for years and it was raining :0( We made the most of it, we stopped at the most scenic villages, we bought an umbrella, we had a rustic picnic sitting on an old wall overlooking the village of Lourmatin, during an hour of sun. We passed hundreds of vineyards on a checkerboard landscape, interwoven with snowy white cherry orchards in full bloom. We passed miles and miles of dormant lavender fields, just teasing me with the promise of how spectacular things will be come July. I took tons of photos, despite the clouds, I can paint them out!
Most of the villages wind around the highest hills for defensive purposes and are a beautiful sight from miles away.
One characteristic, which I thought was fascinating about most of them; and is commonly found in the older villages all over France, was an ancient lavoir, which is the communal village wash house, where the women would gather to wash the family's clothes by hand. They are usually open on all sides and covered with a tile roof over a small shallow pool with a fresh water source, and a raised scrubbing stone or bench on one end. I could just imagine the generations of women who spent many hours toiling away, but in the pleasant company of each other, exchanging village gossip and sharing their stories, although the water was cold and it had to have been brutal work in the winter. Now they stand as a quiet reminder of how the lives of women have changed, at least in this part of the world.
My most favorite place of all was a village called Roussillon, I could have spent a month there! All the houses and buildings in the entire village are painted in my colors! Mostly every shade of rust, with dusky pinks, apricots, and mustard yellows as well, just georgous color combinations. The colors are the result of a huge deposit of ochre, which the town was built on. The ochre is mined and used to tint paint, which is the reason almost all the buildings in Provence are painted in shades of ochre. The ochre is also used to tint artist's paint and pastels, which I found for sale in the Ochre Conservatory near the town. Now I have all the wonderful colors of Roussillon with me in my pastel collection, I can't wait to use them.
Next....The French Riviera. We head towards Saint Tropez, Cannes, Nice and Monaco.