Gare de Toulon, Côte d’Azur. 18.30.
The train to Hyéres is delayed by forty minutes, so I’ve stepped outside the station to get some fresh air. The Côte d’Azur is still in the grip of Storm Adam and the skies are the colour of steel, though they look almost blue beyond the sickly glow of the streetlights.
Clouds of cigarette smoke. Black and green olives rolling across the pavement from the trees standing outside the gare. The cheery sing-song jingle of the SNCF echoing over the rush of the wind and the casual drawl of the Provençale accent. Effortlessly chic Toulonnaise girls talking into earpieces, Eastern European sans-abri moving their blankets out of the rain, a Hispanic couple chatting away in slow, heavily accented English and a number of other accurate but overused cliches.
It’s good to be out of England, though. Two weeks without work would have driven me mad with boredom.
The train was delayed by around fifty minutes in the end. At least one of my companions was getting extremely jittery by the lack of signage on the notice boards, even as the train’s departure was seemingly imminent. Thank goodness I’ve been trained on Spain’s AVE and the last-minute-madness. After the rush for the subway in New York this spring and the gauntlet of flights going to and coming back from the Galapagos this summer, it will take a lot more than a ghost train to get under my skin.
France hasn’t ever grabbed me the way Spain has since the start, though I daresay I haven’t ever given it the chance. This is probably my eighth or ninth trip to France, if you include at least three day trips to Calais (and you leave out any holidays where France was simply a staging post), all of which add up to a little over a month on French soil. I’ve lost count of the amount of time I’ve spent in Spain, but it’s almost certainly closer to four years than it is to three.
The Côte d’Azur gets a lot of attention of the summer variety, but it’s quite beautiful under the iron skies of autumn. I’ve packed for the cold, but I wouldn’t begrudge the odd day of sunshine so I can enjoy the Mediterranean once again – it was so blissfully warm back in the summer. There’s talk of curfews because of the violent protests erupted across France right now, so I might not be going for any 3am swims, but I’m looking forward to being (relatively) tech free for a week or so.
If it weren’t for the comms-heavy side of my day job, I’d quite happily sack off the WiFi and go off grid. I miss those blissful evenings back in my year abroad days – before data became a universal thing – where leaving work meant leaving the internet behind. The amount of reading I managed to get done! There’s just no comparison.
I’ve made it to Hyéres. My final destination is the Giens Peninsula, some four kilometres to the south. It’s late and the sky is threatening rain, so I don’t quite fancy walking it. The taxis here are expensive at 40-50€ a throw and the three or four Uber drivers in town are reluctant to accept what is probably not a very cost-effective return journey. But I’m not that bothered. I’m confident we’ll get there somehow. BB x
