Travel by the southern coast of France | #club75

In my previous post, I described how we crossed the border with France and visited the Nord region near Belgium, and then I mentioned the TGV trip to Marseille where we sang the Marseillaise during a national holiday.

In Marseille, we slept in an apartment rented by Airbnb to be able to do our laundry, eat a hot meal and take a break from sleeping in a tent. This little bit of luxury every now and then is badly needed to keep morale high. We also ordered carpooling to Montpellier, which was supposed to transport us to that city the next day. This is another unplanned expense, but when you stop sticking to the budget plan, each next irrational step becomes easier. Later, we were catching up with the budget for weeks, which we finally managed to do after a month.

_{Sitting on the square next to the old harbor}

We spent the first-day arranging luggage, washing, drying clothes, and so on. In the second, carpooling was planned for the evening. We also wrote, just in case, that we are traveling with a dog, and then we went for a short city tour and a long stay on the beach.

I'm sorry to say this, but ... Marseille was gross. We saw a lot of very nice places in France, some mediocre and ugly, but Marseille was the worst of all. A city of dirt and stench, a city without green areas, Parques with concrete and asphalt melting in the hot sun, a city without a bit of shade and very high temperatures. On top of that, it's loud with disco music. The beach is crowded and uninteresting, although this is what we expected. Not wanting to go too far, we chose the one closest to the center.

_{The Marseille city}

In addition, to deepen our disgust even more, when we sat down to dinner at a restaurant, something exploded in the area. It exploded loudly, but probably not as it should be, because apart from the noise and the quickly distracting people, much else didn't happen. The army arrived in literally three minutes and since then it has been in every corner of the city, carefully patrolling the streets, fearing that someone might want to blow up this littered city.

Problems with the carpooling and the trekking among the coast

We made it to the evening and happy that in a moment we would be far from Marseilles, we headed towards the agreed meeting point with a carpooling girl. Unfortunately, the bad day must remain so until the end, so the girl told us that she does not accept dogs in the car because she is afraid of them. Although the profile on the website said something else, and in addition, we sent information that we were traveling with a dog, but she was not too interested in it. After a moment of negotiation, we generously offer that when she will give us back the money, we can cancel the trip. She didn't want to do that, so finally she accepted the dog as a passenger.

Bestia (our dog, the gentlest creature in the world) got a muzzle, and the girl was panicking all the way that he is scratching the seats (he didn't) or wants to bite her when she shifts gears (he didn't). Fortunately, we could focus on talking to a fellow passenger and try to forget about it. A fellow passenger was Ludwig, a Frenchman of our age and… with plans similar to ours. He was going to South America, heading for Patagonia from Buenos Aires. He also did not know how long his journey will take and whether he will come back to Europe at all. We exchanged knowledge and contacts. At that time, we did not know yet that we will meet Ludwig again in the streets of Santiago de Chile 1.5 years later and that we will spend the whole day telling stories from our travels to each other.

The following days were filled with trekking. We spent the night mainly on the beaches, sometimes in a tent, sometimes only in sleeping bags. The benefits of communal showers on the beaches and, better, in the harbors (hot water showers! Mmmmm…) made it perhaps the cleanest part of our trip. We could take a shower two or three times a day.

_{During the day we couldn't walk too much because our dog did not tolerate high temperatures. We were traveling mostly early in the morning and in the late evenings}

We love France for the naturists' community which is huge in this country. My nudist soul felt like a paradise not only on the naturists' beaches but also in whole naked villages. I love naturism, whenever I have the opportunity to sunbathe completely naked, I prefer this solution. Unfortunately in South America, there are no specially designated places where you can enjoy the sun without clothes - the only solution is to find a completely deserted place. France and then Spain are the last places where we could freely sunbathe the way we like, knowing that we are not breaking the law.

The most interesting place where we slept in the south of the country was a swamp reserve, which has completely dried up and created the widest beach our eyes have seen. The enormity of the sand made it possible to imagine that you were in the desert.

_{Port Nouvelle - dried out swamp reserve}

When we left this miracle of nature behind and passed into a zone of clearings and low thickets, a tern began to rise above our heads. A bird, like a bird. Screeching, probably a form of courtship - I thought, and if it weren't for Krzysiu, I would probably be in the hospital. However, Krzyś was warned against these birds once, while traveling through the endless wastelands of Svalbard. They make nests in the bushes and if anyone gets too close to them, they warn in the way they have warned us. When a person does not obey, they attack by stabbing with their beak at the highest point of the body, i.e. the head. There are two solutions - retreat, or when you need to move forward, lift a stick or a backpack high up so that the bird attacks the equipment instead of us. We chose the first solution and after a few meters back, the bird calmed down and dived into the bushes from which it had flown earlier. We were saved.

We ended our adventure with this beautiful country in Cerbere - a fabulous place. It is situated by the sea, but small hills, up to 1000 m maximum, blend in with the sea. The variety of shrubs and flowers enchants after a few days of semi-arid views of the sun-burnt coast. Besides that, we were surprised with the urban planning - the city is multi-level. You can traverse between the levels along streets and sidewalks, but also through long, intricate tunnels, which, as is often the case with tunnels, are also street art galleries, sometimes very interesting. Graffiti and murals, moreover, emerge from it and to the surface, encouraging entry, which at first may be really disturbing, but it is a completely unfounded fear. Cerbere is an exceptionally safe town.