A Week in the Mer

Sitting in Chris's Pierre Vancances- aka Peter Holidays - apartment with 6 hours to go before my flight and an uncharacteristically grey sky outside, I find myself with the time and volition to write another entry in the travel blog.

In toto it has been a good trip, although not everything I brought out with me made it as far as France; not even as far as the plane. Blissfully unaware that containers of liquid over 100ml wouldn't be allowed in my hand luggage, I had to dump the only deodorant spray I brought out with me.To be honest, it's sweet and rich scent did shout "Man w****", but it did mean that for the next 6 days Chris and I smelt identical.

Finding my way from Nice Airport to Nice-St Augustin train station was no less of a setback. On the map it looked like a ten minute walk. However, taking into account I had to traverse a motorway full of erratic French drivers and persevere against my internal compass (where my north has never been successfully calibrated with Magnetic North), I took a tour of the major highways and byways of the local area.

One hour later I arrived at the station.

Forty minutes after that I was in Juan-les-Pins, my final destination for the evening. Chris met me there; we had a coffee on the beach and headed to his holiday apartment to dump my stuff off. Chris, by the way, is not on holiday. He just works by the Med, lives in a holiday apartment, eats fresh seafood nearly every day and spends his free time travelling the coastline of Southern France. He assures me that he does work for a living.

One beautiful sunset later, we find ourselves in a local restaurant talking to a very friendly and welcoming restraunteur. A perfect opportunity for me to speak French...if I spoke French. I let Chris do the talking. Now, it turns out that Chris and I have very different ways of talking to the French. Chris's sentences are spoken with a gentrified Northenden accent; they are long; and they are divided into acts - not phrases - each with an intermission great enough for him to think of what he's going to say next, and also long enough for his conversational partner to go to the toilet and buy an ice cream. I speak French in short, simple sentences with an accent the French find impenetrable.

Somewhere between us there's the perfect Francophone, but I'm not mating with Chris to find out to be quite frank...ophone.

This seafood meal was good, but not in comparison to my lunch of Moules-Frites the next day. Sitting in cafe near Antibes, the next town along the coast, I tucked into a huge bowl of mussels drenched in a cream and white wine sauce partnered by a fat bowl of chips, bread and a view of the sea. Naeko, you'd be in heaven!

After lunch I wandered round the town of Antibes. Antibes has a marina, an old fort and a beautiful old town enclosed by ramparts, which have historically safe-guarded the town for centuries. The narrow streets of Antibes old town house what you'd expect to find - tucked away restaurants, shops selling all sorts of curios, wine and fresh and jarred produce and a wealth of quaint architecture. What you don't expect to find is what appears on first inspection to be a Costcutter called "Geoffreys of London". I went inside. It was exactly like a Costcutter. One of the price stickers was in pence.Something was afoot. Nextdoor to this was 'Le Blue Lady Pub', and on the street round the corner were two English pubs and the ubiquitous Irish Bar. All was to become apparent when Chris and I went out for a drink that night to a place called 'The Gaffe'. The significance of the name of this bar didn't dawn on me until we stepped inside. It was full of ex-pats. The TV was set to VH1 Classics and the volume was set to stun. Apparently Antibes has a large ex-pat community and seems to attract a lot of British tourists. I wasn't happy. And then when the house 'Indie' band cranked up their take on Libertine-inspired faux 'Laaaanderner', 19th-century-street-urchin-accented rock, it was time to leave. I don't care if Chris was on the lookout for the barmaid he quite fancies, he could go hunting un autre jour! We headed back to Juan-les-Pins for a few drinks and an unsuccessful attempt at getting into a recently opened nightclub (Chris's baseball cap didn't leave his head for most of my trip), we decided to turn in. An early start lay ahead the next day.

We started early the next day, as you may be aware. The plan was as follows:

1. Chris and his colleagues would move to their new digs (Peter Holidays) at 10am

2. We would complete the move by 12ish and make our train to Nice at 12.59

3. We'd be on a train to Genova at 2pm.

But life is what happens when you're busy making plans or, in this case, Chris is acquiring as much stuff as possible while you're busy making plans. It took three car loads to move Chris's stuff and we only had two cars. This collection included his fold-up bike, which he brought from London and has used a sum total of zero times in the past 4 months.

That bike cost us our first train to Nice. Luckily one of Chris's colleagues was on hand to drive us there and we made the train with 15 minutes to spare. All was well for me, Chris and, introducing, Ting.

Now, Ting is a young mainland Chinese man who loves his Chinese fiction, GPS (God knows why) and, above all else, food. He loves it even more than I do. In fact, I strongly believe that his stomach has gained self-awareness and can no longer be classed as an organ under Ting's control: it's more like a parasite. And a very vocal one at that. I have never heard anyone complain how hungry they were so often in all my life. All the way in the car, all the way on the 3 hour train journey to Genova*, all the way when we got to our B&B and then all the way to the restaurant.You can probably sense a small streak of frustration in my voice. I have to admit that I was ready to throttle him, but Chris - bless him - had booked him into a hostel…away from us (Ting's decision - it was cheaper)…on top of a hill…and it was full of screaming kids.

We had to climb the 1km uphill with Ting to get there, but it was worth it. I'm an evil b******, aren't I!J

*It's not worth pointing out that, other than Ting's hunger pangs, the train journey from Nice to Genova passed without much incident. It is, however, very much worth noting that as the train pulled into Genova station Chris discovered (after my prompting) that he had lost the return train tickets. They weren't lost, but had in fact slid under the elderly Italian lady next to him. Chris deftly and skilfully teased the tickets from underneath her seated backside under the watchful eye of her husband who was sitting opposite. Then, after completing such a harrowing procedure, we left our train compartment only to have another Italian gent call after us holding a small piece of luggage. Silver in colour and with a large strap, it was just large enough to hold, say, a digital SLR and its spare lens. More precisely, it was just about large enough to hold Chris's SLR and spare lens. Needless to say, I'm still enjoying that one.

The next day Ting explored Genova before his train home whilst Chris and I travelled south to the Cinque Terres, a UNESCO site comprising 5 villages perched on the rugged coastline of Italy surrounded by beautiful terraces cut into the slopes where vineyards have flourished for centuries. When we arrived it was bucketing it down, but after a few hours the clouds parted and the sun smiled sweetly on the two villages we visited, Manarola and Corniglia.

Both villages are very picturesque and I leave my photos to each speak the 1000 beautiful words I would have difficulty in finding. We sampled the local seafood and wine in Manarola - and some fantastic desserts, ladies - before walking along the coastline to Corniglia. By this time the sun was fully out and so were my guns (well, you have to, don't you). Corniglia can only be reached by climbing 382 steps and I guess after the previous night's hostel hike Chirs felt justified in a little energy boost. So he bought two ice creams and a can of fizzy orange drink.

And from that moment forth, he shall be known as Chris 'Due Gelati' Behrsin.

We didn't have long in Corniglia, which was a shame, and we barely had an hour and a half before we had to descend those 382 steps back to the train, which would wing us on to Genova. All in all, we wished that we'd spent less time in Genova and more time at the Cinque Terres. Genova is not the most remarkable of places and feels more like a functional port, although the San Lorenzo cathedral is a wonder of black and white stone. And it certainly s***s on Holy Angels (Sorry Joe, but it does).

We had one more day in Genova, the first half of which I spent looking round and Chris spent in Europe's second largest aquarium. We met for lunch, meandered about and then took our train home. If I was to offer advice to anyone visiting this part of Italy, it would be as follows:

1. Stay at the Red House B & B, which is 10 minutes walk from the station, only has two rooms and is basically in someone's apartment. Do, however, make sure there are two or four of you as both rooms are twins. Prices are around 30 euros a night.

2. Speak Italian, but be warned: despite my best efforts to resurrect my schoolboy Italian, once they catch on you're English, they'll speak English. Admittedly, I've never used the words 'Scusa' and 'Grazie' so many times in my life - even during my GCSEs - but I thought that within another few weeks I'd be making love to those words as the Italians do, rather than practising a feeble form of verbal Onanism. Chris rather cheekily commented that I sounded like a dubbed Italian film. He even went as far as to say I reminded him of Rudy Van Disarzio, which cannot be true as my Italian is worth well under 30 euros.

3. Only spend one night in Genova. Travel down to the Cinques Terres and say there for at least two days. There are plenty of hotels and hostels and it would have been fantastic to see the sunset over the villages with a glass of the local vino at the ready.

Still, you can't live your life by 'ifs' and 'buts', and soon it was time for us to head back to Nice. I held onto the tickets (just in case) and as Chris dozed off as I gazed out of the window watching the world go by us.

An elderly Italian lady and gent nattered to each other all the way from Genova to Ventimiglia - where we were catching our connection to Nice - as the train sped its route along the coast. I caught their conversation in spats, where my schoolboy Italian would allow. The topics spanned the usual - children, grandchildren, cooking - and their words played out in front of fleeting views of coastal towns, mildly petulant waves crashing against empty beaches, and a sun saying good night to them all.

As the sun slipped beneath the sea and I slipped somewhere between sleep and consciousness, their conversation paused momentarily as they turned to the face the views from the window.

"Il mare bello", the gent commented.
"Il mare sempre bello...il mare sempre bello", whispered the lady, almost in awe, of a sight she must have been treated to many, many times before.

I said nothing, but I couldn't have agreed with them more.

This morning Tony abandoned plans for a well-needed lie-in once French builders doing worknearby decided it was, indeed, hammer time. Today's music news from France includes the discovery that the talent of French female singer-songwriters is inversely proportional to how good looking they are,and guitarist Yvan Le Bolloc'h has a new album out.

Tony eagerly anticipates the album's release in the UK because he genuinely feels that Yvan will feel right at home as one Bolloc'h amongst a load of others!