This morning started at 5am for me, not having too bad a sleep which is a nice way to start the trip. After a quick shower and a check of my emails it was downstairs to meet the group. 19 people on our tour group today, some more will join us throughout the trip and others will leave, so it's bit of a mix of different groups on our one tour. We made our way through England to Dover where we catch the ferry across to Calais, France, the white cliffs of Dover are made from chalk which gives them the white look, Winston Churchill also use to have a bunker under the cliffs called out of the chalky rock over a period of 100 days, but after the war this was abandoned and vandalised, and only just recently opened to the public less than a year ago. Sitting on the ferry, I took the time to get to know a couple of the guys on the tour, after all, it was raining so wasn't much to see out the window. Tim who is from Christchurch, and is currently living in Aussie, despite him saying he is homeless. Fabian who is Tim's friend is an Aussie. Tim use to deliver The Press when he lived in Christchurch, and Fabian use to be a chef, but now decided to be an electrical engineer. So the makeup of people on this trip so 11 Aussies, 5 Kiwis, 2 Canadians, 1 American. Sabrina our guide is a bundle of knowledge of France, she studied French politics while living in France. Very clued up with what's going on and and knows the history of the places really well. A couple of interesting facts, France made a lot of its money from Nuclear power, they have 56 nuclear plants around France and sell a lot of the extra energy off to other countries, they even have school trips to the plants and do tours around them with the kids. After arriving in France, it was straight onto the tour bus to head to Paris. Still raining, so not really much to see out the window apart from a few wind mills for generating energy, along with fields of Rapeseed, used for producing Canola oil. We arrived at our hostel in Paris at about 4:30, giving us about 30 minutes to get into our room, freshen ourselves up, before making our way downstairs for dinner. A rather normal meal this evening, apart from the snail that was part of our entree. If you ask what it tastes like... Well, a garlic flavoured snail. It was garlic flavoured, and it was a snail, so that's really the best way to describe it. From dinner, we headed back onto the bus where we were taken around Paris on a guided tour of the main sights to see, unfortunately by this stage The jet lag had started to kick in, and I started dozing off at points thought this part. As mentioned earlier, Sabrina knows a heap about this area and was able to tell about the buildings, the history of them, what they use to be and what they are now. Traffic was a bit of a nightmare during this trip, according to our bus driver Ronnie, this is the worst he has had on 6 years. With approximately 65 million people living around France, you would expect a fair bit of traffic, but it appears that the reason for tonight's problem was to do with a protest that was happening, was sure a strange thing to see the ops directing traffic while carrying a machine gum over the shoulder, unfortunately, I didn't thin fast enough and grab a picture of it. There were Riot police there, and as we made our way towards the Eiffel Tower we saw a whole heap of cop cars making there way down the road to the protest point. We got out for a quick stop by the Eiffel Tower to grab a few pics, but it was also partly to see where we would be needing to meet tomorrow for dinner and possibly the bike ride tour should we have chosen that activity (which I did). After which we made our way back to the hostel. So tomorrow is going to be a pretty full on day, and even then, I'm only going to see a small fraction of what I want to see. I'll no doubt need to be ominous back to Paris in the future to see more of it.