Six Days In France: Saturday, Cotes des Basques

Having almost fried my shoulders at Anglet, I had to spend Saturday in as much shade as possible. Also, I had to check out of the hotel at ten o'clock, though the hotel let me store my bags and change in the evening into restaurant-suitable clothes. Shade is in short supply in Biarritz, but there's a cliff that provides some until about eleven o'clock, a park on the cliff that will get you by until about midday, restaurants, and another park with winding paths and trees. I began the very long day about ten-fifteen, and the tide was in. Really in.

After about an hour, it had turned and was on its way out...

....so I retreated into the first park-on-the-hillside...

By the time I'd taken that photograph, there was no hiding from the sun, so I went to the Bar de la Cote and settled in for lunch. After I could extend that no longer - they don't do "service continu" - I wandered a few dozen metres into another park on the cliffside and spent a while there. Which brings us to the surfers.

You need to click on the photograph below to see how many there are out there, bobbing about. This was about four o'clock in the afternoon, I think. And there had been no decent waves since the morning. But they all paddled out and hung around waiting for the waves. Or maybe the point was just to hang out in the water: like people fishing in public ponds and lakes. The point is not to catch fish, it's to be fishing - and therefore not to be any of the many places you don't want to be.

And when that pine-tree refuge could hide me from the sun no more, I snuck along the shady side of the streets to the old town and down to the beach, thinking I would pass some time in a cafe with losts of shade above the beach, and which was closed. ("Ferme le samdi" - va savoir) So I finally went down to the beach and found a shady spot, where I listened to Miles' On The Corner.

Of course the kids jump into the water. Always have, always will. Some things will never change, and a good thing too.

From there, I had a chocolate chaud at a cafe in the town, changed in the hotel, had a wonderful supper at Chez Ospio, waited at the hotel until ten, when a taxi took me down to the station in about five minutes flat. Thirteen euros. And so to the sleeper back to the Gare d'Austerlitz.

Six Days In France: Street Art at Anglet Beach

There's a path that runs all the way along the beach from Anglet Plages to Anglet Barre, to save you trudging through the sand, and about half-way down is a concrete thing with an platform and benches on top. Some enterprising writers have made it their own.

Click on the photographs to get more detail. It's worth it.

Six Days in France: The Beaches at Anglet

Anglet is on the end of the 10 bus from Biarritz. The bus has a slightly bizarre timetable...

... ummm, why are there fewer buses in the school holidays, Sundays and Public Holidays than during the regular days, because wouldn't there be more people wanting to go to the beach during the holidays? Anyway, even if it has a bizzare timetable, it has this really great route announcement system...

...apologies for the shake. The journey costs one euro and takes about twenty minutes. There was a stop just outside my hotel. 

Anglet is where the serious surfers go. Some of the afternoon waves were two metres or slightly more, and I understand that's a pretty big deal on this side of the Atlantic. There are no fancy shops or restaurants, and the new centre at Anglet Plages

is fairly, well, tacky-fun-stuff. Grown-ups can ignore it and they seem to. I had lunch at Marinella Spot and competently tasty it was. Lots of bourgeois surfers...

Though how anyone can sit in that sun is beyond me. And so to the sand and sea...

As ever, do click on the photographs to get the larger versions, which give you a much better impression. Except for the bit where it was 82-86 degrees in old money.

Six Days In France: Biarritz Beaches - the Overview

There are four beaches in Biarritz. From the north: Anglet...

...the Plage Miramar and Grande Plage...

...which is a lot smaller at high tide...

...the Old Town...

...and the Cote des Basques and Plage Marbella...

... which disappears at high tide. Fooled me the first day.

You need to know this: there is no shade on any of them. (Well, except for a couple of square metres of the Old Town). Once the sun has hit the sand, that's it until sunset or a nasty cloud.

Serious surfers and locals go to Anglet, then to the Cote des Basques, and the Old Town is the local's family beach. The Eurotrash go to the Grande Plage. The Cote des Basques was about a hundred metres from my hotel, so I spent two of the four days there.

At Anglet and Cote sdes Basques, I cached my Eastpak courier bag in some rocks and went for long walks. It was still there when I returned. I have no idea how the Police do it (perhaps because they carry guns and look like soldiers), but they manage to keep the, errr, opportunists off the beaches.

It's a very French bourgeois town: everyone else on the beach likely has more money and a way cooler motorbike or scooter that the average English visitor. (High-end scooters are really big over there, especially amongst les filles BoBo.) God alone knows what the place is like in July or August - it felt busy enough in late September, but then the weather was unseasonably hot and sunny - again, thanks to the Seven Dials effect.

Of course, you shouldn't go. It's a dreadful place. Terrible. I'd only go again because I have low self-esteem and don't believe I deserve the good things in life. You should go to, oh, Nice.

Six Days in France: Overnight to Biarritz

I took the sleeper to Biarritz. You can fly there from the UK, but the flights are in the middle of the day in both directions, so you lose two days messing around airports. Take the sleeper and you get two full days back.

SNCF's idea of a "First Class" sleeper compartment is pretty basic: four bunks, thin mattresses and foam pillows, and if you're lucky the water works in the little toilettes at both ends of the carriage. If you're lucky. I shared the sleeper compartment with a young lady Korean student and two early thirty-something Frenchmen: a BCBG investment banker based in London and a supplier manager for a company whose business I didn't catch but was based in Biarritz with suppliers in Poland (not a thinkable sentence in 1970). We chatted politely for a short while and then got on with the serious business of trying to get to sleep. It takes a while, and I find I woke up when the train stopped rather than when it was running. The Korean student barely got off fast enough at Bayonne, and what felt like a split second later, it was our turn to tumble off at Biarritz. 07:00 in the morning. I had a quick coffee and croissant in the station buffet, where the barman suggested I take the A1 bus into town. I explained to the driver where I was going and he told me the name of the stop I needed. Don't even think about walking from the station into the town: it's steep uphill all the way and a lot further than it looks on the map. The hotel let me in, at the unearthly and still dark of 07:25 and I had breakfast on the patio as dawn broke. My chosen table is right in front of the camera. This was my breakfast view all week.

This is the road to the "Cote des Basques" in the signpost. It's shorter than the walk across my local Cineworld on the way to the station every morning. That's right. In half the time it takes me to walk from the car to the station, I could walk from the hotel to a Biarritz beach. Or in the other direction, I could be down in the town centre. You see, heaven does exist. Just not in the Middlesex suburbs. The beaches are for another post.

Six Days In France: An Afternoon's Stroll Through Paris

I arrived at Charles de Gaulle about 13:00, thanks to delays at Heathrow, and took the train to the Gare du Nord, and the 5 line to Gare d'Austerlitz - the minor miracle being my use of the machines to buy a carnet for the Metro. I left my bag in the Consigne at Austerlitz, where I would be catching the 23:15 sleeper to Biarritz, and headed into Paris.

First stop, a visual rest from the, err, urban experience of the railway trip. A walk through the Jardin des Plantes, which is about a hundred metres from Austerlitz.

After a quick omlette in sight of a closed (Tuesday!) Centre Pompidou, I wandered into the Square de la Tour St Jacques, where I don't think I've wandered before.

The whole of Europe was having a September heatwave, and under those circumstances it is compulsory for Parisians to have picnics in the park. Besides, they have to got be outside to smoke. Smoking is still big in France. They have traditional values there. My destination was the restaurant Le Telegraph which I'd booked for 19:30 on the internet on Sunday. So I did what everyone has to do on a sunny late afternoon...

... I visited the Notre Dame and walked along the Seine. Everyone was out and drinking decorously from bottles. And smoking.

It gets no more laid-back romantic than this. Well, okay, the Nikki de Saint-Phalle statue in the Caisse de Depots may not be romantic, but it's a neat little piece. The staff at le Telegraph couldn't have been more charming, the restaurant was almost full by half-past eight, mostly of family groups, and the food was good. Ten years ago I would have said it was wonderful, but London has moved on now, and I've got used to that level of cooking. I spent the best part of an hour in a sidewalk cafe just up the road, before heading back to the Rue du Bac Metro and so to the train at Austerlitz.