Europe @ 2.4 km/h (30 page)

The tour over, we disperse, many of us to enjoy the spectacular city views. Forswearing any more speed record attempts, I still find a descent from just under the dome to the start of the spiral ramp irresistible. My time of one minute 27 seconds I consider creditable in the circumstances. Had more people got out of my way in time, who knows? A minute, even, might have been within my grasp.

873-875 km

Today Siegfried meets me by prearrangement at Berlin’s famous Pergamonmuseum. He says it is absolutely unthinkable I should leave the city without seeing it. Built from 1909-1930 largely to hold finds by Germany’s Middle and Near East archaeologists, it features the Throne Room of Babylon, with its still scintillating glazed and coloured bricks from the 2600-year-old reign of Nebuchadnezzar.

The museum’s crowning glory is the Ishtar Gate, named after a Babylonian goddess. Decorated with representations of bulls and ‘dragons’, it sports one creature with the head and body of a snake, the forelegs of a lion, the hind legs of a bird and a scorpion’s sting in the tail. Awesome, not to say fearsome. Again I’m struck by how much history is generally unknown. Who of us have heard of the ancient nation of Hatti, which until its collapse
circa
1200 BC was a great power in the ancient world?

Tonight Sieger and Ingrid are my guests at a
Kartoffelhaus
(potato restaurant) near the old Red Town Hall in East Berlin, and still they insist on paying. German kindness is not always random and spontaneous, I have found: sometimes it can be quite premeditated.

876-883 km

Today, my last full day in Germany, I take the train from Berlin to Frankfurt, completing a rather large loop since my first European landfall here five months ago. What do the Germans think of the French? If Charlotte, a 28-year-old passenger on the train to Frankfurt, is typical, not much. ‘Paris is fantastic, of course, but the people there are unfriendly to outsiders,’ she says. I wonder whether the fact she speaks no French — and I have just enough to get by — will make a difference. Should know soon enough.

And so to the bus station, on my 40th day in Germany, for the overnight coach to Paris. This country has energised me. I note that I’ve done 7.6 km per day, nearly twice as much as I was averaging in Russia. And my overall average speed has risen to 2.57 km/h. Is it possible I am going too fast? The more I see, the more I miss. Oh for the days when there was time to reflect and compare new impressions, when the journey was young. Memo for the future: always try to take Europe at 2.4 km/h.

Our Eurolines bus isn’t even doing that. Far from coasting into France, we are stopped at the old frontier. There may be no more border controls in the ‘new Europe’ but there is a police check in these security-obsessed times.
Ordnung muss sein
to the nth degree. On this score, I’m sure, the French are every bit as German as the rest of us.

THE NORTH OF FRANCE

Time spent: 30 days

Distance covered: 1513 km

Distance pushed: 229.4 km

Average speed: 2.665 km/h

Journey distance to date: 17,717 km

Champagne and champignons. The Seine and Eiffel Tower. French kisses, letters, polish, fried potatoes.
Bon voyage
.
Bon
appétit
. Sorbonne, to a degree. Putting on the Ritz.
Bonne idée. Idée fixe.
Gare de Lyon. Gare d’Austerlitz.
Merci beaucoup
d’état. One revolution gone too far? Tumbrils à la carte but not for Joan of — Arc. De Triomphe posthumous. Parc De Tuileries. Foreign Legion.
Fleur-de-lys
. Laissez-faire the Sun King. Quai d’Orsay. And
musée
too. Verdun. Versailles. Marseilles. Lycées. Rousseau. Marceau. Marcel. Proust. Lumière (the brothers). Encore for the Enlightenment: Voltaire and all the others.
Candide.
The best of all possible glosses. The Panthéon. The Somme. The worst of all possible losses. Descartes: I think,
donc je suis Rodin. The
Thinker.
Charles de Gaulle
. Je vous ai compris
. François Mitterrand.
Cohabitation
.
Le rugby. Le foot. Voilà
Balzac or Jacques Chirac. Marianne.
Mariage
. Go figure! O
Le Figaro
!
Libération
.
Le Monde
.
Liberté. Egalité. Sécurité
for Mobutu and Baby Doc. Lavender in bloom.
Chanel No. 5.
TV Cinq. Petanque warfare. Normandy. The D-Day dead. Cheese-eating surrender monkeys also succumb to beef bourguignon,
cassoulet
, ratatouille, bouillabaisse, bouillon, crêpes bretonnes, quiche lorraine, and the Maid of Orléans.
Bicyclettes.
Tour de France. The metric system. Christian Dior
. Elégance.
La
belle France
. Left Bank. Right Bank.
Vive la différence
. The Palais des Papes at Avignon where
Sur le pont l’on y danse
. The belles of France at the Palais de Danse. Latin Quarter. City of Lights and
bateaux
mouches
.
Les Misérables.
Hugo and Huguenots. Monsieur Hulot. Brigitte Bardot. Madame Tussaud. Can-can. Cannes. The Côte d’Azur. Claude Debussy. Pilgrims at Lourdes. Vichy. Vichyssoise.
Jeu d’esprit
.
Joie de vivre
. Legerdemain.
Légion d’honneur
. Champs-Elysées. Gay Paree. Andre Gidé. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.
The
Little Prince
. Rimbaud. Grand Prix. Prix Goncourt. Jean-Paul Sartre and de Beauvoir. Existentialism, applied to Camus, though he’s an Outsider, Sarkozy too. Chateaux. Bureaux. Roland Garros. Faubourg St Antoine. Juan les Pins. Le Pen. Le Bic.
Le flic
.
Film noir
. And then Gérard Depardieu. Catherine Deneuve.
Agent provocateur.
Chansons d’amour
. Aznavour. Toulouse-Lautrec.
J’accuse
. So does Zola, But, to amuse, I prefer Rabelais and Molière. Tartuffe. And to awe: Saint-Saens. Cézanne. Bizet. Renoir. Gauguin. Van Gogh. Go for a burn with Renault (
deux chevaux
), Peugeot or Citroën. Marie-Antoinette. ‘Let them eat cake.’
Mais non.
Baguettes, Marie
! Curie. Roquefort and Brie.
Mais oui
? Why, certainly!
Gruyère
.
Camembert.
Goat cheese with Beaujolais
.
Don’t say cheese, say
belle fromage.
Par excellence
. Pasteur. Piaf.
Je ne regrette
…
C’est la vie. La Vie en
Rose
. Pigalle. Les Halles. Mademoiselle. Maupassant. Croissants. Soupçon.
Soup du
jour
.
Croque monsieur
. Bovary?
Oui, madame
. Nôtre-Dame. Sainte-Chapelle. St Louis. Folies Bergere. Gustave Flaubert. Belloc (Hilaire). Evian. Escritoire. The Louvre. The Loire. Ooh la la. Languedoc. Hilaire (Belloc). Pont du Gard and Gare du Nord. The Very Fast Train (but not from there) to Bordeaux
au
bord
de la mer. Tout va bien. Manet. Monet.
Down with the Bastille on the fête of
14 juillet
. All stand to sing La Marseillaise. (
Alons, enfants de
la patrie, le jour de gloire est
arrivé
.) So has death. To Père Lachaise. Oscar Wilde. Tomb defiled. Princess Diana … Paris.

France is a world that lives in the imagination of millions who have never set foot there. The associations of a lifetime are enough to create an ambience in which they come spilling out of the subconscious at the lightest touch. Everyone has a hidden stock, not just
moi
. Try it for yourself. French impressionism is a game anyone can play.

In 845 the Vikings sailed up the Seine to Paris,
²⁵
another historical fact I decided it best not to rub in the faces of patriots here abouts. Wherever I have been so far in Europe, the Vikings were there long before me: it’s worth recalling, as you see the great overhang of Scandinavia on any map of Europe, that the same cannot be said even of the Romans or the Goths. You have to go back to the Celts to encounter a race so widely dispersed.

The sheer brute strength of Europe’s true conquerors is something that those who want Europe to be seen as a peaceful and civilised archipelago have airbrushed out of history. But anyone who looks at Europe over the past five centuries rather than the past five decades should think twice before sneering at the strife-torn ‘savages’ of Africa. If it was the Europeans who invented the mirror, maybe they had more need of it.

876-883 km

The bus from Frankfurt released from that police border check, as if from a slingshot, at one in the morning barrels through the cold starlit night, westward via Metz to Paris.

Having thought it best to book a hostel, I opted for the Blue Planet near the Gare de Lyon. The night porter looked as if I had come from another solar system rather than Germany. I realised at once that I would not be staying there. A spiral staircase wound its way up to the residential section; there were no bedrooms on the ground floor. Starved of sleep, I put my head down for a kip on a table in the lounge room, waiting for the day manager to arrive at seven. Who turned out to be the proverbial Parisian: his instant animosity towards me was palpable. But I exercised abnormal control over my tongue. What could be lost by aggravating him was the willingness — of his subordinates — to look after my belongings while I scoured Paris for suitable digs. Patience paid off when a friendly receptionist who took over at nine spirited them to the storage room.

A foreigner who has lived in France for ten years, and whom I would soon meet, paid his hosts a memorable backhanded compliment. ‘Don’t forget. When a Frenchman is rude to you, he’s not being rude, he’s just being himself.’

The City of Lights is not easy to navigate. But after a few days I descried something almost geodesic in Baron Haussmann’s design of road arteries meeting at obtuse angles on great roundabout hubs which kept suburbs within reasonable distance of their neighbours, like spokes on a bicycle. By the time I was ready to leave, having pushed more than 13 km a day on the first three days of October, I knew the old capital better than most users of the
Métro
, sadly off limits to me owing to the scarcity of lifts from street level. Most buses, including those with ‘disabled’ signs, could only be boarded with the greatest difficulty and at the risk of infuriating their drivers.

My quest for lodgings will span several days and make that one exasperating night in Amsterdam seem a cakewalk in comparison. On this first day of ‘trudging the streets’, I eventually reach the biggest hostel in France, the 439-bed d’Artagnan, only to find it full up for a week ahead.

Unavailability is the first hurdle. It is still officially summer, this is a weekend, and my arrival has coincided with the World Cup of rugby, to which France is playing host. Before long, my ears ring with the constant repetition of ‘
Complet
’ (‘Full’). Price is the second hurdle. My €40 (A$67) ceiling is being tested in a capital city not really attuned to budget travellers’ needs. Accessibility will be a third, although that is not an issue today.

I find an accessible hotel, with only one step to negotiate en route to a ground-floor
chambre
. Hotel Lux is a definite misnomer, but fussiness would be out of order and I am grateful for the room. Even then, the offer is limited to two nights. A grudging manager has told the welcoming receptionist that the room is booked for Monday, and even though my intuition tells me differently there is nothing to be gained from calling anyone a liar. My €70 (A$117) has rented a room for 48 hours, and bought time to keep looking.

898-902 km

Marcel Marceau died today. Had I been sub-editing when that story came in, I would have submitted the headline ‘More than a Moment’s Silence, Please’, or perhaps a wordless space like this:

where the headline usually goes, which would doubtless have been rejected as too arty by half.