Hitchhiking to Biarritz, 4-8 Mars 2007

Holiday time! Uni and work are both over for a week. What to do? At the beginning of the year we thought we could go to Germany, or Morocco, but thanks to the swift French bureaucracy we still don’t have our “Cartes de sejour”, and can’t leave the country. We’ve also got a little problem of liquidity, and figured the best way to get around would be: hitchhiking.
So, one Saturday arvo we find ourselves en route to Toulouse, the 4th biggest city in France. As well as important achievements in making things out of liver, Toulouse is known for its Space and Airline industry. Yes, the capital of the Airbus empire and home of the Concorde. The driver who took us there works with airbus, and he filled us in: how the recent model took too long, and now they can’t sell any. The company’s broke, and just before we got there they fired 10 000 workers in Europe, 5 500 of them in France (i.e. Toulouse). But we didn’t get caught up in any demonstrations, instead opting to investigate the café and bar scene.

The whole place is built of little bricks.

Like the cathedral

And the bridge

And half the houses and a lot of the streets. It’s called ‘the pink city’ in the language of the Office of Tourism, and it’s not actually built on a river. It’s built on an enormous canal some crazy king decided to build between the Mediterranean and the Atlantic.

We left that arvo, hitching ride to the next town, then the next town without any problems, before finding ourselves a little bit stuck. We’d left in the direction of Biarritz, but had come no further than an industrial town full of unfriendly people. We’d found that only Peugeots had picked us up till now, and waved friendlily to everyone who passed. Some waved back, but no one stopped. Some people contorted themselves to show how in a rush they were, but otherwise they’d stop of course. Others just looked at us like we were homeless. We waited an hour and a half, and it was getting cold when we started walking along the autoroute to the nearest service station. We actually met someone working there who very cheerfully told us she’d seen us by the side of the road, did someone pick us up? (why didn’t she?). We found someone there though, who took us all the way to Tarbes, saddest city in France, where we decided to spend the night instead of waiting for another hour, this time in the middle of the night. The youth hostel was actually temporary housing for immigrant workers, and we left the next morning at 5 am, hoping Biarritz would hold more promise.

We were so keen to get out of there we caught a train for the last leg, and arrived very early in the morning at Biarritz. We straightaway found our hostel and went into the city to see what we could see.
Biarritz has been popular since the 19th century when the empress of Napoleon III discovered she loved it so much, she insisted on having her baby there. At 8.5 months pregnant, she got the carriage there from Paris, refusing to go into labour before she got there. She sang throughout the birth to show her son how strong she was, and, we imagine, spent the rest of her life on holiday, recovering. Her palace is enormous, and is surrounded by similarly luxurious mansions.

The beach is also worth mentioning. No wonder they named our ocean Pacific, when compared with the Atlantic! Enormous waves, big storms, huge winds. All part of our first taste of Biarrtiz. It was too rough even for any surfers to be out!

There’s lots of chateux-style houses in this millionaire surfer’s paradise,

Some spookier than others. The Adam’s Family have their summer cottage here.

We found a chocolate factory, and helped a little bear escape

Then tried to keep sightseeing, but were blown back home by the incredible winds.

The next day it was still storming, but we had to be back in Aix two days later. So we decided to take some cheap-ish train tickets instead and give hitch-hiking a miss for the return journey. We continued sight-seeing!
We went to Bayonne, nearby bigger city, for a change of scene, but instead found another sad city with a beautiful cathedral and a horribly polluted river.

Even the gargoyles had an attitude, and kept spitting water at us as we passed by!

We had a great trip back, nice and easy, on the train, passing cities we hadn’t seen, like Lourdes, city of miracles that attracts 2 million pilgrims a year. But these pilgrims had already found their salvation from soggy hitchhiking: God bless the SNCF!