We thanked the couple at L'Hôtel Vendome, and laughed dutifully at a repeat of the Dance of the Jolly Mexican as we left.
The weather was glorious, the air had that crisp quality of the early summer, and our packs were heavy but bearable as we bought baguettes and cheese for the day. The trains awaited. After a cheerfully short enquiry as to the platform for the next train to La Rochelle, we were directed to a small but comfy train on which we bagged seats with a small table where we laid out our breakfast things. The train filled up, and started off. Gemma and I were encamped behind our daypacks, happily munching breakfast sandwiches and talking as we pulled into a station about five minutes later. The train emptied. One man came up to us and fired off a stream of French so fast and so very emotively that neither Gemma nor I understood a word of what he was saying, and before we could ask him what he was talking about, he leapt theatrically off the train. The platform slowly cleared, and our train started up again...heading back to Tours.
Everyone else had jumped ship to change onto the express train to La Rochelle; the TGV. Our Interrails weren’t valid for it, so even if we had known what was going on, we wouldn’t have been able to change trains. All we’d really done was find a train on which to eat breakfast. We got off in Tours trying not to look too embarrassed as we passed the moustachioed platform guard for the second time in ten minutes, and after a longer and slower conversation with the lady in the ticket office, discovered that the slow train to La Rochelle left in an hour’s time.
The journey was hot but not dull – we changed lines in a town called Poitiers, which seemed to be wedged into a valley two sizes too small for it, and we explored a bit in the three hour wait for the next train.
The air on our faces was warm and blowing hard, stepping out of the doors of the train station in La Rochelle. With eyes downturned to the grey blue marble of the pavement, we tacked our way to the nearest bus stop. It was time to crack out the tent for the first time, and by the looks of things, we might have been looking at pitching it under the swaying fronds of palm trees. They were absolutely everywhere. It was the Atlantic Coast attempting to get away with masquerading as the Pacific Coast, and I loved it.
Pulling to at the bus stop in the gusty yet warming gale were another couple of backpackers that we recognised from the train, so we got chatting. Nick and Suzanne were German and smiley. Very German, and really, really smiley. Their English was superb, their plan for their few days in La Rochelle sounded brilliant, and Gemma and I desperately dragged the conversation around to superstitions and car license plates to avoid a looming sense of inadequacy.
Our four monumental backpacks took up both wheelchair spaces on the bus as we grinned at each other and snapped our heads around to see as much of the town as we could while speeding along a wide flat boulevard. When we got off, Nick stopped a passing couple and asked, in accented and seemingly flawless French, the way to the campsite. The couple looked flummoxed. Nick asked again, insistent. The elderly gentleman turned to his wife.
"What do you think he’s saying, love?"
"Something about camping, er..."
Nick finally got an opportunity to demonstrate his excellent French, and we found the campsite. It was next to the main road, under trees and with a gentle rolling hill hiding the toilets and showers. We pitched the tent some distance away from Nick and Suzanne. They really were phenomenally friendly.
The wind meant there weren’t that many insects, and we finished our baguettes and brie sitting on the grass under a couple of towering pines as the afternoon came to an end. Nick and Suzanne came over and asked us if we wanted to go out for dinner. We smiled, waved our baguettes, and let the offer pass.
There is no sound in my mind more evocative of the sea than that of halyards clipping masts as the swell rolls boats in a harbour. The pink-pink-pink noise that they make practically smells of salt and lazy windy afternoons. Gemma and I went for a stroll along the promenade that evening and were stunned at how busy it was. Hundreds of tanned men and women in rugby shirts and shorts with leather deck shoes were wandering around the town, drinking and laughing. There was something...familiar...about it all. We passed a sign before entering an enclosure of some sort, announcing La Rochelle’s International Sailing Festival. Gemma’s voice rose an octave.
"Yachties!"
Gemma lived and grew up in Cowes, on the opposite tip of the Isle of Wight to myself. It is home to the Cowes International Sailing Festival With The Admiral's Cup Occasionally Thrown In For Good Measure, or, as we like to call it, Cowes Week. It is seven or ten days of vicious sailing rivalry, swaggering in expensive sailing clothes, drinking Pimms and enjoying the sunshine, rounded off with a night of fireworks. We found ourselves in Cowes' curiously Gallic clone.
Amongst all the palaver, we found ourselves a little bar and ordered two beers, while a group of yachties played foosball in the corner. We began to chat to them. When they found out we were from the Isle of Wight, they became enormously friendly and they asked where we were from on the Island. My own answer passed without comment, but Gemma’s announcement that she had grown up in Cowes, the home of the Cowes International Sailing Festival, brought a round of exclamations and smiles. When Gemma was away, at the bar or the toilet, I asked one of the group, who were French themselves, why they were so pleased to hear where Gemma was from. Had they sailed at Cowes?
"No, no. But everyone knows that girls from Cowes are...how do you say...very friendly."
"Easy?" I asked, unable to hold my eyebrows down.
"Yes!" he smiled, and took a swig of his drink.
You could have knocked me down with a feather. Here was I, living on just the other side of what this Frenchman seemed to regard as a halcyonic haven of sailing and sex, and no one had told me. Girls from Cowes seemed just as unlikely to be 'very friendly' as girls from everywhere else. Maybe it was the yachties. Maybe the secret was in the rugby tops.
I couldn’t help but grin widely at Gemma on her return, but she managed to restrain herself for the rest of the evening, and we made our way back to the campsite without her hurling herself at the nearest man in deck shoes.
