50: Interlaken to La Ferte Gaucher

Week 50 Update:

Interlaken, La Ferte Gaucher.

Day 345:

We had some way to travel that day and for a change we were well prepared. We got up early and were ready to leave our friends by 7:00. It was a little sad not be able to spend more time in the mountains, but we vowed to return as soon as we could. I fired Maggie up and let her idle for a few minutes to get the worse of the chill off her. Although the days were warm and comfortable, the nights still saw temperatures below zero and I was not entirely convinced that the fluids that kept Maggie healthy was designed for that. The hand brake light stayed on when I put the handle down and a quick inspection revealed that the cable at the rear wheels was frozen. I tap with a foot sorted that out and we were off.

Our journey took us to the city of Bern where we got a little confused and a little lost as well. We had plotted our route on Google Maps and printed out the directions, but things were happening a little too fast in the early morning rush hour. We still found our way eventually and arrived at the French border by mid morning. There the customs official had a quick chat, told us that he was impressed with our journey and sent us on our way. I think that was the fastest border crossing we had ever had as it took about two minutes and required absolutely no paperwork.

It was nothing more than a travelling day. Once we left the Alps we were cruising through the massive expanse of French countryside in dull and overcast weather. We still saw the snow capped Alps and the far away distance when we left the small country lanes and joined the impressive French motorway network. According to our map we had about 300km left to go. It was almost strange to drive that distance on roads like that. They were obviously designed to be the quickest and most effortless way to travel, but for us they were incredibly boring! The landscape was flat and pretty featureless and there wasn’t really any traffic to speak of. The other road users were all following the rules and our 100km/h chosen speed made us the slowest thing around. Even the big trucks were overtaking us, but then again, they were not trying to save as much of the cheap Egyptian fuel as they could.

It was about 14:00 when we arrived in the small village of La Frete Gaucher. Thanks to my lovely green passport I had to find a place to lay low and spend as little money as possible close to Paris while waiting for another visa. La Frete Gaucher was an hour’s train journey into the city, it had a camp site with mobile homes to rent and it was authentically and deliciously French countryside. It was perfect! Catt’s parents were joining us for the weekend so our chosen mobile home had to accommodate 4 adults.

The owner of the site spoke as much English as I spoke French but fortunately Catt knew enough of the language to get by. We got the key to our new accommodation and found the 25m2, two bedroom palace tucked in a corner of a beautifully tranquil green. There was a concrete floor to park Maggie on and a perfectly manicured lawn leading up to the home. There was a stream that ran though the property and high trees enclosing us on three sides. The road at the back of our new house was small and quiet and we had a choice between three supermarkets within walking distance.

Pete and Annie arrived about half an hour after us. It was brilliant to see them again and we spent the rest of the afternoon chatting away and catching up. It wasn’t like they did not know what we had been up to. Annie had been religiously reading the blog and updating Pete on our progress and Catt had been chatting to her online on every opportunity she had. But that was just not the same as sitting around a table and actually talking to each other.

As the sun was going down we walked to the nearest shop to source some dinner. I was in charge of finding suitable bacon for the next morning’s breakfast and found the task… well… confusing. It wasn’t like it was the first time I had been in a super market before, but the choices were just astronomical! I remembered seeing a movie about a bomb expert in Iraq. In the film the guy return to the USA after his tour and goes shopping with his wife who asks him to get some milk and breakfast cereal. The scene shows him standing in front of a shelf with what seems like a thousand different brands and he obviously finds it all just incredibly overwhelming! Well, that was me. Buying bacon should not be that difficult and it should not be necessary for a single shop to stock 37 different kinds. I counted them… and then chose the cheapest one. As we packed our few chosen item onto the till I noticed the amount of packaging that the western world saw fit to use and felt a little sick to my stomach. The 100g of bacon I chose because of price came in a plate sized plastic tub and the 6 eggs were neatly protected inside a plastic egg holder wrapped in cardboard. The funniest thing was probably the fact that the supermarket did not have any plastic bags to put the shopping in. Don’t get me wring, I am all in favour of not having plastic shopping bags and forcing people to use their own, but surely packaging things in that amount of unnecessary bollocks totally defeats the object of minimising our impact on the environment!

Back at our 25m2 palace we sat around a table chatting while feasting on the 1.6kg chicken we invested in. Seriously man! A chicken that weighs that much? Where did that come from? I accepted the fact that it could not be a happy racing chicken from the mountains of Ethiopia and I didn’t really care too much that it was probably a battery chicken that was fed on power feed and grain. The fact of the matter was that the thing was HUGE and juicy and incredibly tasty! Even the 2 euro bottle of red wine I chose was better than any of the local wines I had tasted in Africa. In fact, the last time I could remember tasting wine that nice was in Kenya and there we bought Californian wine. The carrots were so big that we shared one between 4 of us and the salad Catt made looked like it belonged in a recipe book with a taste to match. I was loving it! All of it and I wasn’t even really shocked about the price we paid for it all. Sure, a single carrot probably cost the same as a kilogram of the same stuff in an African Market and the chicken, although the size of three Egyptian ones was about four times the price, but the quality man! I had not seen that or tasted that since leaving Kenya’s volcanic regions I only then realized how much I missed good tasting food!

For pudding we shared another bottle of cheap French wine and consumed a whole block of smelly cheese with biscuits. I managed to weigh myself the day before and realized with some shock that I had lost 14kg in the year that we had been on the road. I could see that hanging out with Pete and Annie and food like that I would be able to get that all back in no time!

Sleep did not elude us for long and the tiny but warm bedroom with double bed felt welcoming and comfortable.

Day 346:

There was no real need to get up early but we were both awake around 7:00 anyway. It was Saturday in the French countryside and we could hear the chatter of people walking along the nearby stream. After getting up and having a wondrous shower that resembled a steam bath we made breakfast. Actually, Annie made breakfast for us. She even went to a patisserie earlier that morning to pick us some freshly baked croissants. I’m sure that it’s part of a mother’s job description to spoil her children, but she definitely took that idea further than we had any right to expect. We had bacon and eggs and bread with cheese and jam which felt nothing less than a glorious continuation of the previous evening’s culinary feast.

By the time breakfast was done and the washing up dealt with it was almost mid day. We decided to stop being totally useless lazy blobs and went for a walk. That took us through the centre of the small village and along an old disused train track, following the stream that passed by our camp site. It was slightly chilly and overcast day, but we did not care too much. Every person that passed us smiled and said “Bonjoir” as they passed. We made friends with the village dogs and watched fathers teach their sons the finer arts of fishing. The trees had no leaves after the winter and the place was definitely not as beautiful as it would have been in the summer, but I didn’t care. We could walk… undisturbed, unsolicited and in total perceived safety.

On the way back to our palace we stopped in at the tourist information centre. The lady there spoke mostly French but with Annie’s help we managed to find out how to get to Paris for my visa appointment and roughly how much it would cost. The lady behind the desk was the typical caricature of tourist information person. She loved to talk! She never used one sentence when ten would be possible and her enthusiasm was enchanting. She seemed almost disappointed when I did not seem all that excited about going quad biking or skydiving or 4 wheel driving with the various service providers she had brochures for. There was a picture on the wall of a trout and I deciphered the wording as “get your fishing licence here”. When I asked the lady about it she beamed and told us that the area had the best fishing imaginable and the annual licence only cost 90 euro. She could not tell me what kind of fish there was though. There was also no option for a shorter term licence for less money, so I had to forget that idea.

For our Paris trip it was clear that public transport was going to be significantly easier and cheaper than driving ourselves. That took an hour and a half to establish and with our mission completed we walked back to the campsite for some afternoon tea and snacks.

That evening Catt and I got spoilt again. Pete and Annie took us to the village hotel’s restaurant for a meal. The very extensive French menu was fairly confusing to me but with the help of the others I managed to order a salad and a steak. Mmmm Steak…. Not something that I had had since Kenya either… When the salad arrived I was very glad that I opted to share with Catt. The thing was huge! It was fresh and utterly tasty as well and we both deemed it a perfect choice! By the time we finished that we were both almost full. I have to be honest and say that I expected a tiny bit of choice cut beef on a massive white plate with some inedible garnish. I could not have been more wrong. What arrived was a slab of what I guessed to be Sirloin steak with a mustard sauce. Instead of tiny bots of garnish the plate also contained green beans and mashed potato in a perfect round shape. The plate was huge, but only so to successfully hold the huge amount of food on it. Perhaps it was me. Perhaps I was just not used to seeing portions that size any more.

By the time we had finished I could hardly walk. I could not remember the last time I had left any food on my plate and I was not about to start. The problem was that every time I ate the bread roll on my side plate, the waitress replaced it with a new one. I finished my hunk of cow and then half of Catt’s and the half a bread roll she left… which was replaced by a fresh one. Eventually I just had to give up. I had stop with the bread because I had no space left. Funny thing was that I would have been perfectly happy after just the salad.

It was actually totally refreshing to walk back to the campsite. The air was cold and fresh and smelled almost sweet. There was no wind and blanket of clouds made it darker than what I had been used to. We sat around the small table in the comfortable mobile home talking for another hour or so until my eyelids got so heavy that I nearly could not keep them open again. I think that night a food coma set in before I actually fell asleep, but it was very peaceful none the less.

Day 347:

The day dawned with the first rain we had seen since Kenya… I started thinking that I was referring to Kenya too much. But then again, it suddenly seemed like the last place where I experienced a lot of things: Rain being one of them. The smell of wet grass filled my nostrils and made me smile before I opened my eyes. I was glad we were not camping. It was too cold for that anyway, but the rain could have then been an unpleasant experience. I was also glad we were not staying in a hotel where we had to eat their food and live by their time table. I was suddenly thinking that all those Germans in their big 4 x 4 trucks with camper style accommodations on the back had it worked out. They could camp, but not camp and always make their own food while on the move unlike people who slept in tents.

Annie continued to spoil us with delicious breakfast and fresh croissants and by the time we had finished with that it was almost time for lunch again. It kind of all rolled in to one for me. It felt like we ate from breakfast to lunch with an obscene amount of hot drinks somewhere I the middle, but I didn’t mind. The rain stopped us from going for a walk, so we simply lazed around the place eating and drinking for the remainder of the day.

By mid afternoon it was time for the parents to hit the road back to sunny England again. We waved them good bye wishing that we could just join them, but also totally relaxed about where we were and what we had to accomplish. It was our short little holiday at the end of a stressful time before real life had a chance to catch up to us. We didn’t do much the rest of the day either. We made some dinner in the early evening and managed not to over eat for the first time since the ferry. We shared half a bottle of wine instead of having one each and we relaxed on the couch some more until sleep eventually set in. It ended up being a Sunday like Sundays were supposed to be.

Day 348:

It was visa appointment day and we had no time to be lazy. The alarm woke us early after a quick shower and a mug of the good stuff we were ready to take on Paris. It took us about five minutes to walk to the nearest bus stop via a photo booth where I replenished my passport photo supply. The bus was on time… Imagine that! We did not have to go to a smelly bus stop where we had to fight about price and wait for the bus to fill to capacity before it left as Andrew and Lucy had to do for the 18 months they had been travelling. We simply stepped onto it, presented our prepaid tickets and found a comfortable seat with a seatbelt. The driver waited for everyone to sit down before closing the door and driving off to the next stop.

The bus journey took an hour. We had the option to get off at a train station after half an hour, but the most effective way, according to the lady at the tourist information was to take the bus to the end of the line. That just happened to be at Disneyland Paris. We walked past the fancy hotel and shiny entrance into the park and right into the train station to join the cue of ticket buyers. In very broken French we explained the station we needed to get to and paid the sizeable 26 euro fee for our return fare. The trains were running every ten minutes, so finding one was not difficult at all!

The train journey took another hour, but we were very early so it did not matter much. Once we left the station in Paris we decided to walk to the appointment centre. Pete had left us with his GPS and that showed the distance to be about 6km. It was still overcast, but warm enough and not raining, so walking was quite pleasant. We randomly walked past an internet café where I could print out the last of my needed documentation and arrived at the visa place two hours before my scheduled appointment. I was quite amazed to see how many people were cuing outside and all hopes of getting in early faded instantly. That was no train smash though (No pun) we just went exploring. Neither one of us had ever been to that part of Paris before and it was quite interesting to walk around and see what kind of things and people were about.

We had some lunch outside a small supermarket and bought some coffee in a sleazy looking pub where we were not allowed to sit down. I couldn’t really work it out as the tables were all totally empty, but every time I stepped into that area someone told me I wasn’t allowed to. We also found a Formula one hotel nearby and earmarked that as a possible place to stay when collecting the paperwork again. By 14:30 we were bored though so we simply walked back to the visa place.

My appointment was for 15:00. By 14:45 the friendly security guard let me through the door, but instructed Catt to wait outside. I joined a cue of people sitting on rows of chairs and moved up every time someone finished with that station. When my turn came the lady simply looked at my application form, assigned me a number, attached my photograph and instructed me to go to the waiting room. That was a little strange, I though I had already been in the waiting room.

The waiting room had four times as many chairs as the room I entered into and about four times as many people. I looked up at the screen and saw that there were 22 numbers ahead of me and just sighed. It was going to be a long afternoon! At least Catt had her IPod with her and could listen to some music. I wasn’t allowed any electronics when I was and I did not even take a book with me! I sat there thinking back at the previous time I had to get a visa for the UK. That was in a similar centre in South Africa. In fact, it was outsourced to the same company as the one I found myself in in Paris. Only in South Africa the process was smooth, quick and efficient. I kind of expected the French place to be better, but alas, it was like being back in Egypt. When my number was eventually called I was shown to a desk where another lady went though my paperwork. I found that a little strange. I mean, surely the first person who I spoke to could have done all that and saved us all a massive amount of time and money. Oh yeh, that little visa application cost 88 Euros which was hilarious as the shengen visa was free because I was married to an EU citizen.

Anyway, the second person checked my paperwork again and found everything in order… again. She took 1 euro as payment for an email to be sent when I could collect my passport again and told me to return to the waiting room. Another half an hour passed before I was called again and shown into a small room where my biometric data was taken. All my finger prints were scanned, I had state my name for a video camera and my photo was taken… again. When I was done there I was free to go.

Outside I found Catt almost frozen to the seat. It had been two and half hours since I left her there and we both felt insanely frustrated and utterly exhausted! There was simply no way either one of us could face walking back to the train station. The security guard, who happened to be by far the friendliest person in the place, pointed us towards the metro station which was less than 1 km away and so our return journey began:

The metro took about an hour. It was also rush hour so it had standing room only and there was just no conceivable way that people would see that train as full and take the next one. At some point Catt and I were totally squashed in a corner far away from any handles, but then again we were also wedged in so tightly that we did not need to hold on to the rails. It was, to be honest, quite a brutal experience! At the train station we fought our way through masses of ant like people scurrying about and by some amount of luck found the correct platform again. There were people in uniform actually stopping the commuters from over filling the trains. It was bizarre! I mean, surely when an express elevator in a 50 floor building tells you it is overloaded you will wait for the next one rather than risk your life, but there people seemed to think that the metal tube hurtling down a thin track at great speed was safe enough to totally overload like that…. I stood back, watched the carnage for a little while and noticed that we had a choice of another four trains at 5 minute intervals. We eventually took the second one. There was still standing room only.

The train journey took… well, about an hour. I had to stand for the first 50 minutes of it, but at least a friendly man offered his seat to Catt after about twenty minutes. At the second last stop everyone left the train. It was obviously the edge of the city and the end of where people actually loved. I managed to sit down for the last ten minutes and by the time rain stopped at Disneyland Paris I had made my mind up: I would rather starve to death than commute like that on a daily basis. We took a brisk walk to the bus stop, found the right vehicle and hopped on using our prepaid tickets.

The bus journey took… well, about an hour. By that time we were totally and utterly exhausted and I just fell asleep as the big bus meandered through the villages and into the one we were staying in. I woke up as we stopped at our designated shelter, got off the bus and walked into the nearby supermarket to find something to have for dinner. We walked back to our mobile home, cooked and ate in relative silence and shortly after that we crashed…

Day 349:

I got woken up by bird song…. For the first time since Kenya I believed. It took a while before I remembered where I was and contributed that to the utterly deep sleep I had managed through the night. I stretched out, yawned and dragged myself out of bed to put the kettle on for some coffee. When Catt joined me at the table she told me what the time was with a huge smile on her face: It was 10:23.

There was not really anything we had to accomplish for the day. We had to buy some food, but the shops were close by and open until 20:00. The mobile home was too small to be messy or dirty, so we didn’t really have to clean it. So we did nothing… OK, not nothing at all. We drank coffee and ate lunch. We made a list of things to buy in the shop and we talked about our short term goals.

In the afternoon we took a big hiking rucksack and walked to a super market. We had decided to buy one week’s food to try and gauge what living costs had in store for us. When we lived in South Africa we tried very hard to keep our grocery bill to around 80 euro a week and we were interested what it would be in France. On the way there we passed a mobile phone store and enquired about 3G internet costs. To my utter astonishment a sim card cost ten times more than the same thing in Africa and instead of paying for data, you paid for time. Even those costs were ridiculously high. The only conclusion I could come up with was that the phone companies used the profits from Europe to subsidise their bushiness in Africa. I had to smile at the fact that we had more trouble getting online in France than in any other country we had travelled through.

In the supermarket we were in no hurry at all. We took our time making our selections from the 47 different types of everything. Bizarrely enough we found beef mince to be more expensive than pork steak and chicken cheaper than that. We selected some pate and cheese and hand picked the fresh fruit and vegetables we deemed essential. We even loaded up a few bottles of red wine before we got to the till. Now, to be fair, we did not buy any cleaning products or toiletries, but the total bill for seven days worth of three meals a day came to 55 Euros. I was blown away!

The rucksack was almost too heavy to carry and we had to buy a shopping bag as that supermarket also did not offer plastic apart from the ridiculous amount of packaging. We still managed to walk it all back to our mobile home in good time and after we unpacked it all we had to smile at the cat that we had managed to fill the fridge.

Our dinner consisted of half of one those gigantic chickens and some fresh salad and bread. It was fantastically tasty and beautifully colourful with portion sizes that made sense. We were actually starting to really enjoy the idea of village life in France even though we were still talking about achievable goals in the reality of life that was getting closer by the day. That was all too tiring a concept to keep up for long and sleep came easily after a short while.

Day 350:

I woke up with Catt kissing me and when I opened my eyes she told me it was past 8:00. I felt groggy and lazy and not ready to face the world yet, but also did not want to waste the day by sleeping until 10:00 again. I did manage to stay horizontal until the smell of coffee filled the room. When I checked the time it was 7:35. That was a little strange and when I mentioned it to my darling wife she looked confused. The problem was that she checked the time on her IPod, which was still set on Cairo time, which was an hour different to where we were. Anyway, it was time to get up, so I did.

I had an incredible amount of writing to catch up on and after munching on a massive banana which was obviously imported form somewhere, I had a shower and got stuck into the task of documenting our previous week. My hands flew over the keys as I comfortable sat with the doors wide open and the sun shining on my face and flooding the inside of the home. Every time I looked up I saw the stream flowing through the camp site and heard the birds singing from their perches in the trees. I could hear children at play at the nearby school and the smell of freshly brewed coffee filled the room. “Ah the life of a writer I thought”, I could get used to that…

When it was time for a break we started organising Maggie again. After I expertly managed to flood the inside when filling the water tank with melted glacier water at Tony’s house, we had taken most everything out of the car and stored in the mobile home. Every day the sun was shining I opened all the car doors to let the carpets dry out and when I checked them that day they were perfectly dry and ready to receive the payload again. I used a brush to get the bulk of Sudan’s desert sand out of the car and started packing things back in the order we had decided to pack them in. It was quite amazing to see how much space there was left after we did that. Catt did give her mom some curios to take back to the UK, but when everything was in its rightful place we still had oodles of space left.

After a lunch of some more of that delicious chicken and salad we spent the early afternoon continuing our computer based work. By mid afternoon I was totally up to date with everything I wanted to be and proposed a walk to try and get rid of the calories I got from over indulging with every meal the previous weekend. The weather was perfect! There was not a single cloud in the sky and it was warm enough to ware my sandals.

Our walk took us straight out of the village and past the nearby old Château which was perfectly framed by the green fields of crops around it. The next village along had amazingly quaint and pretty little cottages lining the main street though it but it was too small to even have a shop. There we headed down to the river we had walked along the previous weekend. Our return journey took us past an array of old buildings, a few paddocks with horses and the biggest sheep I had even seen in and a long row of blossoming trees full of eager bees. Spring was definitely in the air and the local villagers were out enjoying the warm sunny afternoon in force.

Our evening was, as had become our custom, uneventful and very relaxing. As I was falling asleep I could not help but start to think about that damn visa application. We had booked and paid for our little home for seven nights, and that was night number six…

Day 351:

A lazy start to a long day happened after 8:00. The outside world seemed darker than usual and even though we had a comfortable and warm temperature inside our hide away, it was strangely cold outside. The clouds were low on the horizon and the mist was rising from the valleys. I couldn’t even really see the old Chateau on the hill.

Our routine of making coffee, having breakfast and having a shower seemed to happen by itself without any input from us at all. I was starting to feel as if it was time to move on. Don’t get me wrong, I was enjoying the idea of being stationary, but desperately wanted to be stationary somewhere where we had the ability to start building some foundations for our latest adventure: Life.

In an attempt to give the visa agency as much time as possible to send me an email we decided to hang out in the village for the morning and early afternoon. Lunch time snuck up on us without any warning and the walk to the Boulangerie was well… freezing! The wind felt as if it came straight from a freezer and with the cloudy skies there was absolutely no sign of any golden light warming the patch of earth where we were. In the village square we found masses of people packing away what looked like movable stalls. It was obviously market day in La Frete Gaucher, but only in the morning, and we missed it.

By 15:00 we decided to go in search of an internet connection. Our little village had one internet café and no wifi but we were told that McDonalds in the bigger town of Coulommiers could help us. It was less than 20km away so for the first time since arriving six day before we started Maggie’s engine and took her on an outing in the French countryside.

The McDonalds in question seemed strangely upmarket in décor and facilities. Neither one of us could even begin to contemplate the idea of fast food so we just ordered a coffee each, fired up laptops and hid in a corner while catching up on electronic communications. There was no email from the visa agency. Then again, the woman at the counter asked me to write down my email address on a piece of paper. When she copied it onto her computer she got it wrong and I had to correct it for her… twice. So it was entirely possible that they never managed to type the right address into their system. On the other hand, it had only been 4 days and the process could take up to 10 days, so perhaps I was just being a little impatient. Still, I felt quite disappointed.

On the drive back to the campsite we started discussing options. The week we had spent there was pleasant and relaxing, but the place did not really offer anything more than walks and cheap wine. (Not that there was anything wrong with either of those) The commute to Paris cost about 30 euro at a time so we were trying to plan it so that we could visit the few sites we were interested in on the same day as collecting my passport. We did investigate moving to a place in Paris itself, but their idea of budget accommodation was 100 euros a night, three times more than what we were paying where we were and we could make our own food…

The only decision that made sense was to walk up the hill to the internet café the next morning and track the application with the unique number I had. If it was done we could then leave for Paris immediately. If not we had to just stay where we were for the weekend and patiently wait it out….

That evening I made a fire in our “pack a braai” using a large amount of charcoal we bought in Egypt. I cooked some huge and juicy pork chops and we roasted a mountain of fresh vegetables to go with it. I have to admit that I never really saw myself cooking on an open fire while wearing an expedition jacket, a woolly hat and gloves, but desperate times you know. Dinner was phenomenal and the cheap wine for the evening was the best that we had tasted since arriving in France. We made a note of the brand and decided to stock up before leaving the country.

If I had to do it again:

It would have been really nice to stay in Interlaken a few more days. I could have applied for the visa in Zurich, but when I filled in the application and made the appointment we did not know that Switzerland was a place we would travel to. Not to harper on about it, but if I had decent maps when looking into it I would have realized it and possibly chose that option. Then again, Interlaken is NOT a cheap place to hang out, so we are probably better off where we are now.

It’s a little difficult to spend any money at this stage in the trip. We are in pretty good shape and by some miracle we have actually managed to stay within our expected budget for the year, but now we are starting to look at the next step in life, our priorities have changed dramatically. So even though the next week might be boring as hell, we are just not really prepared to blow cash on things that are not essential.