Paris On Air

by Oliver Gee

  “Hey Oliver. I’ve been listening to your podcasts over the last couple of seasons. Congratulations on your engagement! The idea of your round-France journey sounds fantastic, although it sounds more like a slow amble on your 50km/hr max scooter. It will be great to highlight some of La France Profonde. We have a little house in a small village in the Charente. It’s a lovely area and you may even be passing through on your journey south. If you’re nearby, and are so inclined, feel free to visit the village of Verteuil-sur-Charente for a couple of days and stay at our place gratuit, a little wedding gift from one Aussie to another. Cheers and all the best, Jim.”

  I was speechless. I knew that the podcast had a lot of listeners at this point and I knew that people enjoyed the show, but no one had been so openly generous before. There had to be a catch… what did Jim want in return? Or was his place a wreck? Or was he, could he be… an axe murderer? With the email was a link to his home and it turned out to be one of the most charming I’ve seen. Nestled in the centre of the medieval village of Verteuil, on the banks of the Charente River, the 18th century stone house was cosy and inviting. Real village life, exactly how I’d imagined the French countryside to be.

  I emailed Jim to see if he was indeed an axe murderer, and it turned out he was a kind soul who just wanted to give something back. On the next episode of the podcast I read out Jim’s email to thank him, but also to share the developments of the story - and it sparked something I’d never have predicted.

  When I woke the next morning, my inbox was flooded with similar emails. Someone with a house in Chantilly; another in Cognac, Nancy, Carcassonne. By the end of the week I had made a folder to keep up with all the offers - together with a map so I could locate these exotic-sounding places. Carpentras, Essoyes, Grenoble, Paimpol, places I’d never even heard about before. Other listeners wrote in and said we could use their frequent traveller points to book hotel rooms. It was unbelievable.

  Of all the offers, the one that made the planning the easiest was from Chantilly. Susan, the Irish owner of the property, said her place was available for one weekend in August. Located an hour out of Paris, it seemed like the perfect destination for the first night of the trip. We chose Giverny for the second night, and decided we’d never plan further ahead than that. And it was fortunate that the listeners were so generous, because I was still on minimum wage and we’d be relying on their membership fees to fund our travel. Luckily the scooter only cost five euros to fill up. Here’s to a healthy, carefree, wondrous adventure! Or so I thought.

  8.2 The disease

  On an unusually cold and overcast day in mid-August, we packed our luggage onto the back of the little red scooter and headed north out of Paris. It was a 45 kilometre trip to Chantilly, where we’d spend the first night of our honeymoon. As we drove out of Paris and through the suburbs we learned a lot about our limitations almost immediately. The first being that it was pretty hard to figure out which roads we were allowed to drive on. We knew that we couldn’t legally take the autoroutes - the kind of highways where cars could get to Chantilly in mere minutes. We had to take the back roads. But we didn’t know how to find the back roads. At first we experimented with setting the GPS for a bicycle, which worked well. That is, until it would inevitably lead us to a children’s park or a little alleyway - neither of which the scooter could cross. A few times on that first day we ended up on big highways where the speed was up to 100 km an hour, and it scared us both. Remember, our scooter could only go 45 km an hour and having trucks whoosh past us was horrifying. Every time we ended up on a major road we took the first available turnoff and headed to the safety of the back streets.

  The drive took several hours and left me feeling surprisingly tired. Suspiciously tired, even, but I didn’t think too much of it. Susan, our lovely hostess, had organized a cottage for us in the charming town. She walked us over to the Chantilly chateau, which had its own taste of fame as a James Bond movie setting. We even got exclusive access to the royal stables for a video, but all the while I had a niggling feeling in the back of my mind: Why am I so tired?

  We only stayed one night and moved on towards Giverny, a drive that was more than twice as long as that from the previous day. And as the morning progressed, I couldn’t shake the concern about my fatigue. It was worrying me at this point, not least because I started to feel deeply sore over my whole body. I ached, all the way from my shoulders to my legs. I knew riding the scooter would be a challenge, but I hadn’t imagined that it would leave me feeling like this. I searched online and found it was fairly normal for motorbike riders to get sore arms and shoulders after long drives, so I tried to ignore it. Surely, after a few days, I wouldn’t notice anymore.

  But it got worse.

  After a few more days I needed to rest after every half an hour of driving. We’d pull over and I’d lay down on the side of the road to recover. In the nights I had cold sweats beyond any I’d experienced before and I was starting to wonder if it was a good idea to continue with the trip. Lina, who at first had said she was also sore from the ride, realized that we weren’t on the same playing field and began to keep a close eye on me. It was around this time that an unusual mark appeared on my right thigh, a red rash that continued to grow and sprouted concentric circles.

  By the time we reached Deauville on the north coast, a pharmacist said it looked like an insect bite and gave me some cream and headache tablets. I figured that was that. I frolicked on the beach, delighted to walk in the footsteps of Coco Chanel and all the other wealthy Parisians who had flocked to the town for their summer getaways. We were five days into the trip and I was glad my mystery illness would be cured. Despite still feeling pretty grim, I pushed on along the coast to the sobering D-Day beaches, then we marvelled at the medieval tapestry in Bayeux.

  But I didn’t get any better. One afternoon, a week into the trip, I went to a drop-in doctor in the middle-of-nowhere, Normandy. After three years in France I’d still never been to a doctor, so part of me was quite excited by this new experience. Not least because I was eager to use my social security card that had been so hard to get. My doctor didn’t speak English, but there was no mistaking her diagnosis.

  “Oui, ça c’est la maladie de lyme,” she said after a brief look at the bullseye on my leg.

  If you’re wondering what that sentence means, then you know exactly how I felt when I heard her say it. What the heck was maladie de lyme? Using a little help from the internet, we understood that I’d been bitten by a tick, and that tick apparently wanted to kill me. Perhaps it was a revenge for my fruit fly massacre the previous summer. While I may not have noticed the tick bite at the time - it had left me with an unusual illness known as Lyme Disease. The main symptoms, the doctor said, included intense fatigue (which can last up to six months), fever, headaches, and joint pain. Well, that sure explained why I’d been feeling so rough. We also learned that if untreated, Lyme Disease can lead to infections of the brain and heart, memory loss, and severe joint problems. Extreme cases can be even worse.

  The doctor put me on Amoxycillin and told me to get some rest. We drove less each day, took it easy on the exploring front, and avoided potentially tick-infested areas for safe measure. And it seemed as if the drugs were doing the trick. Indeed, I enjoyed another lovely week of the honeymoon, while my symptoms seemed to disappear.

  We explored the northern coastline of Brittany and fell in love with it once again. We revisited Fabien for a lesson in making the local specialty of galette pancakes. We wandered the sands at the mythical abbey island of Mont Saint-Michel, getting lost in its medieval streets. The nearby town of Saint Malo triggered my interest in fortified towns, an interest that would almost overwhelm me by the time we got to Carcassonne. We even got up to Ploumanac’h, a town with remarkable pink granite beaches (not to mention the remarkable apostrophe in its name). We were now two weeks into the honeymoon and decided if we were going to go around the whole country,
it was time to escape the northwest and to head south for the first time. We wanted to chase the sun and to find the lavender, the vineyards, and the open road.

  Yes, life was good again. It was the honeymoon we were hoping for. We rode in T-shirts and shorts, with the summer sun beating down on us as we headed for the west coast. We were in love, newly married, and were on the open road. And we didn’t have a care in the world.

  It was around this point, while driving down a road in rural Brittany, that the sun was so strong that it made the back of my neck tingle. Funny how the sun can make you itch, I remember thinking. Lina interrupted my thoughts to say that she had noticed a strange rash on my neck that wasn’t there just minutes before. I looked down and saw that the rash had spread to my arms too.

  This Lyme Disease wasn’t finished with me, it seemed.

  8.3 The wolf

  They say there are no wild wolves in Brittany, but they’re wrong. I saw one. It tried to bite our scooter as we arrived in the village of Guermeur. We’d found a cottage in the woods where I could relax and recuperate for a few days from the Lyme Disease. I was loaded up on antibiotics from the village doctor in Normandy, eleven boxes of pills in total, but this rash was worrying me. By now my chest, back, and legs were covered in spots, and we headed - once again - for a local pharmacy.

  We scooted some 10 kilometres out of Guermeur and into La Sourn, population 2,000. The pharmacist took one look at me and said I had to go immediately to a doctor. She was looking worriedly at my throat. My throat? I looked in the mirror to see the rash was spreading quickly, now covering my entire body - even my palms. The local GP was just down the road, and the receptionist told me a doctor was available. Unbelievable, not even a second’s wait. Imagine that in Paris!

  The doctor, a young man from the area, asked me many questions while inspecting my body. His interrogation gradually drifted further off topic until I realised he was perhaps more interested in something beside my illness.

  “And how is your throat?” (Bad.)

  “And does this hurt if I press this?” (No.)

  “And are you sweating at night?” (Yes.)

  “A lot?” (Yes.)

  “And how long have you been travelling for?” (Two weeks.)

  “And how long will you continue?” (Maybe two months.)

  “And where will you go next?” (Vannes.)

  I began to realise that these geography questions weren’t about nearby doctors or tick-infested national parks. No, he was after something else.

  “What about after Vannes?”

  “Do you plan to stay in villages or in cities?”

  “Have you heard of the Gulf of Morbihan?”

  The questions glided smoothly from health to holiday. By the end of the visit I had tips for the entire western coast of France. Almost as an afterthought, the doc told me I’d had an allergic reaction to Amoxicillin, hence the rash. We headed onwards to the chemist at Pontivy to get my new drugs.

  “Try and avoid the sun,” the pharmacist said, handing me my new pills, Doxycycline. “Any exposure to sunlight will cause severe sunburn.”

  When I told her we were driving a scooter around the country all day and every day, she handed me the strongest sun cream she had and told me to use it liberally and wished us luck. We visited the tourist office in the town, which is inside a péniche moored to the canal-side. The woman at the desk said it was the only tourist office in France on a boat. She directed us to the main sites of the town, including a 15th century chateau built in the style of King Philippe Auguste, who was behind the city walls of Paris that had grown so dear to me. Now armed with a good grounding in Pontivy, we dined on croque monsieurs, completed the suggested walking tour, then headed back to Guermeur, where the wolf was waiting for us.

  I say wolf, and it definitely looked like a wolf, but I suppose it was a Breton Husky on steroids. Whatever it was, it was waiting by a farmer near the entrance to the village, and as we pulled in and drove by it gave chase. The farmer screamed at the hound, something that sounded like “Didier!!!” Now, Didier is a pretty pathetic-sounding name for a wolf-hound, but I wasn’t thinking about that at the time. I was focused on two things: the beast tearing after us and the road ahead.

  The dog was snarling as got closer. I accelerated as we passed an abandoned church. Lina was yelling as we flew through the cornfields. But I couldn’t go too fast, the roads were too small. The wolf gained on us, gained on us, then drew level. He looked at me, my bare left leg, now spotty from the spreading rash, no doubt a tempting treat for a hungry predator. I skidded around yet another corner, where just 24 hours earlier we’d picked blackberries and eaten them on the go. The dog pulled back and started biting near Lina’s ankles.

  From pure instinct I navigated through the country roads. I tried to put some distance between us and the monster, which I could now see had switched to the right side of our scooter, eyeing up my other leg this time. In the side mirror I saw into its bloodshot eyes, which were looking into mine.

  I’m not ashamed to say I was scared. What if the wolf leapt at us? What would I do? The farmer and his screams were now far behind us on the other side of Guermeur. It was just us and Didier. I heard what sounded like the wolf biting the back of the scooter - and it may well have been that - or it may have been a rock hitting the bike, or a screw flying loose as we tackled the uneven terrain.

  And just as it was all getting too much, just as I was thinking I’d spend my last moments in the jaws of a Breton wolf, the creature stopped dead in its tracks and turned away, trotting back to his owner. Miraculously, I’d steered us back to our own cottage, which was on a road called “Dead-end swamp” (Impasse des Marais).

  We pulled into the driveway and didn’t hang around to inspect the bike for tooth marks or blood. Instead, we went inside, shut the door, locked it for good measure, and caught our breath. Then we relaxed. Just as the doctor had ordered. That night, we skipped the sunset walk through the cornfields and stayed inside, watching the sky from the window of our little cottage.

  And fancy that - shining stronger than the stars was a perfectly formed full moon.

  8.4 The croc

  There’s no better way to truly experience a country than to see it from a scooter. I’ve read similar things about riding a motorbike, but we told ourselves that a top speed of 45 km/hour (30 miles) was more pleasurable. Now several weeks into the trip, we were getting used to the slower-paced lifestyle out of Paris and were delighted by the friendliness of the locals.

  Elderly ladies would wave at us from their kitchen windows as we chugged by. One time a whole team of village firefighters whooped and cheered as we passed. Every time we stopped for a meal or a snack, shop owners would ask us where we were from, and the further we travelled the more impressed they were with our adventure. One cafe owner stopped us mid- conversation to call over his wife.

  “Françoise, come here, this is énorme,” he yelled, then retold our story using elegant French words and phrases that I noted and tucked away to remember.

  It was through these exchanges that I learned how to say words like périple instead of voyage, which I think sounds much more impressive. I worked on my routine of explaining the trip so well that I knew how to get laughs from the locals. After revealing our top speed, 45 km an hour, I found that if I added “but it’s 50 when we go downhill” then even the toughest mechanic would chuckle. The trip was a valuable way to improve our French, as we found ourselves talking about things that never cropped up in daily Paris conversations. We would have to discuss extremely specific directions; or would have to negotiate the price of scooter repairs; or we’d have to eventually master describing the heart-shaped route (en forme d’un coeur). Travelling through the countryside of France is an excellent way to improve your French (the scooter bit is optional).

  As we continued the trip we were meeting some memorable characters too,
perhaps none more so than Éléonore. You may remember the story of the crocodile in the Canal Saint-Martin. Heck, you may even believe it. But a big part of the story that really gave it some credibility was that in 1984, sewer workers found a baby croc near the Pont Neuf on the Seine River. After a short stint in a Parisian aquarium, the reptile was sent to a zoo in Vannes, a town in western France. One of my favourite parts of the story was when I found out that she was still alive all these decades later. But nothing gave me greater pleasure than meeting Éléonore the croc when we passed through Vannes on the road trip. The staff took us behind the scenes to get up close to her. Éléonore, they estimated, was a 40-year-old Nile Crocodile. She was three metres long and weighed 200 kg (10ft and 550 pounds). Part of me was sad to think she’d never taste the local fish of the Nile River. Part of me was sadder still that her enclosure was designed to look like the Paris sewers, where she was found, and not the wilds of eastern Africa. But mostly, I wondered what would become of the two crocodiles in the Canal Saint-Martin in Paris. Would they ever make it to the age of 40?

  These were the thoughts in my mind as we continued to head south through the French countryside. As we left Brittany the weather turned even warmer, and we spent long days scooting through the sunflower fields of western France. It was a scorching summer, which I would have loved if it weren’t for the damned medication. I was supposed to be avoiding the sun at all costs. Where I’d previously been wearing a T-shirt and shorts, I now had a bandana around my face, sunglasses, a jacket, and gloves. But the sun still found me. By the time we got to La Rochelle my nose and lips had more or less peeled off. As we crossed the enormous bridge to the beautiful island of Ile de Ré, I must have looked like a zombie. But it didn’t matter to me; we had finally made it to this popular summer getaway and I was keen to see what the fuss was about.