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Details: Written by: Richard_McKie; Parent Category: Travel; Category: Europe; Published: 20 October 2014; Hits: 51486

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Touring in the South of France

September 2014

Lyon

Off the plane we are welcomed by a warm Autumn day in the south of France. Fragrant and green.

Lyon is the first step on our short stay in Southern France, touring in leisurely hops by car, down the Rhône valley from Lyon to Avignon and then to Aix and Nice with various stops along the way.

Months earlier I’d booked a car from Lyon Airport to be dropped off at Nice Airport. I’d tried booking town centre to town centre but there was nothing available.

This meant I got to drive an unfamiliar car, with no gearstick or ignition switch and various other novel idiosyncrasies, ‘straight off the plane’. But I managed to work it out and we got to see the countryside between the airport and the city and quite a bit of the outer suburbs at our own pace. Fortunately we had ‘Madam Butterfly’ with us (more of her later) else we could never have reached our hotel through the maze of one way streets.

The charment Hotel St Vincente near the river turned out to be well placed to walk to most places of interest so, after a little more exploration than I might have liked due to the maze of streets, I parked the car at the long-stay car-park at the Opera.

The Opera Lyon
The Opera - Lyon

Despite some early light rain we found the city delightful. Lyon is a city of many fine buildings and a busy commercial area like a small Paris with friendly inhabitants.

Lyon

Across the Rhône is a high hill, once a Roman fort, topped by a cathedral, the Basilica de Fourvière; and a mini Eifel Tower/communications mast, La Tour Métallique.

La Tour
Métallique - Lyon
La Tour Métallique - Lyon

The Basilica is said to contain a golden virgin that I somehow failed to notice despite roaming around it for some time. But there’s a nice picture on line (link). My days of noticing virgins have, apparently, passed.

Basilica de Fourvière

The Basilica affords a great view over the city.

Lyon Panorama

I was most impressed by the local gallery, the Musée des beaux-arts de Lyon, that’s in an old Benedictine convent and houses what must be the finest art collection in France outside of Paris.

Musée des beaux-arts de Lyon

It provided a nice escape from the weather. And Wendy too found a lot to like in it, particularly the antiquities and the extensive collection of sculpture representing Rodin, Maillol and a beautiful Odalisque by James Pradier.

Musée des beaux-arts de Lyon

I’ve also posted a few more of the many photos I took there.

One of our first tasks was to find a nice little French restaurant for dinner. This was harder than you might think. There were plenty of middle eastern and Italian and even a Thai or two but where were the French eateries? Eventually we discovered a nearby square with a choice of three but pizza, burgers and kebabs now pervade the entire European continent. It’s the same in Germany.

La Tour
Dining in Lyon
Dining in Lyon

The next day was sunny and we did a lot of walking, enjoying the architecture and the general atmosphere.

It's amazing, everyone speaks such good French here. Even the little kids, kinder, enfants. Almost no one speaks English.

Wendy se souvient écolière française. Moi aussi. Mais très mal.

Aber ich habe versucht, Deutsch zu lernen. So that's all a bit confusing.

I don't know. Why can't they all speak one language? English of course.

La Tour
Strolling in Lyon
Strolling in Lyon

Leaving Lyon we aim to reach Mirmande for dinner and our next hotel. We're travelling by the back-roads and an infinity of roundabouts.

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Travel

Hong Kong and Shenzhen China

Following our Japan trip in May 2017 we all returned to Hong Kong, after which Craig and Sonia headed home and Wendy and I headed to Shenzhen in China.

I have mentioned both these locations as a result of previous travels. They form what is effectively a single conurbation divided by the Hong Kong/Mainland border and this line also divides the population economically and in terms of population density.

These days there is a great deal of two way traffic between the two. It's very easy if one has the appropriate passes; and just a little less so for foreign tourists like us. Australians don't need a visa to Hong Kong but do need one to go into China unless flying through and stopping at certain locations for less than 72 hours. Getting a visa requires a visit to the Chinese consulate at home or sitting around in a reception room on the Hong Kong side of the border, for about an hour in a ticket-queue, waiting for a (less expensive) temporary visa to be issued.

With documents in hand it's no more difficult than walking from one metro platform to the next, a five minute walk, interrupted in this case by queues at the immigration desks. Both metros are world class and very similar, with the metro on the Chinese side a little more modern. It's also considerably less expensive. From here you can also take a very fast train to Guangzhou (see our recent visit there on this website) and from there to other major cities in China.

Fiction, Recollections & News

The First Man on the Moon

At 12.56 pm on 21 July 1969 Australian Eastern Standard Time (AEST) Neil Armstrong became the first man to step down onto the Moon. I was at work that day but it was lunchtime. Workplaces did not generally run to television sets and I initially saw it in 'real time' in a shop window in the city.

Later that evening I would watch a full replay at my parents' home. They had a 'big' 26" TV - black and white of course. I had a new job in Sydney having just abandoned Canberra to get married later that year. My future in-laws, being of a more academic bent, did not have TV that was still regarded by many as mindless.

Given the early failures, and a few deaths, the decision to televise the event in 'real time' to the international public was taking a risk. But the whole space program was controversial in the US and sceptics needed to be persuaded.

Opinions and Philosophy

Luther - Father of the Modern World?

To celebrate or perhaps just to mark 500 years since Martin Luther nailed his '95 theses' to a church door in Wittenberg and set in motion the Protestant Revolution, the Australian Broadcasting Commission has been running a number of programs discussing the legacy of this complex man featuring leading thinkers and historians in the field.

Much of the ABC debate has centred on Luther's impact on the modern world. Was he responsible for today? Without him, might the world still be stuck in the 'Middle Ages' with each generation doing more or less what the previous one did, largely within the same medieval social structures? In that case could those inhabitants of an alternative 21st century, obviously not us, as we would never have been born, still live in a world of less than a billion people, most of them working the land as their great grandparents had done, protected and governed by an hereditary aristocracy, their mundane lives punctuated only by variations in the weather; holy days; and occasional wars between those princes?

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