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THE TALE OF TWO CITIES
GARETH DAVIS
looks after all the editorial content at Travel Channel and
runs the website. So if you've any comments or complaints, he's
the one to get in touch with! He also produces and presents
on the channel, primarily the series THE TRAVEL BUG and THE
TRAVEL CHANNEL GUIDE TO … And when he has a spare minute,
he writes for the travel section of the Sunday Mirror in the
UK.
Traditionally, France has been the Provence of middle-class gîtes-sitters and first-time familes under Eurocanvass. Oh, and that school trip. But ever since the Channel was Chunnelled, and “Easy” became the prefix of choice for anything you can do on the cheap, the travel industry’s taken up arms to Frenchify the British masses. Budget airlines may come and Go but Easyjet and Ryanair are battling it out over who’s got the cheapest fares. The idea is to get us hooked on places like Toulouse, Dinard, and Rondez, which mean as much to most of us as Leeds, Bristol, and Stoke-on-Trent do to our Gallic cousins.
 Should we be afraid? Absolutement not! For the price of a couple of DVDs you can hie yourself off to a small smart French town which will comfortably fill a couple of days with enough culture, food, wine, and shopping to leave you pleasantly fuzzy around the edges.
Two cities took my fancy – Rouen and Tours. Eh? Exactly. Unless you’re a fully flagellating member of the Joan of Arc Fan Club the names aren’t going to mean much to you but these two medieval madames are a saucy pair that will favour a romantic couple or a cultured group in search of an elevated weekend.
 Rouen, the capital of Upper Normandy, has had a rough old time but it’s to her credit that she doesn’t bear a grudge. The Allies bombed her in ‘44 and the English occupied her for some thirty years back in the 1400s – and it’s that the Rouennais, along with the rest of France, remember. Because in 1431 in the Place du Vieux Marché we burnt Joan of Arc for witchcraft.
Sounds like a cue for tourism. Well, what’s there is a zany church vintage ‘79 which looks like a cross between a Norwegian longboat and a half-hearted ski jump with a local marché reeking of old fromages snuggling up under its eaves. This religion-meets-retail center is slapbang in the tourist heart of the city, skirted by bistros and pavement cafés. The real cheese though is opposite, squeezed between the timber-framed houses. The Musée Jeanne d’Arc is a waxwork trawl through the saint’s life. That it fails to come alive is due to a pedantic English commentary which sounds like a duff Linguaphone cours
Much better is what’s to be had on the other side of the main street called Rue – there’s no getting away from her - Jeanne d’Arc. The Gothic Cathédrale de Notre-Dame kept Monet busily painting through thirty different studies all capturing the façade in changing light. The artist actually sat opposite in the first floor of what is now a twee but terribly well-organised tourist information centre. One work, Rouen Cathedral 1894, can be viewed at the Musée des Beaux-Arts, one of the best French regional art museums I’ve seen; a radiantly light space boasting Van Dyck, Renoir, Degas, Modigliani, and, of course, the Monet.
 Rouen is just up the Seine, an hour and a half from Paris by train. The town centre’s a typical crisscross of boulevards sloping down the river’s right bank. The station’s at the top and everything else is towards the bottom. I stayed near the station.
The Hotel de Dieppe is a convenient family-run 3*. Ok, I was in one of the smallest single floral rooms I’ve ever seen but rooms were scarce. The Tall Ships were in town and who am I to turn my nose up at three hundred sailors? Not that there were any to be found at Les Petits Bateaux. The “Captain wishes you Bon Appetit” announced the menu. That was as nautical as it got. It’s a friendly restaurant and the two set menus on offer come in at €21 and €31. But be warned. Normandy has a filthy reputation for the richest cholestroly-overloaded cuisine in France, drowning in pools of butter, cream and Calvados.
Tours isn’t quite as English-user friendly. The saying goes that this part of France, the Touraine, is home to the purest form of French. Hell, I’m happy to give it a go and the one thing I’ll say about the locals, you give them an inch, and they’ll give you a mile.
Tours is squished between the Loire and Cher Rivers, an hour’s train ride southwest of Paris and an hour’s cheap flight from the UK. I stayed at the smart Hotel l’Univers which is just a couple of tugs on the old wheely case from the train station and a short walk to all the gay haunts.
 This region is France’s Valley of the Kings, stuffed with châteaux, holiday homes for France’s monarchs who came here for a bit of naughté naughté. And guess who crops up yet again? At what is now a shoe shop in the Rue Colbert, Joan of Arc picked up her armour en route to trouncing the Anglais at Orleans. Fortunately, that’s it on Joannie.
St Martin is Tours’ biggest name whose tomb and basilica were crowd pullers back in the Middle Ages but only two towers remain testifying to what a whale of a place it must have been. Tours isn’t littered with must-sees. The Cathedrale St-Gatien is fairly unexceptional and so’s the Musée des Beaux Arts. It’s called upstaging - big time. When you’re spitting distance from châteaux like Amboise, Chenonceaux, and Chinon, all easily accessed on a day trip, you’ve got some pretty stiff competition.
But what Tours does have is oodles of atmosphere which got me hooked. The Old Town centering on Place Plumereau, a pretty timberframe-fringed square, is a great amble and the square on a summer night is steaming with locals and visitors digestifing under the stars. A great place to retire to after downing the lardons at Le Petit Patrimoine, a small gay-friendly showcase for the local produce which again piles on the pounds for a reasonable amount of Euros. Game and goats’ cheeses are prevalent. Vegetarians are being increasingly catered for but if you don’t eat fish, the options are still as rare as a non-smoking Turk.
Now, shopping; admittedly Rouen’s got the edge for clothes but bugger the Versace, the wine and cheeses are what attract us. Tours’ Les Halles, the local market, is a stunner. The displays could give Harrods Food Hall a run for its money at a sliver of the price. The Loire is the home of the great French whites, Muscadet to the west and Sancerre to the east which you can pick up for a few quid. And between Rouen and Tours, you can stock up on local cheeses like Camembert, Neufchâtel, Valencay and Chevignol.
But exercise caution. The budget airlines may offer low fares but equally low are their baggage allowances. Ryanair’s for example comes in at 15kg for luggage. That’s 8 kilos less than most scheduled carriers. Happily lugging my wine back with me, I got stung for £40 excess baggage, and after a fantastic few days of nosing at the trough it was a shame to leave with a distinctly nasty taste in my mouth.
FOR MORE INFORMATION
To find out more about Rouen visit
To find out more about Tours visit
To find out more about The Loire Valley visit
Gareth travelled to Rouen with Rail Europe. To fine out more about Rail Europe visit 
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March 2006 |