Laure's Ticket to Ride!
We both finished work on the Thursday evening, and met up at 7pm British Time at Digbeth Coach Station. It always strikes me as amazing that the second largest city in the UK should have one of the most run-down coach stations in the country - hopefully that will soon change however! We had a nice and pleasant journey down, and hoped that it was a portent of things to come. The coach arrived into London Victoria Coach Station about 15 minutes early, and then we had to wait around for an hour and a bit for our connection to Dover, and the real start of our journey.
The coach to Dover stopped in quite a few places en route, and was the slowest journey I've ever had to Dover, taking about 2 and a half hours. It being the middle of the night however it made sense that it didn't fly down the motorway! We made it to Dover in plenty of time for our ferry to Calais, which was due to depart at 2:45am UK Time. The ferry itself was not great, obviously overnight ferries aren't particularly stocked with luxurious amenities, like food ... We also seemed to be sharing the ferry with a selection of misfits, druggies, and other strange types.
We reached Calais at 5am French Time, and managed to catch the free bus from the ferry terminal to the town's railway station. We needed to get to Calais' other station - Calais Frethun - and after looking at the rail timetables from Calais Ville we realised we'd have to catch a local bus instead. Here we were, nearly 12 hours into an Inter-Rail journey round SW Europe and we hadn't set foot on a train yet!! We just about made it to the railway station in time, bought our compulsory TGV reservations - which were cheaper than we had anticipated - and took our first train, to Paris!
We reached Paris about 15 minutes late, and had a wander around the streets nearby the Gare du Nord. We bought a couple of things from a Leader Price supermarket for what would be lunch, and then grabbed the metro to Gare Austerlitz to catch the train to Perpignan, potentially the longest single journey we would make, 9 hours and 10 minutes.
We had some problems finding seats on the train, it being quite popular and crowded and us not having made a reservation. We eventually found a couple of seats in the 'espace-enfant' coach, so we ended up sitting next to a compartment of kids playing games! In our little section there were nice enough people; Laure listened to a retired coach driver and another guy who used to work in the French colonies, and so had been in a lot of the places we were going to go on this trip! We looked a lot out through the window in the corridor; France has a lot of very nice countryside. At some point beyond Brive, the vegetation became a lot more yellowish-green and we knew we were in the South. In Toulouse all the people from our compartment got off.
Between Narbonne and Rivesaltes the landscape took us rather by surprise: the railway seemed to be built on a causeway, with the Mediterranean on one side and marshes on the other, and the whole area looked pretty deserted, with the bluest sky and the bluest sea. The marshes had very flat islands with short vegetation, that looked more like green stains on some kind of blue material. We very rarely saw a house, and it seemed like the whole area was a bird-watcher's heaven! It looked almost as though there oughtn't be a train passing here.
We finally arrived at Perpignan railway station, the 'Centre of the Universe' as Salvador Dali had put it. But then Dali was a rather odd bloke. It wasn't as windy as we had been advised by someone it would be. The area around the station was quite nice. We went to the hotel we'd booked (The "Hotel Le Berry"), but it seemed that there was some kind of problem with the hotel. It wasn't a major problem; the manager had managed to book us into the hotel next door, "Le Helder". We never did find out what the problem was. The room had three beds, but no electricity point or phone, so we told the receptionist to wake us up in the morning. That room was supposed to be 210FF, but we only had to pay 120FF, which was the price of the hotel room we'd initially booked.
We ate that first night at "Le Perroquet" restaurant, although there was no evidence of any parrot on the menu! Laure had "boudin a la catalane" which was not so good, beef sirloin and fries; Ian had chicken nuggets, "tête de veau sauce gribiche" and fries. It was a pleasant meal with RTL 2 playing in the background. We walked a little bit around our part of the town, though we were a little far from the centre. We noticed that all the road names were in two languages, each road had a French name and what we assumed to be a Catalan name. The town was covered with palm trees, and Ian pointed out he'd never seen one in real life before. We went back to the hotel and settled down to a deserved good night's sleep.