Sète

The grandkids were very reluctant to let me go. Their father was away, and it had been a long time since they had an adult who would push them on the swing, whirl them around till they were dizzy, etc. My cousin had grandkids; that made me feel old. His wife fed me a filling breakfast of noodles with beef and fish balls for the journey.


I had a first class seat (which went by the marketspeak of Comfort 1, there were no uncomfortable seats, just degrees of comfort) on Thalys with the perk of restauration à la place (meal served in the seat). It was quite tasty actually. I felt happier about the 22€ supplement it cost me. There were no classic white departure schedules at Rotterdam, nor at Paris Nord. Electronic automation was taking over. Train travel was getting more like plane travel, anodyne but flavourless.


From Gare du Nord I caught a metro to Gare de Lyon. I wanted to book my sleeper for a later segment but all the counters were closed. Was it the D-Day holiday or what? It turned out later that an electricity union was en grève (on strike), cutting power to many trains in Paris. I waited from 1320 to 1520. The platform was announced close to departure time, like with planes, then everybody got onto the TGV. I might have been lucky that the TGV service wasn't affected. We didn't seem to be travelling very fast, perhaps 140 km/h. The TGV seemed to be the normal intercity train now, only locals served regional destinations.

The Languedoc-Roussillon region of France is less well known than the Côte d'Azur, but also has a Mediterranean climate, and Catalan culture, hence my curiosity about it. At that moment I was about 200 km from where I had been only a few days before, and I had gone all the way back to the Netherlands only to return. I sure had concocted a strange itinerary. My justification was that I had to transit Barcelona to visit the Canary Islands and why not see the Costa Brava while I was there. Then I needed a new region in France to visit and I was curious about Languedoc-Roussillon. Also I wanted to be an overnight train ride away from Geneva, and this was as far away as I could go to get enough sleep. And then I looked at my trajectory on the map and wow, how weird.

Sète with its port and canal, looked just as I had anticipated from my research. It did look a bit seedy. The hostel was halfway up a hill and it was quite tiring getting there. My German friend B, whom I had arranged to meet and travel for a few days together, turned up while I was having dinner. He was staying in a hotel in the port. We walked down there to have a drink and a chat. The canals give Sète the appellation Venice of Languedoc.

Just like in Girona there were noisy scooters roaming the streets in the evening, and this was a Monday. However the night air was soft, and the town did not feel sinister at all.


We had an early night. B was still recovering from a recent trip to Myanmar. Something smelt in the hostel room. Perhaps it was the port itself.