Saint Malo, France

Although I’d felt more comfortable in some dentist chairs than in my ferry seat, I slept surprisingly well, thanks mainly to that budget traveller’s essential: earplugs. They cut out both the loud drone of the ferry’s engines and that of my own snoring quite nicely and helped me get a fairly unbroken night’s sleep, with me waking up around an hour before we docked.

Soon I was belting out of the ferry terminal and pedalling eagerly along the roads of Saint Malo at dawn. A little too eagerly in fact, as I realised I didn’t have a clue where I was going. I pulled over, took my bearings on the SatNav and headed for the “old” walled city, known as Intra-Muros (apparently rebuilt faithfully after being mostly decimated during the Second World War). It was very quiet and not a great deal was open yet, but I found a boulangerie that was serving, secured Ron to a tree and stepped in, warming up my nasal passages for action.

“Er… un choc au pain, s’il vous plait.”
“Quoi?” came the reply from the bemused shopkeeper, who looked uncannily like a musketeer.
“Un… chocolat au pain?” I said uncertainly.
“Ah, un pain au chocolat!” he said with realisation, and all the old people in the queue behind me tittered at my tentative grip on the French language. It been a while since I had last spoken it. Fourteen years, to be precise. I sealed the fate of my first ever attempt to speak the language on French soil as an outright failure by accidentally coming out with a classic Delboy-ism on my way out, by waving and saying “Bonjour!” instead of “Au revoir!”

I cycled fairly aimlessly all morning, partly to get my bearings around town and partly to get used to Ron and the 24 gears he apparently possessed. Most of my concentration was taken up by dodging the gravel that lined most of the roads and cycle paths, which contained an artistic sprinkling of shattered glass in many places. Perhaps the road sweepers were on strike. One group that didn’t appear to be shirking its responsibilities, however, was the city’s dogs: there were not-so-little mounds of dog turd everywhere.

As lunchtime approached I headed for the YHA, eager to check in and tuck into the French picnic of camembert, pate and baguette I had bought from a supermarket. My thighs were burning from the exertion, and a little bit farther down the road cycling suddenly seemed to become even harder work. Eventually I realised that I had a puncture in my rear wheel. Arse! Rotten luck after only a few hours of cycling. I cursed the city’s road sweepers as I walked my bike to a nearby bus shelter to rest and eat lunch.

As I sat there, a just-prepared baguette balanced on my leg slid off and with a deft backflip landed face down on the pavement. Right into the gravel. It had claimed a second victim. Perhaps it was just the effect of being in France that was rubbing off on me, but I felt ready to surrender. Things really seemed to be working against me today.

Having stowed Ron safely at the hostel, I took a walk along the front at sunset to see the spire of the old town’s Cathedral  beautifully silhouetted (it took me a long time to find a section of the seafront without dogshit from which to take that), eventually turning back for the hostel but via one of the few bars open.

Traditional French bars tend to be local places for local people, with the regulars sitting or standing up at the bar drinking either espressos or half pints of beer from wine glasses, and are generally run by a middle-aged woman in designer glasses who is very much the host, providing conversation as well as food and drink. Where an English tourist fitted in amongst this jolly Gallic throng is clear, and was made as such: he didn’t. I was polite, I spoke French to order and I sat on a table minding my own business and writing, but still I felt a distinct iciness towards my prescence, and that on one occasion I was being discussed. I guess there is a chance that I perceived things incorrectly - but then again, perhaps your average French person is simply a narrow-minded bastard with an innate suspicion of foreigners, and therefore not so dissimilar from your average English person after all?

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