Le Havre

One of my first real weekends away during my last contract was to Le Havre. In fact, it was a little more than a weekend, as there had been a problem during some maintenance at the school, resulting in the water being turned off and the school essentially evacuated. Except I didn’t really have anywhere to evacuate to. Additionally, it had just snowed – so while I had previously considered a trip to Le Havre, all those plans went up in smoke because the buses were cancelled. Eventually, I reconciled myself to spending far too much to take a “Z” across three different train lines, though not without a bit of a panic first (shout out to my parents from dealing with my drama from more than sixteen thousand kilometres away! Thanks to the internet, there is no escape!). Anyway, I was able to book an AirBnB, complete with a kitchen and closet-style laundry, so I could take all the food I had already prepared for the end of the school week and do some laundry. The last was a necessity, as most of my clothes and my actual backpack (!) were at a colleague’s house due to the complicated laundry situation of living in a school. In the end, I had my big handbag that I usually only take on a plane, my little four-euro backpack, and a shopping bag filled with my food, clothes, crochet, and tech stuffs. All this to say: it was a really cobbled, barely held-together, patchwork quilt of a trip!

The final cherry on top was texting a colleague while on the train to tell her my plans and she replied, “Why are you going there? It’s ugly!” Ahhhh….

So, I arrive in Le Havre, too many hours later, but at least I’m there. I can wash dishes and brush my teeth, and, honestly, the AirBnB is really the height of luxury after living in a school. For the next few days at least, I’m home.

Le Havre translates into English as “The Haven”, and it’s been a pretty major port city for a long time. During World War 2, it was bombed down to ground level. This is a big part of why my colleague called it ugly. It was rebuilt in a more block-centric, modern design after the war, things being built in a hurry and with scarcity of resources. Still, they have made some efforts. If you look back towards the train station as you exit it, you can see the wall above the doorway is made of many panes of coloured glass.

On my walk that first night (even though I hadn’t arrived very early, I still did a short version of my customary ‘first day’ wander), I came across a church with a tower so tall, surely they must have been trying to set some sort of record. It sported glass panes in the same colours as at the station, and with the lights on inside the building, it looked very nice. On another day, I went inside, and the tower threw coloured squares of light all around the inside of the building, patterning the walls and the floor.

There is still something of a cathedral in Le Havre as well, although not in Normandy’s full, classic, gothic style. They say this was one of the few buildings to “survive” the war. I have seen the picture of the rumble, and their definition of “survive” and mine is a little different – it’s the ship of Sisyphus: how much can you replace and still call it the same boat? But the original sculpture of Jesus on the cross did survive the wreckage and was reinstalled in the arguably new building, and that is still pretty impressive.

Another thing to recommend Le Havre is that it’s right on the coast, and I was starting to miss the ocean. Le Havre has its industrial port, docks for various private boats, an ocean inlet crafted to act as a kind of tranquil pool in one part of a town, and a pebble beach.

At the beach, there’s a little lighthouse, and a strange square-ish sculpture, that looks different, depending what angle you catch it on. You can also look back at one of the smaller ports to see a statue of a kid on their father’s shoulders.  I went a few times, joining a crowd to watch the sun set over the water and feel a little more peace sink into my bones.

Back at the ocean inlet, there is a giant and dramatic bridge to let people cross from one side to the other. Nearby, there is a bookshop. I passed it on my first night, and then it just… kept going. Finding the door was quite a challenge, having to round a corner and continue down past several more sectioned windows. I think it used to be at least three different things before it was amalgamated into one huge bookstore. Once I found the door, I saw that it also had a basement level too! I had to return the next day because there was too much to see before closing time.

At a different section of the coast, there is a large… sculpture is perhaps the word? Art piece? It is two giant arches made of shipping containers, all painted wild and bright colours. It was nice in the evening, with pretty streetlights, but is nice in the bright light of day too.

Just around the corner from here is the MuMa – Le Havre’s art museum. I didn’t quite wrangle free entry here but it’s pretty cheap anyway. And I loved it! It’s not very big, but it’s all the kind of painting that I love. Mostly it was local landscapes, which is my favourite.

Le Havre also has a large garden, which I still went to, even though it was entirely the wrong season. The greenhouses were all locked up to keep out the cold, and entry is closed to the public for not quite two months of the year – and I was just one week too early, but so it goes.

I still really enjoyed it. The garden is mostly in a square-shaped, with a bit of a hill built up around the edge, so I could climb up the hill, sloshing through a little bit of mud at times, and walk all the way around the garden at the top, where they had a couple different Asian sections (with a very potent curry leaf tree), and even an Australia section! I plucked a eucalyptus leaf and kept it in my coat pocket until it was time to fly back to Oz again.

A colleague saw me playing with it once, and she suggested I was homesick. It’s the obvious connection really. But it threw me, because I wasn’t thinking about that all. I first learnt to scent gum leaves in someone’s backyard in the Middle East, and crushing a gum leaf usually takes me back there, to a young voice saying, “You’re Australian, so, you should know how to do this.” And then making sure I knew.

It’s a memory that’s a bit like standing between two mirrors – the reflection of the reflection of the reflection going on forever, like a doorway back to all the places and all the me’s who’ve ever cracked a eucalypt leaf to smell the oil. I wasn’t sad and forlorn, longing for some other place when that colleague saw me fiddling with my leaf – I was thinking about how you could call so many places home and each one was new and rich and lovely, never cheapening or dulling the places that had come before it. I was thinking about a gum tree at home amongst the snow and ice of February in Le Havre, and that really anywhere you put down roots could end up being the right place. I was thinking how nice it was to be able to call the whole world “home”.

On my way out of the garden, I also did the labyrinth hedge in what was surely record time! Of course, all the leaves had fallen off the hedge so you could see all the way to the end – but that’s hardly my fault!

Getting to and from the garden was quite the trek, and on the way up, I had been sure that Google Maps was taking me on an obscure mountain goat path – but I ended up encountering three separate groups of people, so it seems not. The whole trip was a little precarious with the ice and snow, and I swear nearly broke my hip in front of a class of middle schoolers. Thankfully I slipped towards a wall instead of towards the street, and was able to right myself before I forever cemented twenty-something as the age of “ancients” forever in their minds.

You don’t always have to scramble the hills around town though. They have a funicular in town to take you up one part of the hill, and this was the first place where I ever rode one. (There is one in Paris, at Mont Marte to get to Sacre Coeur, but I didn’t learn that until after this trip.) There were lots of firsts this trip. I also ate snails for the first time here, drowned in garlic and butter. It’s a little chewy, but the snail itself doesn’t seem to have any particular flavour. I did a full lunch time “formule” which is a very economic way to eat out on France, especially at lunch, where you choose from a smaller menu and it comes with an entrée or a dessert. (Or indeed both, but I have only done this once and, honestly, it’s too much food!) So, I had my snails with a classic steak and chips, the steak incredibly tenderised.

All in all, I really liked Le Havre, and I came back for more than one weekend.

Étretat

Part of the drawcard of Le Havre though, is that it has a decent size bus station, and from here you can catch the bus to Étretat. This was what I did on my second visit to Le Havre. For some reason, you can’t buy the ticket on the bus, so even though I got there very early, I still had to rush to the building that seemed to be an eternity away to get my ticket, and then race back to the bus. The ticket I was given was not a proper plastic card, but did boast that it could be recharged five times. However, the teller still gave me a separate one for the return. A bit strange. Anyway, I did make that bus, and it’s not a long trip – barely over an hour. It is a good little route to see a bit of ‘outback’ France because there doesn’t seem to be much else out there but farms. Occasionally as we passed by, I would be forcibly reminded that Normandy is a big cow region. (It’s cows, apples, and Camembert cheese if you’re keeping score.)

The bus stop is back aways from the coast, which is a smart design move. As you make your way to the famous cliffs and coastline, you have to make through the town, perhaps discover a little shop or café. It’s tiny, and it won’t take long!

If you have watched the popular Netflix show ‘Lupin’ (originally French), then you’ve already seen the cliffs of Etretat featured briefly in that shows. If you would like to take a more classic approach, boy do I have the six hundred paintings for you. Actually, it’s probably closer to one thousand six hundred. Monet alone has painted these cliffs ninety (90) times!

So, you know, I’d ‘seen’ them. I knew what I was looking for, what I was going to see. But it was yet another instance where the physical reality was so different, so incredibly imposing (I place it on the level of standing at the base of the Eiffel Tower, or standing on my first bridge in Venice). It simply did not feel real at all.

I was incredibly, incredibly lucky for my first visit – it was some random weekend, in the middle of the French school term, and, what’s more, in the middle of winter. It was rainy and stormy on either side of that Saturday – but the day I was there could not have been clearer, brighter, more picturesque. I am told that in the height of summer, Etretat is lousy with tourists, well out-numbering the local population, and making it difficult to walk the cliffs. But this is the beauty of the off season, the beauty of living somewhere, knowing that you can shoot your shot and if it doesn’t work out, there’s always another weekend. So yeah. It was meant to be a miserable day, which meant there weren’t that many people there at all, and it was peaceful and beautiful, and yeah, I was so incredibly lucky.

But I wouldn’t come to that realisation for an hour or two – first I had to get unstuck from where I was standing on the wooden deck that borders that part of the coast. I went to the right first, reading some little signs along the way, talking about Monet having painted the cliffs so many times (presumably for all the people who aren’t essentially trying to take up residence inside every museum and gallery they find), asking people to please not take even one pebble, and a little bit of war history (that is, I suppose, Normandy’s fourth regional icon).

I started with the right, or northmost cliff: La Falaise d’Amont. This one has a little church at the top, undergoing construction when I was there, and has a memorial site. This cliff was the last place that the biplane “L’Oiseau Blanc” was seen as two French pilots tried to be the first to make a non-stop flight from Paris to New York City. It had been agreed that they would make the decision to continue, if they felt it possible, when they reached Étretat. Evidently, they thought they could, but they were never seen again and no-one really knows what happened – they never found the wreckage, and there were many conflicting stories at the time. The monument is named for the plane, which translates as The White Bird.

From here, you can get the most perfect view looking back at the middle cliff with it’s iconic arch and needle.

I walked along the top a little ways but it feels like you could walk along the coast unimpeded for hours. But I turned back and headed for the other cliff.

The middle cliff is called Falaise d’Aval and is probably the most iconic. It is a protected site and while you are allowed to climb it on foot, there is a limit to how close people are allowed to get in a boat. The thing about cliffs and coastlines is that eventually they will be come unrecognisable. Eventually, the land falls back into the sea. The arch and the needlepoint at Étretat won’t last forever. Some day all we’ll have is the photos… And several hundred paintings.

You can walk out all over the top of the cliff though and see birds nests over the railings, and even go in a little (generously speaking) cave.

From this cliff, you can get a good view of the town, La Falaise d’Amont, and the third cliff that you cannot see from the beach: Falaise La Manneporte. This is a second, much stockier arch, and you can continue far down along the coast in this direction too (and perhaps even play a spot of golf on the parallel course nearby).

After, I returned to the pebble beach. It is lovely to be up on the cliffs, but you can’t see the needlepoint from that middle cliff. I went and did my own little watercolour renditions of the cliffs, because why not? I also went and got a little Croque Monsieur, but with chicken instead of ham, and while this is iconic, I will say… Still just a sandwich. I don’t know what I was expecting.

But I was also able to get a scoop of violet gelato, so I have now had the experience of that on two different French beaches on opposite sides of the country, which feels a little random, but delightful. While I was sitting there, some brazen seagulls came and stole a girl’s sandwich from right out of her hands. They ripped it apart, so there were suddenly a hundred squabbling birds on the beach. The girl and her friend accepted defeat quickly, and instead started filming the wild bird tornado.

I would get the chance to go again another day, in different weather, and it didn’t hit quite the same. Although the cliffs are still impressive, without the crystal blue on the sky and ocean to back it up, it does feel a little different. So, I was lucky – but I still think the locals are living in their own but of paradise, all year round.

This will be my last post for 2024. You can expect the next installment to hit your inbox on January 8th.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year! I’ll see you on the other side!