Bonjour tout le monde if be saying it right!! Today’s installment is all about Marseille and the day trip over there.
So for today it was an early start compared to the last few days, I was up for 0730 and all showered to be out the door at 0810 for our 0830 train into Marseille. It is about an hour and 15 mins to Marseille and there are some nice views on the ride. In France they often have double decker trains and this was one of them. They also have lots of leg room. I must say this is quite the luxury compared to hours long coach journeys across South America.
Arriving into Marseille you are presented with a nice view of the city and the grandiose Notre dame de La Garde church on the hill in the distance. From Saint Charles station it’s about a 15 minute walk down to what is the old port. Now I did the usual thing and booked onto a free walking tour and this was the meetup.
After a quick coffee and Pan au chocolat I’m met with our guide, Ezequiel the Argentinian! Didn’t get a picture of him sadly but he was an interesting character, he met a French lady when doing some anthropology work in Mexico then moved to Marseille and though he split up with his woman he loved Marseille so much he stayed here for the last 15 years! Soon the others show up and we get started.
So to first start on Marseille it is one of the oldest ports this side of the Mediterranean being originally a Greek colony by the name of Masalia, the Greeks set up here as it was a great natural deep water port and back in their day the harbour extended way further in. In fact most of the modern poet is reclaimed land from the sea.
Marseille has been destroyed and rebuilt several times after the fall of the Western Roman Empire and as such a lot of it’s Greco-Roman past was buried until the mid 1800’s when they found remains of it when digging up the city to expand the port.
In 1848 Marseille was expanded under order of Napoleon III to make it the principal port of the French Colonial empire for recieving goods from across the empire. It grew into the biggest commercial port in the Mediterranean and it still is today. The downtown area did become a ghetto as it become populated by poor immigrants from the French colonies, while it is a middle class area now it is one of the few French cities where nobody rich lives in the downtown. When they modernised it they built these grandiose buildings in the Parisian style of architect Georges-Eugène Haussmann. They tried to convince the rich to move into these buildings but they never did move back here and it got occupied with immigrants often living there illegally.
After we go past this we learn that modern Marseille is 60% a reconstruction because of the Nazi occupation in WW2. Initially after France fell in 1940 it was left alone being in the southern Vichy France puppet state half of the country but this changed in 1942 when Germany was clearly losing in North Africa. They knew the allies would land in France sooner or later but they didn’t know where and Marseille would have been a major target for any attack from the south so the Nazis began stationing troops here. Once the Nazis got here they seen the city full of poor dark skinned immigrants and decided to go door to door dragging everyone out of their homes and putting them on Trains east to never be heard from again. This was not enough for them though and they decided to systematically detonate every building these people were living in pretty much in a straight line all the way to the sea. The Haussman era buildings were spared and the traditional old town but the rest completely razed.
With the dark chapter over it was next into the traditional old town which used to be a dangerous area (by European standards) but has in recent years been more opened to tourism and the back streets here resemble a lot of the places I seen back in Latin America.
Eventually the tour wrapped up at the cathedral and our guide invites anyone who wants to join him for a glass of Pastis, the local liqueur. I oblige and go join him in this little tabac bar and have a glass. It tasted a bit like hactus cough medicine if anyone remembers that. While there we got chatting and reminiscing over travels and ended up chatting quite a long time about the state of affairs in Bolivia. It’s still a mess with the blockades but seems like they are over it and it’s opened back up for now. I got lucky missing those as they were just starting as I went from Sucre to Uyuni and then to the Argentina border. When they started it was in and around La Paz but did later spread across the whole country. Whatever happens next I wish the Bolivians well it’s an amazing country and it deserves better. Would love to come back there one day!
After this it was too hot to go hiking up the mountain to that Notre dame church so I got on an early train back and joined Clive for an afternoon on the beach.
The next few days was more lazing around on a beach but we did do an inland trip which was pretty interesting and we’ll cover that on the next one.
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