Low-cost midlife crisis

You would think that as they are probably the two most important cities in North East France, there would be regular train journeys between Lille and Calais. You would think wrong.

I suspect the problem is the Eurostar, which has somehow taken control of this corridor rendering it virtually barren of regular and convenient SNCF services. We needed to be in Calais no later than 1pm in order to make our ferry. This left us with two choices of train. It’s not a long trip.

Choice #1: Lille (Europe) to Calais (Frethun). Departing 10.05 arriving 10.33. A bit earlier than necessary obviously, but the big problem is that we end up in Calais (Frethun) which is not in Calais at all but in a village about 10km away. It’s the Eurostar station for Calais basically.

Choice #2: Lille (Centre Hospitalier Régional) to Calais Ville. Dep 10.33 Arr 11.58. A better arrival time and station. But we’d have to start from some station far from central Lille. Plus it takes 3 times as long

That’s it. The next option left at 11 something, but managed to be even slower than option #2, and only get to Calais at 14.04.

So, we chose Frethun. From where we needed to get a bus into Calais itself. At least that bus seemed to exist and was on time. From Calais main railway station there are free shuttle buses to the port every 22 minutes. We coalesced with a few other backpacking travellers on the same boat as us and waited for the shuttle bus. And waited.

There was no sign of any bus. Nor really of any buses. Or taxis. We saw one taxi at the station and one of our number asked the driver how much it would be. Not too expensive, it seemed, but he (the driver) thought he seemed to be the only taxi he’d seen today. He said he’d be back soon.

Finally, after we’d waited for about 40 minutes, while any number of people had walked past, an older lady stopped and told us that today was a public holiday and the buses wouldn’t be coming. This explained the lack of taxis too. It would have been nice if someone could have mentioned this earlier. Perhaps they assumed we were all Catholic (it is some Catholic holiday or other) or maybe the way that the French assimilation system works, if you are in France you are French, and therefore no one needs to tell you about the fact that it’s a holiday. So, in the end we set off on the scenic 50 minute walk to the port

After a while we started encountering groups of tired people coming the other way, like us caught up in the festive 15th August spirit, wheeling their suitcases the 3 kms back to the town in a joyful spiritual way.

One of the things we’ve become aware of is that foot passengers are not really catered for any more on the ferries across the Channel. Many ferry operators don’t even permit foot passengers, and the ones that do have very few. Again this is an effect of the Eurostar. Foot passengers logically go by rail. Unless of course there are no effing railway seats available.

At Calais port there was an exhibition proudly outlining how they built a brand new ferry port to handle the huge volume of trade across the Channel, which was opened in 2015,a year before the idiotic 52% of British voters decided to cut themselves off from the rest of the continent for reasons best known to themselves (but very closely tied to racism). And then of course the overtly racist Conservative government took this decision and turned it into the most ludicrously insular anti-European “fuck you, neighbours” version of this possible.

We’re on the ferry now. Heading towards the benighted island on which I was born. I have mixed feelings. Still, at least the whole place doesn’t shut down for something about Mary.