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.

All the trains from Rotterdam in the direction of Calais were fully booked up with no reservations to be had. One of the issues with the app is that it doesn’t really offer up alternatives when this happens so you have to try and come up with alternatives by chopping the journey into chunks, or, the better option, speaking to someone in the ticket office who seem to be unfailingly helpful and cheerful.

I had the slight fear that this would leave us on another seat-free journey a fear that was compounded when an announcement came on the tannoy at Rotterdam station that the train to Brussels that was soon to arrive was overcrowded and people travelling domestically in the Netherlands should try and find a different route to their destination. However, this proved to be a bit overexaggerated and there were seats for more or less everyone as far as I could tell.

Another aside about the app – it renders everywhere in Belgium in French which is dead confusing in places which are nearly always rendered in Flemish. Today’s trip took us through Anvers, for example, which I’d never heard of, until we got there and I realised it was Antwerp.

Our route today was Rotterdam to Brussels to Tournai to Lille. The last of those legs turned out to be on our first rail replacement bus of the trip. Obviously everyone hates rail replacement buses but it felt like a bit of variety and the driver was a bit of a trip.

Anyway, we arrived safe and sound in Lille, which turns out to be a gorgeous place, much to my surprise. Also our hostel turns out to be around the corner from De Gaulle’s birthplace. I had no idea he was from Lille. Was he a ch’ti? (to be honest I’d never been interested in knowing where he was born, so it’s not like I always imagined he was from Paris or Carcassonne or Brest or somewhere)

Tomorrow we brave Brexit Britain. Wish us luck

We didn’t take any trains today (well unless you count the metro, which doesn’t fall under interrail)

One slightly related thing to note though – some  places in the Netherlands don’t take visa or mastercard (either as credit cards or debit cards). This is, as you might imagine, a fairly annoying hassle. I think it is just a Dutch thing. Nobody appears to know why. We’ve fallen foul of this in a few places now. Obviously it’s an annoyance to most tourists, but it’s perhaps of special import to interrailers because one of the practitioners of this “this is a local shop for local people” practice is a supermarket chain called Albert Heijn which appears to have a monopoly on stations (think WH Smith in the UK)

We spent the day enjoying the modern architecture of Rotterdam, and enjoying less the current heatwave in NW Europe.

The first place we went the first time I went interrailing was Amsterdam. Obviously this was not a random choice. I have very good memories of that experience (and also some significant gaps in my memory. I have no idea why). Yesterday we went back to Amsterdam.

First problem was that we discovered that to get into the Van Gogh Museum you have to book your tickets at least a week in advance (this is not an exaggeration). So that was an experience I was unable to repeat from the first time (yes we did actually go to museums that time. It wasn’t all hashish and Heineken and chips and mayonnaise). We did manage to get into the Rijksmuseum though, which was worth it. I love the way the museum essentially presents a history of the Netherlands through art.

Anyway Amsterdam didn’t feel like it did back then. Back then we discovered Amsterdam, it was cool and edgy and we were pioneers exploring the promised land. There were two tourist cities existing in the same space simultaneously (like in China Mieville’s The City and The City, a book which I heartily recommend). One city had middle aged tourists on canal cruises and the other had young tourists getting high. Oh.

Oooooh

At one point I needed to find a coffeeshop. You don’t need to know the reason for that, but I just did. We walked for ages before finally I saw one. At one point I was beginning to wonder if I had reached the point where I was no longer able to find a coffeeshop in Amsterdam. Possibly a worse sin than being unable to organise a piss up in a brewery.

We did a day trip to Gouda and Delft today. As it was Thursday it was the weekly cheese market in Gouda. Anyone who knows me will be well aware of how much of a noble sacrifice it was for me to accompany my family to such a thing. (Though, to be honest, less of a sacrifice since I no longer have much of a sense of smell – a pre-covid condition)

Anyway I’m not here to do a travelogue I’m here to look at interrailing. We had more reservation challenges to deal with. Our next proposed trip after Rotterdam was to the UK. Theoretically the Eurostar train through the channel tunnel is covered by interrail, but obviously it’s one of those “reservation required” trains. It occurred to me that this might be a problem a few days ago and I tried to see whether we could get reservations – but the app said, in not so many words, “Reservations on the Eurostar? You’re having a laugh, intcha”. So we had to get ferry tickets – even ferry tickets for foot passengers are in short supply it seems, but I managed to get us some.

Rotterdam to London via the tunnel takes 3 hours. Rotterdam to London via the Calais to Dover ferry takes an unspecified amount of time largely dependent on what sound like chaotic passport lines. But at a bare minimum 9 hours. Which is a bit of a bummer. But part of the interrail experience. Plus, for reasons unknown, the timetable doesn’t really offer any way of getting to Calais from Rotterdam until mid afternoon, too late for our ferry bookings, so we have to leave here on Sunday in order to get to Calais on Monday lunchtime. And I’ll have to make reservations on those trains. Gah.

One other mild irritation – not exactly interrail connected but tangentially linked – public transport tickets in Rotterdam. There are cards you can buy (like oyster cards in London) and charge, which I assume is a reasonable way to do it. But if you’re only here for a couple of days, paying a deposit for a card and then trying to reclaim it afterwards seems like a lot of hassle. On our way back from Delft, I had the brilliant and cunning plan to get off at Blaak (a station in Rotterdam which also happened to be on the metro line we wanted). This cunning plan flopped because there were no effing metro ticket machines in Blaak that didn’t just top up cards. I quickly downloaded the app and tried to buy our tickets online – only to discover that you could only do that with a Dutch bank card. I don’t like to complain (much) but Rotterdam public transport people – get your shit together for fucks sake.

Anyway, we took the train back to Rotterdam Centraal, where we were able to buy actual tickets, get the metro two stops, change and half an hour later than the first time we were, as AC/DC had it, back in Blaak.

(my daughter was disgusted by that joke so I’m retelling it both to annoy her, but also in the hope of finding a more receptive audience.)