One of the main joys of Erasmus is shameless travelling. This is especially true for British people who, when the irritating expanse of water no longer separates them from mainland Europe, suddenly have the new options of international buses and trains opened up for them. It's even truer for me. I have an irrational mistrust of planes and my flights are characterised by an unignorable fear of the plane either being blown up by terrorists or plunging nose-first into the sea. To quote a sorely underrated Disney film: "If man were meant to fly, he would have been born with wings."
When you have a limited amount of time in a place your enthusiasm for exploring it increases exponentially. My attitude towards seeing new cities in my homeland is somewhat laissez-faire and it appears that this is the case for a lot of people. An Italian friend in Pavia told me she had never been to Turin; I was shocked until I remembered I've never been to Oxford. I was determined not to leave any vital places out while I was still on the continent. Being twenty minutes away from the second-largest city in Italy made seeing new parts of the country a real possibility. In four months I managed to cover all the biggest cities in the north at fairly little expense. As Aix is twenty minutes away from the second-largest city in France, I expected the same to be the case here. I was so wrong.
The fast TGV (trains à grande vitesse) are eye-wateringly expensive. Tickets are only affordable if you buy them about two years before your intended date of travel and valid on one specific train so if you miss your train you have buy a new one and probably re-mortgage your home. Even the eleven minute journey between Aix and Marseilles costs 9 euro. I tried out the cheaper, slower TER trains as part of my InterRail ticket and they take more than double the time. They're also not really that cheap, certainly not compared to the Italian regionali. The only genuinely cheap trains in France seem to come from private companies; the two that I am aware of that operate from Aix-en-Provence are Ouigo and IDTGV. IDTGV only goes to Paris, however, and Ouigo to Lyon or Disneyland. While their services are appreciated, they're not really that useful for me.
As a result of this, my main form of transportation in France has been the bus. Cartreize, a company that operates in Bouches-du-Rhône, offer a free young person's card which means that you can get twenty-four hours unlimited use of all their buses for 2 euro. This makes travelling to Marseilles, the airport and the beach actually feasible. They don't run as regularly as more expensive services, meaning I occasionally have to kill two hours after missing the bus I planned to catch, and the air conditioning doesn't work at the back of the bus but you get what you pay for. The car-share website BlaBlaCar is the favoured alternative of the French; it has become so popular that SNCF, the French train company, are trying to buy it out before it becomes a serious threat to their profits. I, however, have steered clear of using it. I know I'm being paranoid but I still have a (healthy, I feel) fear of psychotic axe murderers, which getting into a car with someone I don't know tends to aggravate.
Another fun new train-related experience came in the form of strikes. I had been told by many people of many nationalities, including French, that French public sector workers will strike at the drop of a hat. Striking is actually looked upon favourably by a lot of French people and their media tend to be far more sympathetic to the plight of the underpaid than the whining red-tops of the UK. My A Level French teacher, a tiny sexagenarian lady from Brittany with purple hair and the ability to make adults cry, wryly informed our class once that, "The British don't know how to strike." She was referring to the events of May 1966 when paving slabs were prised from the streets and thrown at government buildings by French protesters, of which I strongly suspect she was one. Whether it's down to the legacy of the 1980s or our national disposition for coughing pointedly rather than voicing our disapproval, we're just not as inclined towards industrial action as our Gallic neighbours. Most travel strikes in the UK involve the London Underground, which I don't use regularly enough to be affected by. As such, I am very poorly equipped to deal with railway strikes. It was unfortunate, therefore, that I decided to make an eight-hour, three-train, 600km journey from Provence to Limousin in the middle of one of the longest railway worker strikes that France has seen in recent years.
Now, I am not about to launch into an attack on the workers of SNCF for two reasons. The first, and most important, is that I believe that the right to strike is vital to a civilised society and worth defending, even if I don't always agree with the motives or I'm put to personal inconvenience by it. I will always put workers' rights to demand fair salaries and working conditions above employers' rights to treat their staff like shit and I don't care how many people think I'm naive for that. The second reason is that I actually agree with most of what the French unions are saying. For those of you too lazy to click on the article I linked to above, two of the largest unions in France have walked out in an attempt to dissuade the government from passing a piece of legislation that will merge the existing two railway companies and then divide them into three. Allegedly this is to reduce debt and promote competition and the unions have taken exception to what is, essentially, the start of the deregulation of the French railways. I'm no expert on economics but, having seen the results of many private companies running the trains and the state being left to deal with the crumbling infrastructure, I much prefer the idea of one large, centralised company to the planned set-up.
Bearing in mind my sympathy towards the striking employees of SNCF, it should say a lot that, by the time I managed to get to my destination, I was drafting an e-mail to the CEO of Greater Anglia apologising for all the bitchy comments I have made about their service over the years. I arrived at Lyon with minimal disruption and ninety minutes to spare, and settled down to enjoy a croissant and some free WiFi. It then became apparent that my train had become a bus. Confused but with plenty of time between my next connection, I toddled off the bus station to catch my bus to Clermont-Ferrand in Auvergne. I was greeted a stricken-looking bus driver and some very, very angry French people. SNCF had only put on one replacement bus and its pitiful capacity had been reached before you can say, "Hey, this bus is pretty small, isn't it?" He and an SNCF employee attempted to persuade the Powers That Be to send another bus for the remaining sixty or so people who had paid good money to get to their destination but they were unsuccessful. The next bus wasn't for three hours and it wasn't stopping at Clermont-Ferrand but Vichy, even further from where I was supposed to be. I amused the French people around me with an unbridled outpouring of English expletives, nearly burst into tears twice and made some frantic phone calls. After waiting in the 30°C heat for several hours I took the bus to Vichy, where the friends I was meeting had graciously agreed to drive 100km out of their way to pick me up. I had given up on my train to Bugeat and was wise to do so. Four days later, at the time of writing this, every regional train in Limousin (and this seems to be the only type there) has been cancelled.
What bothers me is not the fact that the railway workers of France are striking but the fact that their supervisors seem to be incapable of making any provisions for the helpless commuters and tourists who have been left stranded because of this, despite the fact that they have paid extortionate sums for their tickets. As SNCF own most of the regional buses and their drivers were also on strike, they pulled in private companies to drive the trains routes but didn't provide enough seats and then left the hapless drivers to face the wrath of the baying mob. It hadn't improved by the time I returned to Aix and I had to change my route and wait around at Clermont-Ferrand and Lyon for several hours each. To add insult to injury, the only toilet at Clermont-Ferrand is a portaloo that costs 50 centimes. It demanded exact change which I did not have. Whoever decided to get rid of free toilets in train stations should be shot. Only in the hand or the foot or something, you understand, not in a vital organ or major artery. I'm not a monster.
It is unfortunate that my travels in France have not actually been all that expansive. Having been forced by ignorance, poverty and inconvenience to stick to the local lines of transport, I've pretty much just been exploring Provence throughout the duration of my stay here. I am lucky, I suppose, that it's one of the most beautiful parts of mainland Europe. And, seeing as I'm currently writing this at Lyon Part Dieu and crossing all my crossable extremities that my train to Marseilles is still running, here's hoping I get back there.
