You know I love a boat ride and on this weekend, the Batobus did just the job.
In Paris, the big name in tourist boats is Bateaux Mouches but they depart from Pont de l’Alma and that RER station was closed that particular weekend, to keep the gilets-jaunes from rioting in tourist areas. I rode the RER back and forth, trying to figure out the trick to getting one that stopped where I wanted, oblivious at this stage to metro closures. Incidentally, I always think the RER is just a long-distance metro and it blows my mind to see a full-size double-decker train underground.
Eventually I surfaced at Musée d’Orsay and stumbled upon a Batobus stop by the riverside. That would do! In fact, the Batobus is better because you can hop on and off at nine stops along its circuit as and when you please during the life of your 24 hour ticket. I’m pretty sure Bateaux Mouches only have the one stop.
On the other hand, Bateaux Mouches have an entire open top deck where Batobus only has a small viewing deck at the back. In summer they open the glass roof but in rainy November it was well and truly closed.
On that same hand, Bateaux Mouches have commentary but then, unless you’re plugged into the sound system, you’re probably not going to hear a lot and then you won’t be able to move around to take photos.
We started heading east, to St Germain des Prés, the stop for the Latin Quarter and then in to Notre Dame. It turns round at Jardin des Plantes and follows the river west again, this time taking the northern branch of the river past Île De Cité, past the Louvre and Place de la Concorde and eventually down to the Eiffel Tower, where it turns to go back east, stopping at Invalides on its way to my start point at Orsay.
I did the journey twice. I let it carry me up and down to the Eiffel Tower, disembarked, did the tourist thing and then got back on, did another full circuit and finally got off for good at Notre Dame. By the end of the day, the sun had set and Paris would have been in darkness, except for the constant blue flashing lights as yet another convoy of police cars, bikes and vans rushed off to a gilets-jaunes disturbance. I saw 21 vans in one, plus an unspecified number of cars that I couldn’t count because the wall separating the road from the river was too high.
I have never been to a city that isn’t pleasanter from the water. Big fan of the boat trip. Batobus’s hop-off system works beautifully for me although it would be nice to have a single ticket to use it just as a bus between stops, especially on riot days with major metro closures.
I’ve been up the Eiffel Tower a few times now but I couldn’t resist doing it again. Last time, early January 2018, at 8pm, it was fairly quiet. I knew a drizzly November day would also be quiet but I now shudder to think what it’s like on a busy summer day.
I like to think of myself as someone who’s fine with heights. Nonchalant about them, even. I don’t know who I even am. My blood runs cold on the upper gallery of each floor and the lifts are terrifying. I know they’re all tested and double and triple failsafed but a little voice in my brain starts muttering about the entire packed lift falling and it’s such a long time between the second and third floors.
It’s cold 300m above Paris in November. But there’s a lower third floor as well as the open-air viewing platform and there are radiators around the walls of the indoor bit. Much to my continued astonishment, I couldn’t see Sacré-Cœur from the third floor, try as I might, even with my phone map pointing my nose in precisely the right direction. It was as if it had been wiped from the city. I knew there were a lot of sirens and I could see mysterious clouds rising in places and I genuinely began to wonder if a second major church had burned down. At this point, I still didn’t know about the gilets-jaunes so anything could have been happening. And yet from the second floor, there it was. Big rounded white church, large as life and twice as natural. If someone could explain that optical illusion, please leave a comment below.
My last stop before returning to solid ground was the first floor gift shop. I always put together a mini scrapbook and I wanted postcards and a gold coin. I have the Eiffel Tower gold coin in my last Paris scrapbook but 2019 was its 130th birthday so there was a special coin. And shiny postcards.
I’ve already told you how I got back on the Batobus and did nearly another whole loop and a half. I disembarked, finally, at Notre Dame to get the direct metro back to my germ-infested hotel in the 10th arrondissement. That was nearly a mistake. The metro is right by the central police prefecture and do you think the gilets-jaunes kept away, despite the proximity of tourist site Notre Dame? Well, there was a police car on its roof and judging by the timestamp on my photo of it and the time of assorted news tweets, I’d missed the actual event by less than ten minutes. You do not want to get mixed up in riots abroad, particularly when the police have been out with tear gas.
Yeah, I knew all about the day’s events shortly after getting back to the hotel. I picked a great weekend to go to Paris.