Smart Travels

Saturday, 30 July 2016

Marseille, Frioul Islands, & Montpellier

A trip to the south of France was the occasion to visit Marseille, France's second city.

Marseille Vieux Port (Old Port)

We started off by visiting the Museum of European and Mediterranean Civilisations, known as the MucEM. It is France's first national museum to be located outside of Paris and was inaugurated in 2013 when Marseille was designated as European Capital of Culture.

Fort Saint-Jean, built in 1660, which now houses the MUCEM

a modern part of the MuCEM, linked to the older buildings by a footbridge

another modern part of the MuCEM

Perched on a hilltop, Notre-Dame de la Garde Basilica is probably the city's best-known symbol.

Notre-Dame de la Garde Basilica, which dominates Marseille's Old Port

The inside of the basilica is very nautically themed, with model ships and planes.

inside the Basilica

view over the Vieux Port from the Basilica; Fort Saint-Jean in the centre

Corniche Kennedy is a boulevard nearly 4km long that skirts the Mediterranean sea.

Corniche Kennedy

We spent two nights on the Frioul archipelago, a group of four islands, to go diving there. The islands are only 4km from Marseille.

Frioul islands

We stayed both nights on a (stationary) boat in the marina. Unfortunately the Mistral kept us awake with the wind banging ropes against the mast all night!

our accommodation

gull, Frioul islands

our dive club, Plongée Frioul

Nearby, Chateau d'If is an island former-fortress-prison that features in Alexandre Dumas' novel The Count of Monte Cristo.

Chateau d'If

After a side-trip to Corsica, we headed to Montpellier, France's eight largest city.

Les Arceaux, Montpellier, an 18th century aqueduct
built to supply the city with water

Montpellier's Faculty of Medicine is the oldest in the world and is housed in a former bishopric next to Cathédrale Saint-Pierre.

Montpellier Faculty of Medicine

Cathédrale Saint-Pierre is a 14th-century Gothic cathedral.

cathedral main south entrance

house, old city centre of Montpellier

Porte de Peyrou, a triumphal arch built in 1693

Place de la Comédie is a square which is a focal point in the city centre. It features a fountain, the Three Graces, built by sculptor Étienne d'Antoine in 1790, and the Opéra national de Montpellier Languedoc-Roussillon is also located on the square.

at Place de la Comédie, with the Opera in the background

Saturday, 23 July 2016

Corsica

The French call Corsica the "Island of Beauty", and knowing that the island is not that far across the Mediterranean from Marseille, where people have a reputation for exaggeration, my expectations weren't necessarily sky high. I was however pleasantly surprised by what we saw, and I find the island's reputation well-deserved, even though we only saw southern Corsica.

Two days after we arrived was our wedding anniversary, and we were lucky to spend the day on board the Antika, a 14-metre long ketch that sails out of Porto Vecchio.

Antika

Sails away

The next day was spent diving at Dive Center Hippocampe. The morning's dive was at a site called 'Toro', where we saw a lot of groupers. After lunch we dived at 'Millenium' where there is a pit of barracudas!

Barracudas at Millenium dive spot

Our final full day was spent visiting inland and the far south of Corsica.

view

monument at Chera paying homage to Corsican resistants

mountain road

tiny hamlet

tiny church!

village of Sartène

south coast of Corsica; Sardinia on the horizon

at Bonifacio

house in Bonifacio where Napeoleon stayed from 22 Jan to 3 March 1793

Bonifacio

interior of the Sainte Marie Majeure Church, Bonifacio

Sunday, 26 June 2016

Grand Étang

Grand Étang (which means 'Big Pond') is Reunion's only high altitude volcanic lake and its largest inland body of water, with an area covering 50 hectares (123 acres).

Grand Etang, looking east

Located in the district of Saint-Benoît, it lies at an altitude of 525 metres at the bottom of an almost vertical ridge separating it from the Rivière des Marsouins valley.

looking west

You can walk or ride a horse around the lake, or just pic-nic there. The walk is about 4 km long, more if you take a detour to visit the waterfalls to the west. It's pretty easy but can be muddy depending on the time of year.

waterfalls, Grand Etang

looking west from the start of the walk

on the north shore looking west

path from carpark to lake

Grand Etang is part of a larger site that has been identified by BirdLife International as an Important Bird Area (IBA) because it supports a colony of Audubon's shearwaters (with 300 breeding pairs), as well as populations of Réunion harriers, Mascarene swiftlets, Mascarene paradise flycatchers, Réunion bulbuls, Mascarene white-eyes, Réunion olive white-eyes and Réunion stonechats.

Reunion stonechat at Grand Etang (known locally as a tec-tec)

One plant I've only ever seen growing at Grand Etang and nowhere else is wild Job's-tears. The plant bears hard, pearly-white oval beads that can be used for making necklaces, rosaries and other objects.

Job's tears

close-up of Job's tears

Fed essentially by rainfall and runoff, the water level is very variable.

The water can reach up to 10 metres depth, but on the day we visited it was less than 1.9 metres deep at this measuring stick near the shore.

depth measurement instrument

My husband remembers seeing pictures of Grand Etang after Cyclone Hyacinthe ("the wettest tropical cyclone on record in the world") in 1980 when the level of the water was so high it was more or less touching the electrical cables strung across the lake.