We woke up with an ambitious plan—way too ambitious, as it would turn out, unfortunately. Despite the fact that we had gone to bed past one last night, we were aiming at the 9 am train to Cannes, where a ferry to a secluded monastery island supposedly were leaving every hour. According to my ambitious plan, we were going to one of the “hawk’s nest” villages of Coat d’Azul, so called because of their location on top of rocky mountains, overlooking the Mediterranean, in order to avoid attacks from whatever the enemy they had at the time of the construction. From about a dozen attractive “hawk’s nest” villages around Nice, our attention had been drawn to Biot, which had, described my guide, “a peaceful and quaint feel of a sleepy village life and a burst of vibrant colors found in Fernand Leger museum located just outside of the village.” If we could catch the 10 am ferry and come back on the one at noon, we would barely make it to the lethargic village and the cubist museum, accessible by local bus from a station somewhere between Cannes and Nice.
Upon accommodating ourselves in the seats, Patrick fell asleep. A terrible toothache kept him awake all night, with his heartless, cold-blooded girlfriend fast asleep, only murmuring some suspicious sympathy to his misfortune in her half-consciousness. I also had to fight against the slumber devil lest we miss the Cannes station. To keep myself awake, I wrote this belated travelogue—I had been too busy and tired to keep as good an account of our trip as I should have. The train ran through the typical seaside scenery with occasional small resort towns, abundant palm trees, beaches of white sand, and lash mountains pushing the railroad right onto the ocean. The narrow strip of land between the mountain and the ocean was reminiscent of Japanese coastal towns on the Pacific. Only thing that was missing from the scenery was the signboards of hot springs… Consecutive days of rain had washed off every single particle of pollutant from the air, allowing the sky to glow crisply with generous sunshine, with the calm ocean throwing back the blue hue. It was going to be a lovely day, in fact the first lovely day we would have in cloud-covered winter of France.
Cannes was a smaller yet livelier resort town than our adopted hometown Nice. The shorter walk from the station to the seaside cut through a busier, but less corporate and more relaxed commercial district, compared to that of Nice, adding to the local charm of the town. It was far from Cannes in my imagination, gleaming with celebrities walking on an obscene red carpet, bathing the shower of camera flashes. Down-to-earth modesty of local everyday life had replaced the ephemeral, frivolous grandeur we would associate with the town of the international film festival. From a friendly pharmacist willing to help us clueless tourists, Patrick purchased a package of aspirin to cope with the persistent toothache.
Ferry port was hidden behind a fair ground. It was so well hidden that they had to put up a booth on the way from the station to guide helpless tourists to the port. On the backdrop of a makeshift stage for a nightly comedy show, drops of water retained the whole miniature universe of fair ground: the purple airplane perfect with red throttle, saddled white horse with silver mane, gleaming Harley Davidson with orange flame. We, and a few seagulls were the only disturbance in the moist, silent stillness of the fairground waiting for the evening when it would open again to entertain a new set of excited children and dreamy lovers.
The ferry port was at the very end of the fair ground, around the corner of a popcorn stand, covered with a vinyl sheet for the night. We found out that the ferry to the St. Honorat Island were not leaving until noon, placing the final “rejected” stamp on our plan to go to both the island and the “hawk’s nest” village. The other, more commercialized St. Marguerite Island, to which there was a 11 am ferry, became our compromise destination. Being in an off season, there was a fair prospect of finding some secluded natural scenery even on the larger island, we consoled ourselves as we opened a bag of pastries from a bakery on our way to the station in Nice. Patrick’s gigantic (atypical for a French pastry) chocolate brioche was mediocre (in French standard, that was), but the apricot pie I had was excellent with tartness of fresh apricots (obviously not from a can!) blending with the buttery crust and sweet glazing. Taking pictures of the boats and the port in a soft light coming through a thin layer of cloud quickly filled the twenty minutes we had to wait.
waterline, Cannes
Originally uploaded by uBookworm.
There was a Fall which terrified Patrick and which I somehow survived. We were near the edge of a harbor below the cliff, taking pictures of the 13th century fortress nesting on a steep cliff, when Patrick warned me of a big wave coming to splash us. I stepped back to stay dry, and the next moment, I was on the concrete ground two feet below where I had been standing. Miraculously, I didn't crack open my skull, nor did I smash my camera which I was holding in my hand. I only scratched an elbow and a knee, and my camera added a legion d'honour a millimeter off the lens (pfew!). And that was it. Or so I thought. It shocked me nonetheless, so it took me some effort to contain the shake of my knees and put smile on my face in order to assure terrified Patrick that I was all right. "Thank God I didn't kill myself or destroy the camera," I joked. (It was a joke because neither of us believe in Gods or Goddesses of any sort, but the word almost seemed appropriate.) With my sleeve rolled up lest it get smeared with blood from the scratch, we started to climb the long and shady stairs leading to the fortress. From the cliff, seagulls were casting half sympathetic, half mocking gazes of the superior upon the clumsiness of poor wingless creatures that I just displayed.
