Ypres - surprisingly lovely
I blame the rain for making us dash from Calais to Milan in under a week. We had made it clear from the start: we would take things slowly this time. So six countries in as many days was not what we had in mind. And I will try and do them justice in as fewer words as possible.
We got off the ferry at about lunchtime and so we needed a quick stop. We looked at Veurne (surprisingly attractive) but ended up in a campsite in Ypres. The aim was to visit the Menin Gate and pop along and see Paschendale. Ypres, again, is surprisingly lovely. Moated with a high, wide, red-brick fortress affair (which we managed to cycle round most of), the city is dominated by a huge square hemmed in with merchant houses, a large cathedral and a very long, three-storey dark Romanesque town hall. The cathedral was notable for its exquisite stained glass windows. At the edge of town the high walls break for the rather out of place triumphal white stone Menim Gate which was a gift from the Belgian people to the Allies for liberating the country towards the end of World War One. It’s a smaller version of our Marble Arch meets British military cemetery headstone. It is adorned with the names of some of the dead Allied servicemen, and is the only commemorative location anywhere in Europe where the last post is played every evening. Shamefully we didn’t stay late enough to hear the last post but rain forced us back to the van.
There are not enough words to describe the holocaustic nature of the Western Front. In the Ypres area alone there are 170 war cemeteries many of which house the 300,000 allied troops that were killed in the final months of 1918 as they closed the Ypres Salient and liberated Belgium. To get a feel (but never fully understand the scale) of the problem we hit the right spot by visiting the Tyne Cot military cemetery at Paschendale. We left the campsite in drizzling rain and arrived at the cemetery in unpleasant, horizontal rain. Unlike most military cemeteries I’ve been to, you can’t really see much of Tyne Cot until you walk round the outside onto its open side, where the 35,000 soldiers have now been literally been dug in (sorry – an awful choice of words) overlooking no-mans’ land towards the German front line. But before you get a glimpse of the vastness that is 35,000 headstones you are drawn to the single-storey, slat grey and glass visitors’ centre. On the way there you get sense of some young girl talking to you, calling out some names in a calm but nevertheless distressed manner, a bit like you might get from a child-ghost in a haunted house. When you get inside this sparse building, all becomes clear. At the far end there are two TV screens set into the grey stone walls. The right one shows pictures of the tortured landscape at the time of the battle. The left shows a continuous rotation of bust shots of Allied soldiers – and with each new head shot the girl calls out his name. It’s enchanting but horrible all at the same time. No matter what else is happening in this small museum (there are lots of letters from the Ministry telling fraught families the fate of their loved ones) you can’t help but be drawn back to the rolling newscast of victims of the conflict accompanied by the ghost-like chant of a young female calling out a rolling set of desperate names.
The cemetery, now cloaked in a relentless drizzle, was a horrific oasis of white stone and statues. Most of the graves are marked only “a soldier who died in the Great War’. Sure there were British Regimental names and those from the New Zealand Army, but most were unknown. Do you that mustard gas was first used in this area in 1915? Apart from deathly gas (that burns your lungs and make you drown from your own secretions), the machine gun and a hopeless tank, warfare had not moved on for a century. It was a
Tyne Cot cemetry - futility in the rain.......
massive battle of attrition, where results were measured in the death count on both sides. By way of battle-winning improvement we had done away with red tunics and found more lethal ways of killing more people, but we had lost the manoeuvre that, for example, had enabled Wellington to defeat Napoleon at Waterloo. There was no stealth, no bluff, no nasty cleverness, no left-flanking – only full-frontal death. It was futility in the grandest sense. On a lighter note, and just as futile but in a wholly positive way, was the bunch of British school children who turned up as we left. Not a rain-coat in sight and very quickly drenched to the skin. I sincerely hope they remember that day.
We pointed south and headed for Nancy, only because we had never been there before. On the way we stopped at Metz, a fortified city (once part of the Maginot Line) on the French Moselle. This pretty city, made so much more attractive by the snaking Moselle which dissects it, has a fine cathedral renown for its stained-glass windows – so much so that it’s known as ‘God’s lantern’. It is impressively tall and thin, giving the visitor the feel of being stuck at the bottom of a huge, grey-walled crevasse. But the windows are beautiful and the cathedral is well worth a visit. We stayed in our first French aire (along with all the other gypsies) and didn’t stay awake long enough to see the 14th July fireworks on the nearby lake.
Nancy was next. This is a very pretty city built up around a large pedestrian paved square,
Nancy: pretty, well, expensive.......
lined with palaces and cornered with very ornate gilded wrought iron gates. Off one side and through Nancy’s own Arch de Triumph, runs a double, tree-lined avenue flanked by important houses. And at its far end is another, smaller square and another, smaller palace. It was all very nice and made more special by a glimpse of the sun, but soured somewhat by the exorbitant price of coffee in the centre if town (connect to Italy later). However we were cheered by our choice of campsite in a deep valley on the Moselle to the west of Nancy. Here we were able to cycle along the river, go for a run and see a cloppiter-cloppiter manage one of the river’s enormous locks without breaking sweat. I’d have much preferred to see it take out one of the lock doors and drain the Moselle south of Nancy, but you can’t have everything.
After Nancy we changed rivers and headed for the Rhine, and Basel in particular. Our aim
Colmar - Strasbourg on steriods.
was to mosey through Switzerland, walking the hills and avoiding the cows. We broke our journey to look at Colmar, a French town you’d never give a second glance to as you zoomed down the French motorway. But our Green Guide said we should go, so we did. And what an inspired deviation it was! Leaving aside parking on the outskirts of town assisted by a drunk, testy Frenchman who insisted on showing us to our slot and then demanded payment, it was a gem of a town – a bit like Little Venice in Strasbourg, but magnified by a factor of thirty. It is a mish-mash of scores of narrow streets lined by multi-coloured full timbered houses. They are each exquisite with funny little towers whose roofs are finished off with multi-coloured tiles. And like Strasbourg, little canals wind their way through the town which set off the hanging baskets. We also found a little museum which had a Picasso and a Monet in it. So our day was complete.
We made the outskirts of Basel by mid-afternoon and found a campsite in France, just short of the border (Basel pretty much spreads itself greedily over three countries, Switzerland, France and Germany, and hogs the Rhine for itself as the river turns ninety degrees right from Lake Constance and starts its drive for the North Sea coast). Out came the bikes and off we toddled into Basel centre. Basel is pretty enough, but would be little without the Rhine dissecting it. There’s an attractive cathedral perched high on a fairly sheer, rocky embankment and there are hundreds of trams and thousands of bicycles. But
Basel, workmanlike but not that interesting
it’s very urban Swiss: workmanlike, clean but with no form nor architectural pizzazz. Key to the city is the fairly bizarre practice of putting all of you belongings into a waterproof bag, which then acts as a float to prevent you from drowning as you hurl yourself into this fast-flowing very wide river. They were all doing it. Including a young couple with a toddler who was sat on a small blow-up chair and really enjoying the moment. It was as mad as it was marvellous. We’d done something similar further downstream in the Rhine, but that was in the safety of an eddy that ensured you ended up back on the shore. And we did it only once we had seen two ninety-year old German fraus manage it without drowning. But here the Rhine is unrelenting and I reckon three-quarters of the revellers were not seen again before bumping into a container ship in Rotterdam.
We left Basel in the rain and popped out of Switzerland six hours later into Italy – in the rain. It was very disappointing, but you do go to Switzerland for the views, and when you are driving through what seemed like an aerated bath, you’re lucky if you can see far enough to spot an oncoming car. We crossed the high Alps via the Simplon Pass and were
....and it rained....
amazed at the countless number of newly formed waterfalls that cascaded down the sheer sides of these (presumably) gorgeous mountains. At one point, in a break in the clouds, a town-size wall of rock was carelessly draped with piercing white, scrunched-up ribbons of water each more fabulous than the last. It was though the mountain had fissured, and sprung the most almighty leaks. Between hairpin bends, it was breathtaking.
The Italian/Swiss boarder isn’t at the head of the Simplon Pass, but a good way down the southern side. Mind you, there was no need for an announcement. We knew we were in Italy when every third building was derelict. It may have been the rain that made Italy appear tired and broken, but I would argue that it was the general state of the buildings that makes Italy seem tired and broken. This trait, by the way, followed us all the way down off the mountains and across the Po valley. But we had to stop somewhere……and we did on Lake Majore.
I can’t say a great deal about Lake Majore, accept it was difficult to tell where the lake started and rain stopped. It was frustratingly wet so that we could only guess how beautiful it was. We parked in a small, simple campsite by the lake, ate, read our books, went for a short walk, testing the rainproof abilities of our Berghauses (which thankfully proved to be good) and slept. We woke up the next day and with the sun out to greet us made a decision that today was Milan day.
Milan is a prosperous, busy and attractive city. We parked in a large open car park attended by the nicest elderly Italian who helped himself to one of our apples and then we proceeded not to cycle into town as Claire had a puncture. So we did the Michelin city walk and, as always, got so infuriated with the numbering of the map against the descriptions in the guide that I almost threw the guide away. Call me simple, but if you offer a proposed route marked beautifully and accurately in green with important buildings and museums to look at, why not put the buildings in the same order in the written bit of the guide book? I gave up.
Milan's Duomo, the White Witch's Palace
The highlights of Milan boil down to two remarkable buildings: the cathedral and the Castello Sforzesco. There are some wonderful churches and basilicas, there’s the Le Scala opera house (which the Green Guide is right in saying is dull from the outside, but apparently delightful on the inside), and there’s ‘Milan’s drawing room’, the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II, a sumptuous glass domed and ceilinged shopping arcade where the very chic can pay a fortune for a handbag. But it’s the white-marbled finish of the ‘Flamoyuant Gothic’ Duomo, or cathedral, with its piercing spires and beautifully ornate frontage (and especially it’s heavily sculptured doors which are story books of their own) that takes one’s breath away. Inside it’s like any other big, splendid cathedral. Outside it’s like the White Queen’s palace in the Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe. Quite wonderful.
And from the ornate to the overbearing, the huge, tall red-brick Castello Sforzesco is a combination of sod-off Mortello Tower built with a Moorish slant. The walls are so high, it’s
The Castello Sforzesco - nobody told us to stop building upwards.
as though the architect had told the builders to start building the walls and then went of sick for a couple of months. On return his open mouth is met by Bob the Builder with a ‘you didn’t tell us to stop’. I didn’t realise that bricks could laid be to such height. And apart from regular holes, the walls have no form at all until they reach the top. Here there’s a Moorish balcony from which the boiling oil can be poured. Mind you it would probably be cold by the time it landed on the hapless invaders…..
We left Milan satisfied that we could say we had been. It is very chic. You can buy a Gucci handbag for £2500 and sit and drink inexpensive coffee in one of the many piazzas. And whilst sipping away you can only agree that Italian women are the most attractive in the world. They are genetically thin, or there is some unwritten edict that the more matronly must remain inside until dark. So Milan gets a tick for: the cathedral, the Castello Sforzesco and its chicks. Well worth a visit.
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