Lyons

Since reaching the rivers Saone and Rhone life has got considerably easier.  We left St Jean de Losne on the 22nd August and followed the Saone down to its junction with the Rhone at Lyon, arriving three days later on the 24th August.

The Saone is very like the upper Thames from Oxford to Windsor, except it goes on for much longer – we travelled over a hundred miles of it.  After the canals it was a real treat to find marinas and proper quaysides and pontoons for leisure boats to tie up at and real towns and cities with shops and restaurants that were actually open.  The locks were much fewer and much of the time Sue and I took turns at the helm while the other sunbathed in the generally warm and sunny weather.  Much of the time I lay on the foredeck taking snaps or looking at Swans, Herons or Egrets through the binoculars.

As we flowed down towards Lyon we passed through increasingly affluent countryside, smart villas and villages and the occasional riverside restaurant, rather reminiscent of Maidenhead.  The entrance to Lyon itself is really dramatic, the river enters the City under the shadow of a steep wooded hill dominated by a large 19th century church, the Basilique de Fourviere and a Blackpool Tower like radio mast.  The Basilique is a truly wonderful four-spired confection – the kind of thing that Walt Disney might have come up with if asked to produce a combination of the Taj Mahal and St Paul’s cathedral.  It goes extraordinarily well with the Blackpool Tower replica and creates a dramatic, actually rather sinister skyline, more like the product of a dictatorship than a democracy.

As the river sweeps around the hill the city begins to crowd in – elegant bridges and tall 19th century buildings and stone quaysides with big cast iron rings set in them for the peniches and other working boats.  Our canal guides are in French, German and English.  Unfortunately the publishers appear to have commissioned the English translation from a tea boy whose mate once had a fortnight’s holiday in Bournemouth.  Nevertheless, the Guide’s description of the facilities in Lyon is extraordinarily apt:

“This is the arrival in Lyons ... In the big city nothing special has been arranged for pleasure boats on the Saone, but you will always find a mooring place at one of the numerous quays, between two barges (but without hindering them).”

There are literally no facilities for pleasure boats and we moored in the centre of the City, near the Old Town, between two peniches converted into houseboats and close to a number of other yachts and cruisers.  It was good to smell the air of a City again and Lyon is a bustling attractive place with more than a touch of the South in the weather, the light and the attitude of the people.  We spent a day and a couple of nights in the City doing the tourist thing and watching the people walking past on the quayside.  After a month of Ramsgate and rural France it was a relief to see some black faces and the sights and smells of different cultures – I guess I’m really a city boy a heart.

By an odd coincidence we arrived in Lyons on the anniversary of the last time we were there, when we had flown to Lyons’ airport en route to Provence for a weeks holiday.  Then, we stayed overnight in a hotel near the bank of the City’s other and more mighty river, the Rhone.  The morning after we arrived I remember getting up and taking a walk along the riverside thinking “my God, in less than a year we will be travelling past this same spot on the boat” and not really believing it.  This time we walked to the same spot on the banks of the Rhone to make the connection with that time.