Day 29: Nice > Èze > Nice

After a big day driving yesterday, it was a nice change to leave Claude at home and go exploring today.

We had a couple of walking tours booked in Nice, but one changed the time to tomorrow morning, and the other also changed the time to tomorrow afternoon, then cancelled due to health reasons.

MBW – as usual – has done her research and suggested that Èze was where we were going today. It is up in the mountains, and has a mediveal castle at the top of the hill with some exotic gardens.

And we do like medieval castles.

It is also closer to Monaco than it is to Nice, and is has around 2,500 inhabitants known as Ezasques.

The only thing it doesn’t have is a frequent and reliable bus service … but we will come to that later.

Traffic in Nice is a little … hmmm … crazy. Well, it’s crazy around where we are staying. So we decided to be public transport ninjas today.

But before I tell you about that, I need to tell you about this place we are staying.

We are staying in Farzad’s place, on the 7th floor of an apartment building that overlooks the water.

And when I say “the water”, I’m not talking about a sewage treatment plant. No siree, I’m talking about the Mediterranean Coast.

The Côte d’Azur.

The airport is just to our right, but we don’t hear any noise from the planes, and there is a supermarket on the ground floor, which is very handy-dandy when we have run out of something important, like chocolate.

We also have private parking, which is good for Claude. Set and forget.

The apartment is a bit old, but it is clean and functional.

The tram line is also just below us, and it is just a short walk to our nearest stop.

Most importantly though, there is a boulangerie just down the street, so tomorrow morning we will be sitting on our verandah watching the world go by, eating pastries and drinking coffee.

Does it get any better than this? Seriously?

We got up a bit earlier today, although it was hardly a gold medal winning performance. I think it was around 7.00am, but that’s OK, because that is sunrise here. So we got up and got some pictures of the sun coming up over the water.

I’ve noticed a lot of vapour trails from passing aircraft here. I don’t know why that is, but I assume that it has something to do with the cooler air here. If you have a view on that, feel to let me know.

We got up, took some photos, and had brekky. Lots to do, and only 3 days to do it here in Nice.

So once we had decided on Èze, we just had to figure out how to get there. You will recall that I have been lamenting the fact that every place we have been to has a different public transport ticketing system. Well guess what? Nice has a different one again.

Fortunately Nice uses both a card system and an app, so I don’t have yet another card in my wallet. But I might consider opening a museum of bus tickets when we get home. For a couple of euros, I’ll allow you to come and have a look.

So we downloaded the apps on our phone, and figured that – as we are here for 3 full days – we are better off getting a two day pass than a one day pass, because we save a whole euro each.

Which is about $1.65 each in real money, and it means that we don’t need to buy a new pass every day.

So we installed the app, bought our passes online, and locked the apartment to toddle down to the tram station.

Now you are probably wondering why we bought 2 day passess when we are here for 3 days, right? The only option after a 2 day pass was a 7 day pass, and Farzad will expect us to be gone long before that expires. If we need more, we will buy another day. Or we might take Claude out for a spin instead.

The tram rolled in, we hopped on, tapped our phones, and we were off.

On a side note, and probably mainly for the benefit of my colleagues from QR who may be following along, the trams here are obviously made by the same people who built QR’s NGR fleet, because much of the hardware on the trams was the same … like the button to open the doors.

I’m not really sure why I’ve noticed that, but old habits are hard to break, I guess.

The tram took us east towards the centre of Nice itself, where we disembarked and went in search of a connecting bus – the 82.

It’s always a bit concerning when you turn up at the bus stop to see maybe 40-50 people waiting ahead of you, but Èze is a popular destination and there will be buses every 10 minutes … won’t there?

It is in fact correct to say that Èze is a popular destination, but it is absolutely incorrect to assume that there is a regular bus service.

The 82 bus came whizzing along, and reminisent of Brisbane’s public transport system, the bus was jam packed and the driver didn’t even slow down. He shrugged his shoulders and formed his forearms into a “X” shape, which obviously translates to “there’s no way you are getting on this bus, even if I wanted to let you”.

We checked with Google Maps and found that the next 82 is not for another hour, so we changed our expectations and found another bus that was heading basically in the right direction, but that we could get on.

We got off at a place called Beaulieu-sur-Mer, which was a pretty little seaside village with a beach that had people swimming. To be completely accurate there was only 1 person swimming, and he didn’t look like he was enjoying himself much. He must have lost a bet.

I offered MBW $10 if she took off her shoes and went for a paddle so that she could give me a beach report, but she is not that silly.

So we poked around there for about 20 minutes, and then went back to the bus stop to wait for the next bus (as 83 as it happens), hoping that most of the passengers will have disembarked before getting to Beaulieu-sur-Mer.

We were in luck, so we jumped aboard and went the rest of the way up the the hill to Èze Village.

The road up the hill had more twists and turns that an Agatha Christie novel. The bus drivers must be paid danger money because the bus is skirting the edge of the cliff, and they have to swing completely onto the wrong side of the road to take each corner.

And did I mention that the road is extremely narrow? And there are cars coming the other way?

We got into Èze Village around 11.45am and you’ll never guess what they had in progress.

Markets!

There is not really much to see up in the Èze Village, but what there is, is spectacular. There is a medieval castle with some exotic gardens (Jardin Exotique d’Èze) that you have to pay to see, but well worth the entry fee.

You can walk up and around the gardens, and the views from the top of the gardens is amazing.

We potted around for a couple of hours and we tried some Socca, which is a traditional food made from chickpea flour and olive oil and cooked in a wood-fired oven.

Tasty, salty, interesting.

After spending a couple of hours in the medieval castle and gardens, we decided that we needed lunch, and we needed to figure out how to get back home.

We bought a tomato, goat’s cheese, and honey panini for lunch, followed by ice-creams.

That’s twice I’ve had goat’s cheese and honey recently, and I’ve enjoyed it. It might be our new “thing” when we get home.

But I may need to buy a goat. And a beehive.

Because we are very close to Monaco, there is a lot of money around Èze. I imagine that it would be expensive to buy or build a house on the edge of that hill with those views, but the other givewaway was that I think I saw more Bentleys and Ferraris today than I have ever seen in my life.

Plus all of the Mercedes, BMWs and Audis that the “poor” people drive.

We checked the bus timetable and found that the only bus back was 2.15, with the next one after 6.00pm tonight … so lucky we checked. It was now 1.45, so we took off for the bus stop to find 30 or so people already waiting for the bus … which didn’t inspire confidence in our ability to get home tonight.

But we made a very clever tactical move. We saw the bus that we wanted to catch come up the hill and stop around the corner to unload all of the incoming passengers. We also knew that it has one more stop at the very top of the hill before it turns around and comes back down for the return journey … so we jumped on the bus as it was going up to its last stop, and rode to the top and back down to pick up everyone else.

You’d want to trust that the bus drivers aren’t drunk – or have kamikaze tendencies – because it wouldn’t take much to send one of those buses over the cliff, and all of the passengers into eternity.

We got back down to the centre of Nice and did the first part of today’s trip in reverse, catching the tram back to our station, and then a short walk home.

It feels like we really didn’t do much today because we only visited Èze. But keep in mind that the trip there was a bit onerous – it’s hard work being a public transport ninja – and Èze is built at the top of a hill, so there were lots and lots of stairs to navigate. And they had a pretty poor building code 500 or so years ago when they built medieval castles, so the stairs are neither flat, uniform, or smooth.

But climbing stairs will be good practice for when we climb the 463 steps of Brunelleschi’s Dome in Florence in a couple of weeks.

We’ve had another great day here in France. Nice is a pretty place and we are enjoying it.

Tomorrow we have a walking tour and we will need to get some more mileage out of our transport passes, and tomorrow night we are meeting a friend’s (hi, Maree!!) daughter who we have just learned lives in Nice … so we are meeting her for coffee.

I hope that you are enjoying tagging along!!

Ciao

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