Cradoc and I went to Eze, a medieval village perched high on a hilltop, a place locals recommended we see. We took a local bus to the port where we’d connect with the twenty minute bus ride to Eze. But we couldn’t find the bus stop. We wandered the streets looking. A bus came down the street. I pointed frantically at the driver to ask where the stop was. He pointed around the corner. We made a mad dash for the bus and squeezed onto a full load. Good thing, the bus only ran every two hours.
We drove along the Moyenne Corniche, one of the three parallel coastal roads connecting Nice to Menton, at the Italian border. The Lower Corniche ran along the coast and the train line. The Grande Corniche was the highest road and was where “To Catch a Thief” with Cary Grant and Grace Kelly was filmed (also the road Grace Kelly died on).
At the Eze bus stop almost all the passengers got off. We were engulfed in foreign languages; Chinese, Japanese, Italian, Russian, German, all belonging to bodies swarming up the hill towards the village. I immediately thought we were in trouble, a possible tourist trap, but didn’t say anything. We followed the crowd. At the entrance to the old village a man sold trinkets of all sorts and a fast food cafe sold 2 euro sugar crepes for the inflated price of 5 euros. We entered into a maze of very narrow streets filled with chintzy souvenir shops, expensive four star hotels, and galleries. There was no charm or vibrancy in the village. For a few minutes I walked around the claustrophobic streets with no way to look out to the view of the sea.
“I liked the old town in Villefranche better.”
“Thank God,” said Cradoc. “I was trying to keep quiet for once. But this place reminds me of Disneyland. I wonder why this is such an attraction?”
I pictured hordes of tourists in the summer crammed into these tight streets wondering the same thing, or maybe not. I couldn’t figure out what other people found entertaining.
Take for example the time Cradoc and I were thrown off a paddle wheel river boat in the middle of the wilderness in Alaska.
The people we stayed with in Fairbanks highly recommended the ride; an authentic paddle boat ride on the Chena River. We loved this idea. Cradoc grew up in Alaska and loved its history. On our Alaska trip, in 1990, we looked for experiences that made us feel like we might’ve been explorers in another time. So a quiet paddle boat ride down a river, away from the heat and crowds of Fairbanks on a hotter than normal summer day sounded great. We paid for our expensive ticket, and joined the crowds who all seemed to have the same idea of cooling off on the river.
Almost instantly we realized this might not be our kind of boat ride. Inside the boat was dotted with TV screens playing nature scenes. Loud music played on speakers installed all over the boat. We went outside to escape the noise, but there were speakers in every corner. The paddle boat started up, the music stopped, and we had high hopes of silence, but they were quickly dashed with a loud grating voice talking about the history of the paddle boat. Fair enough, when the history was told, then it would be quiet. No, that was when the two local top 40 radio station Dj’s started to entertain us incessantly without taking a breath. They took turns describing the images on the TV screen of the animals found on the river. Everyone’s eyes were glued to the screen. We went to the bathroom and stuffed our ears with toilet paper. It didn’t help. There were even speakers in the bathroom. We ran around the whole boat again, every deck, looking for a place without a speaker. No luck. We found an employee and asked them to turn off one of the speakers so we could take the ride in peace and quiet. Not possible. So we dealt with the noise and watched live river otters playing on the shore while everyone else watched the canned version on the TV screen, shown in case no real wildlife appeared. No one looked out of the boat at the life otters. Or the beavers. Or the caribou. No lie.
The boat stopped at a mock Indian village. By this time we had complained to the owner of the boat that the peaceful ride they advertised was not the ride they offered, and we wanted our money back. He told us we were the first people to ever ask for our money back. I told him our request still stood. “I’ll give your money back but you can’t take the boat back to Fairbanks. Get off here at the Indian village.”
“How will we find our way back?”
“Follow that path through the woods.”
So we did.
We left everyone behind watching a woman go round and round in circles with her dog sled (on wheels since it was summer), pulled on a little dirt track by dusty dogs. We also left behind people dressed as natives looking very much like true life versions of animatrons in Frontier Land.
We didn’t know where we were, or how long it would take to get to civilization. We walked for hours. And hours. The path went on and on through the wilderness, but we were still happy with our decision. All was quiet in the forest and we had a bottle of water and a snack I grabbed off the boat before we were kicked off.
We finally emerged onto a busy road and found a convenience store where we called our hosts for a ride.
“Where are you?”
“I don’t know.” The store owner gave me the address.
“What’re you doing there? That’s about twenty miles from Fairbanks.”
They came to pick us up. On the ride home they asked about the boat ride. Since they were the ones who recommended the ride I told them I got motion sickness and we decided to get off the boat.
“In the middle of the wilderness?”
I was curious what other people thought about the boat ride. I Googled, “river boat ride fairbanks alaska” and came up with some recent reviews of the ride. Just like the owner said, everyone seemed to like the adventure: “From the time we boarded the paddle boat, Discovery III, to the time we got off, the action never stopped. Not only was the ride smooth and visually interactive, the narration onboard was first rate. The best four hours you will spend in Fairbanks. You will see a live sea plane landing beside the boat, 4 time winner of the Iditarod Susan Butcher, Native culture, and many facts about Fairbanks. The crew was committed to making the trip informative as well as enjoyable, right down to complimentary coffee and doughnuts.”
Like I said, there was no way to say what was good, or bad entertainment. To each their own. I just hoped it wasn’t Susan Butcher going round and round in circles when we were there, and she was still at it sixteen years later.
Which brought us back to the Eze Village, a wonderfully preserved part of history morphed into a tiny theme park. We made a bee line for the exit and looked at the bus schedule. There was a bus at 11:40. The huge clock on the medieval wall said it was 11:35. We panicked at the thought of another two hours in the village and made our second mad dash of the day for the bus. The driver was the same one who dropped us off only fifteen minutes earlier. He did a double take when he saw us and then a very small smile broke onto his otherwise sour face. I thought to myself, ‘We broke the record for the shortest stay in Eze village!’ Triumphant we took our seats.
When I got home I looked at the guide book to see if we missed anything at Eze. There was the Jardin Exotique perched at the top of the village, which was where you got the marvelous views of the coast for the price of an admission fee. I doubted we would have paid it, so I didn’t feel we missed much. The guide book also mentioned that one of Eze’s claims to fame was that Walt Disney holidayed there. Maybe that was where he got the idea for Disneyland.
We did find things that pleased us more often than not. For instance, on that same Alaska trip we took a boat ride down the Yukon river from Dawson City, in the Yukon Territory, to Eagle, Alaska, a wilderness village that we had to fly out of with a bush pilot. While we were there we stayed with the same old couple that James Michener stayed with part of the time while he was writing the book “Alaska.” A true adventure…
