Bordeaux and St. Emilion

At the end of our European excursion, we spent half a day in Bordeaux, a large city situated in one of the largest wine regions of France, and a full day in St. Emilion, a small town completely surrounded by vineyards. The day in St. Emilion is rated by the both of as being the highlight of our trip, as we both enjoyed our day there immensely. While soaking up the wine, we took a few photos, which you can see here.

We arrived in Bordeaux just after midday, checked into another Ibis hotel, and found some lunch. Afterwards, we headed into the city centre via Bordeaux’s modern tram system to take a look around. We soon found an information centre where we received a map of the city. We had decided that we wanted to do a wine tour the next day, but we found that they were unfortunately already completely booked (it was a weekend). The woman at the information centre gave us some brochures of St. Emilion and recommended visiting that instead, as they had many wineries.
We spent the rest of the afternoon wandering around Bordeaux, and went down to the river where we saw a film crew filming a TV show or movie of some kind, visited a church and basically just explored around the centre city. It has a romantic feel to it, and its buildings reminded me of Bath. When it started to get dark and our feet were feeling the strain, we headed toward our hotel in search of food. On the way we found the restaurant with the worst food we’d eaten for the entirety of our trip. It was called Cafe des Arts, and at first it seemed pretty good if a little expensive, it was popular with locals, the service was good and our entree was nice, but when we got to the mains the meal took a turn for the worse. Tanya ordered fish, but received a layer of salted garlic, under which could be found some fish. I ordered lamb chops, which came undercooked and tough, piled with garlic. The meals were pretty much inedible even though we normally like garlic.

We got to the train station early the next morning and caught a train to St. Emilion. The train station wasn’t actually in the town, but about one and a half kilometres out of it. So we had a bit of a walk down the vineyard lined roads to the town itself. Luckily the weather was great; blue sky with a scattering of clouds.
The town is situated on a limestone outcrop/hill and is dominated by the church bell tower at the top of the hill. The streets have a medieval feel to them and are still sporting cobbles.
We started by exploring the town, and found it has quite a few wine shops, gift stores and restaurants as well as well a few wineries in the town. We eventually made it to the Office de Tourisme and booked ourselves into a tour of some of the underground parts of the city. The tour took us through the cave where Saint Emilion (who the town is named after) lived in as a hermit back in the 8th century, through the catacombs which are a series of burial chambers excavated in the limestone cliff, and finally into the huge space of the monolithic church, a half a cathedral sized space inside the cliff which had been hollowed out centuries ago.
After the tour, we exited out into the main square area, which was full with tables of the nearby restaurants. As it was lunchtime, we sat down at one of the tables and enjoyed a French meal each with some local wine.

We visited one of the town’s wineries next, Clos des Menuts, but the owner was running a private tasting, so we didn’t get to try any wine. They did allow us (and other visitors) to look around their underground cellars for free, which were rather vast, and was hewn out of the limestone like the church. After that winery, we tried visiting another winery a little walk out of the town, but we found it deserted.
We got back to the town and visited the local church and cloisters, then decided to head up the tall bell tower of the monolithic church. We had to get a key from the Office de Tourisme, but because it was locked by default, it meant we had the tower to ourselves. The view from the top was magnificent; you see for miles around, and all there was were vineyards.
Back down at the bottom, we were determined to get a bottle of wine to take back with us. We found a shop near the Office de Tourisme which must have had all the wines from St. Emilion where we bought a bottle of the local red.
There was one last landmark in in the town we hadn’t visited, Castel Daou Rey – an old military castle/tower, and as it was getting late in the afternoon we only just got in before they closed. The castle was quite interesting, and at the top there was a great view of the town.
We made our way back to the station, but had to wait about an hour for a train back to Bordeaux.

The next day we began our train journey back to Britain. We got a fast train to Paris, changed trains for Rouen where we had to wait a while before getting another train for Dieppe. Since we had a while to wait in Rouen, and it was pretty horrible weather, we checked out the local art museum. The look on the cloakroom attendant’s face was priceless when we dropped our heavy rucksacks off before wandering around the museum.

We eventually made it to Dieppe, where we stayed the night, and caught a ferry back to Newhaven. The ferry was almost empty which was quite different it on the way over.
My aunt Eileen in Brighton was nice enough to allow us to stay a couple of days before we headed back to London.