NORMANDY LANDINGS
To travel to Normandy along the Seine is to take it by stealth, writes Larissa Dubecki, who ventured forth in search of châteaux and Calvados.
To travel to Normandy along the Seine is to take it by stealth, with châteaux and Calvados to savour on the way.
UUpclose, the Seine is the pale, uneasy green of military-grade khaki. Further out, it deepens to a shade of olive that may have provided the inspiration for plain cigarette packaging. Only in the distance does it transform beyond the prosaic. It undergoes a silvering, its undulations tightly ribbed, almost platinum.
The Seine is not a river to induce paroxysms of poetry like the Volga, or music like the Danube.
It is a dogged river. For thousands of years it has been a conduit of conflict and commerce, mainlining pillage and profit for a who’s who of Europe’s fiercest tribes (the Celts and the Gauls, the Romans and the Vikings, to name just the headline acts).
An artery through the heart of Normandy, the
Seine loops from Paris to meet the English Channel at Le Havre and Honfleur, a 315-kilometre stretch of waterway cutting through a region that plays its cards differently from the rest of France. It’s a place of cider, not wine. Of rough-hewn farmhouse jambon rather than extravagant charcuterie. And cheese. The pied Normande cows with their distinctive lunettes, or spectacles, dotting the fabled lush fields – bred from a variety brought by Norse invaders in the 10th century, spawning a millennium’s worth of jokes about the Viking preference for cows over women – are a reminder of Camembert, Livarot, Neufchâtel and Pont-l’Évêque, the four Norman cheeses to rule them all.
“So quietly flows the Seine that one hardly notices its presence,” wrote Henry Miller. (He also wrote, “to know Paris is to know a great deal”, which proves his keen eye for aphorism.) When it comes to the river, he is at once completely correct and uncharacteristically understated. To travel to Normandy along the Seine is to take it by stealth, like the pillagers who once crept along this watery highway. “Now the invaders, they come by riverboat,” says our guide, Anna, as she surveys APT’s AmaLegro lined up beside two competitors – an act of on-water cooperation that allows guests to cross three conjoined lobbies to reach land.
This floating five-star hotel is soon to be decommissioned after a 10-year run, but for now it’s home to Champagne breakfasts and chef’s-table dégustations, window walls and WiFi. Most of its cruising is done at night while guests sleep, lulled by the quiet throb of the engines and the gentle slap of the water. It’s a smooth journey. A nip of wormwood wine, the 19th-century French prophylactic against river-sickness, is redundant. It’s a marvel to pull back the curtains each morning and see a new town, always with the soaring spire of its resident cathedral puncturing the sky.
River cruising is the travel equivalent of the Slow Food movement. These broad, typically triple-tiered vessels are a sure means to beat the madness of the boulevards, gliding at a queenly maximum speed of 20 kilometres an hour. A train or coach to the city of Vernon, 75 kilometres west of Paris, would take about 45 minutes. By ship it takes all night and a good chunk of the morning to hug the Seine’s serpentine bends. By the time we arrive the sun has long risen over moody green cliffs with pale limestone erosions impacted like molars, and smug medieval villages of half-timbered houses and Gothic châteaux. If the scenery isn’t reason enough to linger over coffee on deck, negotiating the 19th-century locks is a ritual guaranteed to lure>