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Taking the tour on foot reveals what ships, buses would never let you see

Story and photos by Josh Noel | Tribune reporter

January 18, 2009

NICE, France—Warned of absurdly high cab fares, I shrugged off another warning about Nice—its robbers and pickpockets—and decided to walk to my hotel from the train station.

That mile of sidewalk was cracked and dirty, and the soft October breeze smelled of garbage and dog waste. Every other storefront was vacant, and laundry hung like the national flag. It felt nothing like Paris. It didn't even feel French. It was Barcelona, Rome and Miami in a blender, and the names on apartment buzzers backed it up: Gasteau lived beside Marchi, who lived beside Evans.

The Riviera may conjure images of lounging sun-kissed beauties in black sunglasses, but all I saw were hunched, hurried locals who withheld eye contact. Yes, there was a promise of grandeur—the gleaming Mediterranean Sea bobbed at the foot of the sloping avenues. But the street-corner condom vending machines were covered in graffiti.

This was the South of France?

Indeed, and it was an appropriate, if inauspicious, introduction to a place I'd be exploring for the next week on foot. I was about to embark on a growing European rage: the self-guided walking tour. My travels would take me from Nice to the Italian border—about 20 miles in a car but closer to 75 miles the way I'd be doing it.

My boots would take me beside buzzing highways, up dirt trails and along seaside stone paths. A couple of short taxi rides would allow me to skip the most disagreeable patches, while several detours up mountains and around rocky peninsulas would let me savor the most beautiful.

The allure was simple. Tourists most often experience this corner of the globe by cruise ship or bus. Locals, depending on their economic lot, prefer trains or helicopters. I wanted none of the above but to see all I could; I wanted to pull back the curtain and experience the real Riviera, its good and its bad. So I walked. Most of the time I followed a set of route instructions, but at times I called my own shots.

And the first was walking from the train station, dragging my suitcase though western Nice—still unrobbed. But where were the high rollers? The glamor? Those sun-kissed beauties? The answers, of course, were on the road.

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The next morning, I asked the front-desk clerk at my hotel about a neighborhood called Cimiez. Perched high above the city, it was supposedly one of Nice's finer areas. She said it was worth a visit and circled on the map where I could catch the bus. I asked if I could walk.

"I don't think so," she said. "It is too much walking up."

I didn't explain my new and perhaps irrational dedication to walking. Instead I went out to side streets that were absent a single tourist's guidebook or dangling camera, until reaching the wide, soulless corridor of pavement and cheap shopping that is Nice's modern downtown (most of these Riviera towns have a new and an old downtown, the latter being the tourist center).

I turned north, away from the sea, and began ascending. And up, up, up I went along twisting streets, past faded pink, yellow and green homes built into the hills to overlook the glistening water. At its lower reaches, where the tourists moved, Nice was grim and poorly kept. In the hills, it became sedately beautiful.

A couple miles on I reached Cimiez, wandering its 2,000-year-old Roman ruins and the neighboring Matisse museum, housed in the 17th Century villa where the great French artist lived. At the heart of the neighborhood, in a large circular park, Sunday in France unfolded. It was a remarkable time of revelry and companionship: Dogs frolicked after kids who frolicked after soccer balls. Dads kicked soccer balls with their sons. Teenagers traded turns as goalie and shooter.

Couples ate sandwiches and drank wine, a blond boy's 6th birthday unfolded with a French rendition of "Happy Birthday to You" (same melody, just insert joyeux anniversaire), and ancient couples moved slowly hand in hand.

As dusk approached, I headed back down the residential streets toward the shops and tourists of the "old" downtown, stopping at a library where dozens of university students studied at long tables with headphones in their ears. The scene was remarkable in its ordinariness; I couldn't remember walking into a library while visiting another country, but that's what happens when you are on foot and follow any whim.

Then it was back to the boardwalk along the Mediterranean to watch the sun sink in a warm orange haze while a band of giggly French Boy Scouts chased each other beside the sea.

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From Nice I headed east, to the 1,000-year-old narrow stone streets of the next town over, Villefranche-sur-Mer; I stopped there for a mushroom risotto and red wine lunch. Then I kept heading east, along the Riviera highway closest to the sea, called the Basse Corniche. A bus load of tourists pointed cameras at the water and, farther on, a bottle of wine three-quarters full sat abandoned on the side of the road—Chilean, of course. I walked along the highway's twisting edge until hitting the next seaside town, Beaulieu-sur-Mer.

My hotel was run by M. and Mme. Henri Albert, a middle-class couple with halting English who left the Paris suburbs 15 years ago to move here. The tidy, spacious lobby doubled as their living and dining rooms. Their daughter, Anne-Louise, a pretty 18-year-old in her last year of high school, studied last year in Chattanooga, Tenn., and spoke nearly perfect English. I asked how she liked living in one of the world's most revered addresses. She can't wait to leave.