Ailly-sur-Somme (and another Venice)

After having a disturbed sleep on Monday night because of the pet food factory, Tuesday night was back to the peace and quiet we’re used to lately.  We were going to have a walk around the local marshes before we left Blangy-Tronville but changed our minds and decided to head for Amiens for lunch as we can always stop off on our way back up the river in a couple of weeks or so.

Sunrise on Wednesday morning

We were just setting off when we were surprised by seeing there was a boat coming our way.  It was a French couple on a cruiser, and I thought they’d be well away by the time we reached the first lock as they would be a lot faster than us.  When the first lock came into sight, I could see the éclusier had already closed the top gates though, when he saw us coming, he started opening them again which meant this was the first time we’ve shared a lock this year.

Sharing our first lock this year

As we came out of the lock, we could feel the refreshing spray blowing from a bridge that was being jet washed.  As it was surprisingly warm already I gestured for the guys not to stop, so they laughed and directed their guns in our direction to cool us down.

Jet washing a passerelle (footbridge)

We knew Amiens was going to be different to other large towns and cities we’ve cruised through as it is yet another place that describes itself as the Venice of France.  The map in the guidebook showed that as we approached the centre we were going to pass through a marshy area, famous for its hortillonnages or floating islands which were originally used for market gardening. 

We came in from the east and moored at the start of the big loop in the centre

Many hortillonnages are now weekend retreats, only accessible by boat of course, although there are still some people who make a living growing and selling fruit and vegetables. 

Nearing the outskirts of Amiens

One of dozens of channels into the hortillonnages

We’ve never seen anything like it before and found the whole area absolutely fascinating.  Each island has its own entrance passerelle and the quality varied from makeshift to quite ornate.

One end of the scale…

…to the other

There was a pontoon in the centre of town, and we saw it was empty apart from the French couple who’d came down ahead of us.  As we could now feel we were on a river we spun the boat around before mooring so we were facing upstream against the current.

Moored opposite Amiens rowing club…

…with a quaint bridge behind us

Amiens is one of the 100 plus French towns and cities where masks wearing is obligatory in outdoor areas.  Having only worn masks in air-conditioned supermarkets before, we hadn’t realised how much of a pain they are to wear in the hot weather.  

We really were in the middle of the city but before we went exploring, we walked away from the centre to take Buddy around a green area.  The trouble was that we hadn’t counted on the parks being criss-crossed with the waterways and we kept getting stymied by a lack of bridges and ended up walking nearly the whole way around some fields before being able to get to the next. 

One of the leisure lakes which for some reason was closed

There were a lot of pear and apple trees, absolutely laden with fruit, growing in one area.  Karen was desperate to pick some pears, but none were in her reach. 

 

Not quite tall enough

After the parks we went to the Saint Leu quarter and to get there we had to walk over the bridge behind our boat and along the riverfront which was lined with restaurants.

From across the river we got a good view of the cathedral.  Until then we had just caught glimpses as we came into the city and we could only see the roof and spires from the mooring.

In the middle of the river was a buoy with a statue of a man standing on it.  It was carved out of wood in 1993 by a German sculptor called Stephan Balkenhol.  Looking at various pictures on the web it can be seen that his clothes are often being changed; when we saw him, he also had a mask hanging off his right ear.

The man on a buoy

Saint Leu is the area where the weavers, tanners and millers lived and worked along the many mill streams that drove dozens of water mills.  It is now one of Amiens trendy areas and the style of the buildings along the waterside does make it very attractive and many of them are weatherboarded to the ground floors with exposed timber frames above.  As you can see from a couple of the pictures, some are still in need of a bit of care and attention.

 

At one end of the quarter was the modern brick-built university campus looking quite out of place.  The only thing we could see that was remotely in keeping with the area was that the buildings making up the complex were all surrounded by waterways.  It did make us wonder what was there before the university was built.

Next, we had to find the main post office as Joanna had sent our spare part for the washing machine using the poste restante service.  We’ve never used the service before and have heard of varying degrees of success.  It is generally used by people with no address so they can receive letters and parcels anywhere in the world.  If you don’t know what it is, the consignment has to be addressed to the recipient’s post office of choice with the words POSTE RESTANTE added after the name.  The recipient then has to pay the post office a fee when they pick it up.

In retrospect we should never have chosen a post office in such a large place.  The queues were very long and also very slow.  A security guard was on hand to split people into different queues depending upon their postal needs.  There was also a system whereby priority was given to business and disabled users.  I waited for more than half an hour and when I was finally seen they refused to handover the parcel as I didn’t have the original posting receipt with me.  We’d not heard nor read of this requirement before so it’ll mean another visit once we get Jo to send a copy of her receipt to us.

The route took us past the cathedral where a music and light show is played on its front façade each night during summer:

 

There was also a street decorated with large lampshades: 

 

 

And a mermaid holding an art nouveau clock:

 

As it was September, the light show was still running and we wandered over around 9.30pm to see it.  It was really strange wearing a mask at night, but the show was stunning.  It lasted for 15 minutes and runs every night from June to September and again during the Christmas market season.  As usual with this sort of show it’s impossible to capture the moments on film, especially those where the illuminations are going through their spectacular transformations, but here are a few of our attempts at the static images.

 

The end of the show

On Wednesday we cruised six miles down one lock.

Jo had sent a picture of the receipt for the poste restante parcel so my first job on Thursday was to go back to the main post office in Amiens and try and pick it up again.  I was a little more successful this time and once the Royal Mail receipt number was keyed in I was immediately told I was in the wrong part of the post office and needed to go to the locker room which is where parcels could be picked up.  I duly went to find the locker room which was back outside and around the back of the building.  Even though it was all open there was no one around and all the ringing of bells and shouts of bonjour and monsieur didn’t raise anyone, so I gave up in frustration.

We’d already decided to have a look around the city once I’d been to the post office so when I got back we set off on a circular walk starting with the Tour Perret.

Approaching Tour Perret

We’d heard that the tower was one of France’s earliest skyscrapers and found a newspaper article from 1956 that talked about the scandal of the building of the residential tower block that was the tallest skyscraper in France at the time.  It was an all too familiar story as it was already 132 million francs over its 93 million budget and 30 months behind schedule.

The reinforced concrete tower closer up

We then went off to find Jules Verne’s house where he and his wife lived from 1882.

Not far from there was a circus building built in 1889 that reminded us of the circus buildings in Châlons-en-Champagne, the home of the national circus school.  The circus building was renamed in 2003 and is now known as the Jules Verne circus.

Cirque Jules Verne

As we didn’t have Buddy with us, we both went into the post office locker room but with the same result as I had had earlier.  There was nothing for it but to go back into the post office and have another go so, as we weren’t both allowed in at the same time, Karen went to pick up a few things from a supermarket and I joined the queue.  Once I was in, I had a little more luck, the girl found a record of the package but said I should have come in three days ago when it arrived.  She could see I wasn’t happy and managed to get someone else to help.  This girl immediately recognised my name and went off to a crate, found the package and presented it to me with a triumphant smile!

Back on the boat, I was feeling a bit stressed after the five attempts to get the spare part (that I’m not convinced will fix the washing machine anyway) that I thought it best to leave attempting the repair until Friday.  We spent an hour or so watching schoolchildren having lessons at the rowing club opposite.  The beginners kept us amused as they struggled against the current to get further upstream where the river was broader and it would be easier to row.  The guy in his outboard was kept constantly busy rescuing them and towing them to easier spots.

Once a more experienced class arrived and would give us less to watch we decided to cruise to the other end of Amiens and check out the mooring above a lock there.  When we tied up, we both had the same thought, let’s move out to the country as we didn’t want to see any more of the city.  It’s not that we didn’t like Amiens, in fact we both loved it and had really enjoyed our sightseeing.  It’s just that as there's plenty more to see we both felt we'd rather be there in less restrictive times.  We didn’t have to wait for an éclusier as there was a small office at the lock and one came out immediately to see us through.

Goodbye Amiens

The locks from Amiens down to the sea locks at St Valery also have a set of flood gates 50 metres or so below the bottom gates.  In fact, at the second lock we went down, the flood gates were acting as the bottom gates thus using a far larger volume of water than the normal locks.  This made the lock very slow to fill but did explain why we had to wait ages for a boat to come up.  

The bottom gates were originally just the other side of bridge

As we neared Ailly-sur-Somme and started looking out for the mooring we suddenly thought we were in a mill town in Yorkshire.  There were several rows of terraced housing running perpendicularly away from the canal and also some large warehouses and mill buildings in various states of disrepair.  It’s the first time we’ve seen housing like this in France and we found out later that the site was a jute spinning factory established in 1845 by a Scottish-French company called Carmichaël.  The Scottish input was from Dundee which, at the time, was the coarse textile spinning centre of the world.  It certainly looked well worth a visit, so we’ll probably walk down there tomorrow.

Moored for Thursday night at Ailly-sur-Somme

On Thursday we cruised five miles down two locks.