Mont Saint Michel is one of France’s most visited sights, and after seeing pictures of the fortified monastery it’s easy to see why.
It’s built on a tiny outcrop of rocky land in the middle of a shallow muddy bay, so everything for miles around is flat but the island sticks straight up so that you can see it from a long way away as you drive towards the coast. It also has some of the largest tides in the world; up to 14 metres difference between high and low tide.
The water used to be deeper around the island, but silt has been building up in the entire bay over the last few hundred years so the whole bay is a lot shallower than it used to be. When we were there at low tide it almost looked like all the water in the bay had emptied out and it was just a giant mud flat. The bay is so shallow that a popular activity is for people to walk across the bay at low tide. It’s about 14km to cross the bay if you’re keen. Or 6km for the short route.
But even though it looks like dry land it’s actually pretty dangerous to cross the bay if you don’t know what you’re doing as people have been drowned by the quickly rising tides so you’re only allowed to do it with a guide. Seeing as we weren’t prepared for anything like this we thought we’d do a lap around the island instead.
The first part of the trip was fairly simple as this was on the rocky side of the island so no mud to worry about. We even found this little chapel hidden away outside the walls.
It was when we were about 80% of the way around the island that we came to the sticky mud and were forced to decide if we should try and cross it or go back. We figured that since we’d come this far, and that it looked fairly dry and solid near the walls, we would try and make it all the way around. There was one difficult section where ALL the trekkers had walked through which had turned the mud into a deep sloppy mess, but we were able to climb along a section of the wall to stay high and dry out of the mud. There were a few close calls but we managed to make it across the mud without slipping over and ending up covered in sticky mud.
After our trip to Mont Saint Michel we ended up going to Nantes. It was a bit of an accident that we ended up there, but seeing as we had to catch the train on a Sunday there weren’t too many options that weren’t Paris and Nantes was one of them. It seems that on Sundays in France all the shops close so you starve, AND there’s hardly any trains so you can’t try looking for food in a new town.
Probably the biggest things to see in Nantes are the chateau (castle) and a theme park dedicated to building giant steampunk animals.
Les Machines de l’Ile is a pretty one-of-a-kind place. They build giant mechanical animals out of wood, iron & leather which you can then ride. The animals have a lot of moving joints so that when they move, it looks natural. There’s a bit of puppetry involved in it, so when you ride the animal you also control how its legs or head move around. The staff are pretty good at it so the body parts they controlled moved naturally, but when we had a go the effect wasn’t quite as impressive.
The giant elephant was the first thing they created (and still probably the most impressive), the second was a triple-decker merry-go-round inspired by the sea and Jules Verne’s book Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. Their current project is to build a giant 35m tall artificial tree and fill it with animals that you can ride. I’m not sure how long it will take for it to be finished, but it’s going to be bloody impressive once it’s done.
It’s definitely an interesting one-of-a-kind place to visit, and a nice change from the many churches and museums we’ve seen lately (not that there’s anything wrong with that). Next up will be us riding bikes along the Loire River. Something else different and mixing things up!
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