Back to France, part one

Noirmoutier

Eight years.

We work it out in the queue for the tunnel. As a French teacher, immersed in French websites, politics, literature and the mechanics of the language, I haven’t actually been on holiday to France for eight years. There have been school trips, but these are not holidays, folks! It feels strange, shameful almost. Sure, I also teach Spanish too and have been to Spain recently. But this is the country I grew up in. How have I left it so long?

But we’re on our way now, a 6-hour crawl through the Chunnel car parks and border posts later. We’re going to show our daughter where I grew up. Where we met. So many stories to tell her.

“This Autoroute didn’t exist when I was your age. The last bit to Calais was a crawl through villages.”

“What?”

She pulls out a headphone.

“Don’t worry,” says my wife, head turning towards me.

It’s hard to give someone a look when they are driving, but I feel it: I need to be more selective with my anecdotes.

Seven hours later, with a quick stop at an aire (“Can I ‘elp you?”; “Trois jambon-beurre et un expresso, s’il vous plait”; I see your excellent English, son, and I raise you my French. I will keep doing this until someone asks if I am French. In two weeks, nobody does), we arrive at an ancient cobblestoned causeway, patches of tarmac clinging to it (there is a bridge too, if the tide is in). We trundle across, past hunched-over figures scraping up palourdes, a kind of clam, and other delicacies with hand rakes, past crow’s nests sitting atop poles, ladders up to them, at regular intervals alongside the causeway. The tide comes in quickly here. In the distance I see the large flat cages of oyster beds, and fields of pillars up which mussels are grown.

We reach land again and drive on, past neat fields of ridges and furrows, the famous Noirmoutier potatoes, and lines of tomato vines in reds, yellows and purples. Seafood, potatoes, tomatoes: this is going to be a good week. The north of the island is a patchwork of rectangular salterns, where seawater is flowed through and evaporates, and salt is harvested. Some are stirred by bronzed figures in broad-brimmed hats, who wield giant paddles, stirring and sculpting piles of grey-white salt. Shacks alongside them sell huge bags of it and small, flavoured packets – we got lavender – and jars of pickled samphire. There are cyclists and cycle lanes everywhere: families on cycle paths heading to a beach, time-triallists racing along the roads, people returning from markets with wooden crates on their luggage rack. We drive through the small town of Noirmoutier-en-l’Île to the forested east of the island, where the main campsites and many holiday rentals are. We park our car, for the week as it turns out.

We grab a very good pizza from an airstream caravan at the bar and pitch the tent under pine trees at the quiet end of this busy beachside campsite. Small boats sit tied to buoys a little way out, glowing as the sun sets behind us. The beach is deserted. It looks idyllic, but how busy will it be in the morning?

Not very, it turns out, and the water is warm enough to swim for an hour or so, especially on a hot day, which is each day we are there, and every day this parched summer. It is also shallow and flat, with very little current. ‘Discerning French people’ head west for their holidays, I have always heard. From la Baule-Escoublac to Royan, beaches, forested dunes, islands and presqu-îles abound. Noirmoutier feels similar to Île de Ré, a couple of hours south. This campsite is a mixture of French, Dutch and Belgian families, with some Brits and Germans and a handful of Spaniards. Not for them the Med, but the pine trees, heat and calm sea do feel a little Med-like.

The sea is cooler, but the beach is uncrowded. I am entirely sold on this combination. Caravanners on the beachfront pitches look dug in for the summer: smiling grandparents preside over gaggles of small children. I peak into awnings at comfortable chairs, tables, grills, ovens and coffee machines. It puts our small stove balanced on a rock into perspective, but I am not getting a caravan. We have at least brought bikes and a paddle board, and our daily routine is established: swim, breakfast, go somewhere on bikes, lunch, come back, swim, paddle, lie in the shade. It is bliss, saltwater an instant balm. In the evenings, we go for a walk up the beach, sometimes coming back through the Bois de la Chaise, a 110-hectare coastal woodland of evergreen oaks and maritime pines. It is a listed site and feels ancient but has been replanted several times. It is home to Scops’s owls, who are masters of camouflage, and around 100 equally well-hidden 19th century villas which occasionally change hands for silly (but still discreet – this isn’t the Cap d’Antibes) money. Renoir loved the light here, as well as the backdrop of the forest, when he visited from Pornic on a pedestrian ferry which still runs from a photogenic pier in summer. In the water next to it are sleek wooden racing yachts. Black-headed gulls pitter-patter on the waterline. Their call sounds like someone doing a bad impression of a gull. Fine-feature terns fly by too, swiftly but also clumsily, as if slightly drunk. Perhaps it’s us. The light eventually fades at 10 or so, and we fall asleep quickly. Tomorrow is another day. Much like this one, but that is fine.

Where to stay:

Noirmoutier has options for every budget. We camped at Huttopia, which seemed a good campsite, right on the beach, high on trees and low on concrete, and it also has safari tents and cabins. Some campsites have pools, indoor and out, and there are also holiday flats, houses and villas, as well as hotels. These sometimes have pools, but you are never far from the sea on this island.

What to see and do:

1) Nothing, or very little: it’s the perfect place for it.

2) OK then: walk, cycle, paddle, swim, explore. Then eat.

3) Places: it’s a cliché but the town of Noirmoutier-en-l’Île is bustling, charming, set along a quayside on a tidal channel. Its market (there is a market every day on the island, but this one is the biggest and best, and happens 3 times a week) is good, its restaurants better, with super-fresh seafood and other standard French café fare, with the odd twist. Vegetarians don’t have a wide choice, but the salads are good. There are some vegan options. It even has a castle, museums and aquarium, as well as wetlands, where we spot avocets, among other species. We are just east of there, and near the gates of the campsite is a very good fruit and veg market garden stall (think: tomato heaven). There is also a campsite at L’Herbaudière in the northwest (and two in la Guérinière and one in Barbâtre, in the south of the island). This working port has the island’s outstanding restaurant, Guillaume Couillon’s La Marine, which has two Michelin stars (I got my seafood-sceptic family no further than the menu outside), a marina and other good restaurant, as well as a long, deserted beach, good for walking, and rock-pooling and spotting egrets at low tide.

South of here is L’Épine, a pine forest with holiday homes behind it, and la Guérinière, a small town from which 4 miles of south-facing beaches extend, a little more windswept than on the east of the island, where wind and kite-surfers do their thing, or land-yachters at low tide. There are schools for both. There is history here too: behind the beaches are old, restored windmills, and concrete blockhouses from the Nazis’ Atlantic wall. And finally, there are shellfish diggers too at low tide. You can observe or join in. Finally, there is Barbâtre, a continuation of this west-coast beach, with a pine forest, a nature reserve and a large campsite behind it. The whole place is just magical, perfect for summer relaxation.