To the Lighthouse
/
Behind me is the Cordouan Lighthouse, a UNESCO heritage site built from the days of the emperor (Photo courtesy of Criselda Yabes).
The clouds parted and I got my wish.
From the port city of Royan, we got on a ferry boat, my partner and I along with about 40 other passengers. After about an hour of cruising, we were transferred to a customized boat with wheels that drove us on a causeway to reach the entrance of the lighthouse at end of the Gironde estuary.
This was a normal expedition at sea, an excursion for the school kids who were with us. Seeing them, I wanted to experience a child’s wonder as well. Water has been my playmate since childhood in the southern coast of the Philippines. If there was anything constant on the horizon from out at sea, it had to be a lighthouse.
The Cordouan, a stone tower of 68 meters, was not just any lighthouse. It was the oldest from the 17th century, a UNESCO heritage site built in the Napoleonic period so that even the king had an apartment inside it. What awed me was its architecture, the smoothness of the stone-cut blocks, rising so high it looked like a building in Paris. More than that, there was a domed chapel on the second story, complete with stained-glass windows of saints. We lighted a candle for the occasion of our visit.
The truly majestic Cordouan Lighthouse (Photo by Criselda Yabes)
I was fascinated because I grew up by the sea in the southern Philippines, where lighthouses were either decayed or gone. In France, there was a school for lighthouse keepers, but that had to go in recent years, according to Cordouan’s barefooted and sunburned keeper who gave us a tour. The first thing I saw, before the official tour, was his kitchen and quarters, and I thought people of his kind were one of the luckiest on earth.
He was employed as a civil servant, rotating his time between a full week on the lighthouse and another onshore. That gave him 22 weeks of vacation in a year, he said. For a French, that’s four times more than what others normally get.
What would I do if I had that much time in the Cordouan Lighthouse? Stay on the top floor where there was an antique desk and a chair, and I could write while the green, red, and white lights turned in the night, a beacon to the ships out there.
A lighthouse keeper's desk centuries ago inside the Cordouan lighthouse, the oldest in France and open to the public (Photo by Criselda Yabes)
We had an hour-and-a-half to look around. What made it special was the fact that we made it there and I, like everyone else present, took as many pictures as we could. I needn’t have. I knew I was going to remember this, and I bought a pocket notebook as souvenir before we had to leave. Maybe one day I could tuck this memory into a novel.
This birthday gift was part of an “island-hopping” package, an itinerary we had planned to include lighthouse visits in a ten-day holiday in the French region of Charante-Maritime. The day before, on the island of Oleron, an-hour-and-a-half-hour drive from Royan, we biked more than ten kilometers to see the Chassiron Lighthouse on top of the island. It’s a much simpler one, painted in black and white stripes, and with more than 200 steps going up, no stops until you reach the top, no frills and all linear.
The lighthouse of Chassiron on the island of Oleron, a favorite fixture (Photo by Criselda Yabes)
From the top, one could see what the fishermen did for a living in olden days. Abutting the shores were necklace-like “fish locks” (translated into English), rocks built into semi-circular-walled basins to trap fish in the old tradition. Some have disintegrated over the years. My partner played with his brother in them when they were children on family summer vacations. They had a square whitewashed typical island house with pastel volet, a French window usually seen in the countryside to keep out the strong winds.
Oleron was the first of three islands we visited. We rented a mobile home in a camp site just a couple of hundred meters from the beach. Oleron has long, clean, almost empty beaches (mid-June, wasn’t quite the start of the summer vacation, which officially began in July and ended in August). But the cool spring temperature still lingered, and we couldn’t take a dip in the water.
Colorful huts of oyster gatherers on the island of Oleron off the French Atlantic coast (Photo by Criselda Yabes)
Every day, after pedaling on the island’s bicycle routes, the beach was our respite. It was enough to smell the air, lie on the sand, and feel the mild rays of the sun. We went to community centers, all named after saints, and indulged in any homemade ice cream we found.
Apparently, Oleron has managed to retain its island feel despite a mushrooming of bike rental-shops. Better than having more cars. A lot of the tourists were mostly retired couples. They snaked around the island in electric bicycles, mostly the women. It was amazing to see some gray-haired women in their ‘60s or ‘70s jogging on the road, as if they were preparing for a marathon.
The island’s main city center has turned chic, sprouting jewelry stores, antique and decor shops (where I spotted Filipino-made handwoven backpacks from the mountain provinces), and high-end clothing boutiques. Les Delices du Chai was the best shopping depot for the region’s food products, from seaweed-flavored butter cookies to caramel with sea salt candies, to liquors called pineau made from the local vineyards that we saw along the bike paths. They also have lemonades and colas.
After prolonged bouts of rain in the north where we live, it was lovely to sit in the Café de Commerce in town, sipping a brand-new non-alcoholic carbonated mango juice of some kind. Yes, it felt chic doing just that, watching people go by as they would in Parisian cafes. But when it came to real bourgeois chic, Oleron was outranked by the second island we visited, called Ré.
The camping site in Ré was a showroom of luxury camping cars. We had only our tent, which we couldn’t pitch when we realized the poles were stuffed with hard soil from previous use. And then the weather abruptly changed, pouring a deluge. Thank goodness there was a tent lodge available, only for three times the cost. Our luxury was keeping ourselves dry and the lodge was equipped with a decent mini kitchen.
I deliberately chose a location near the phare des baleines, the lighthouse of whales as it was called, just around the bend from the seaweed-choked beach that you could smell from afar. We were lucky to have the clouds parting later in the evening--enough time for me to climb the lighthouse. It was slightly scary with the strong winds, and my partner didn’t bother to come with me.
Phare des Baleines, or the lighthouse of the whales, on the island of Re, a vacation spot for the bourgeois boheme (Photo by Criselda Yabes)
The lighthouse was chic, too; the souvenir shop had higher prices and the tourists were not only retired couples. I took pictures of it from every angle, from the beach, the poppy fields, from our tent.
The next day when the rains stopped, we took long walks on the embankment, through the villages, and round back to the lighthouse grounds. And then it poured again. The best thing we could do was to visit the city center, St. Martin by the port, for a taste of Ile de Ré’s famous Martiniére ice cream, before leaving the island for our next itinerary.
Noirmoutier doesn’t have any lighthouse. We were coming back to this island for old time’s sake. It was a three-hour drive from Ré, no thanks to the GPS that kept taking me to so many roundabouts but finally landing us on the gois, a stone-built causeway that disappears during low tide. My partner was freaking out for no reason, worried that the water might suddenly rise without warning. The fun of it was the crossing; darker clouds lying low gave off a biblical effect.
The Catholic religion does not leave the islands; this one in Noirmoutier, while in Oleron, villages are named after saints (Photo by Criselda Yabes).
The island, which has a tail that reminds me of a sperm, is situated in the Vendée region, almost close to the coast of Brittany (which I think is the best region in France). This was going to be our downtime, a chance to rekindle memories, and rediscover the island I hadn’t been to in more than 20 years. I had spent some writing time here before and was so inspired by nostalgia.
We rented a studio near the beach, slept as much as we could, and spent more time cooking. We went window-shopping when it was drizzling and sat at the Café Le Noire by the port canal when it was sunny. It took us just half a day biking through the upper part of the island known for the Plage des Dames, the beach for women, which had the iconic white cabins where bourgeois families of long ago changed into their bathing suits.
The island is known for its salt and potatoes; there were salt ponds smack in the middle and you could buy different kinds from the shacks owned by the salt farmers (if you could call them that), and the potatoes are grown in seaweeds and horse manure. The main port was not a desirable scenery, and we discovered; alas, that the best beaches were on the tail end of the island. I noted one camping site that was five-star.
In Noirmoutier, I went looking for the fisherman’s sandals that I should have bought when I first saw it in Oleron. When we were in Ré, I saw a woman walking on the embankment wearing that plastic sandal, a blue one that matched with her jeans and sweater. She looked carefree with the wind tossing around her light-brown hair. My partner said it was the same sandal he wore when he was a kid playing on the beach.
But Noirmoutier didn’t have any of it in the bazaars. They had the Havaiianas, which is not the same, evidently. I thought our island holiday trip was going to be anticlimactic just because I couldn’t have one of those fisherman’s sandals.
What would I do if I had that much time in the Cordouan Lighthouse? Stay on the top floor where there was an antique desk and a chair, and I could write while the green, red, and white lights turned in the night.
Our last day was a simple walk around town. There was the castle and the church. Around a bend was a bookstore, a homey kind of bookstore that I didn’t find in either Oleron or Ré. Not only that, I found a book, the last copy left of one that I had been looking for. I suppose that was the best parting gift.
It was a pity that after hopping from one island to the next, I couldn’t swim. I could have if I had brought a wet suit with me, but that’s not how it is to feel the water. No one else was in the water save an old man who took a quick dip, two elders giving their dogs a bath, and a couple that went wind surfing in their full-body gear.
Strangely, I didn’t miss home where I knew I could swim anywhere for as long as I wanted. I made a mental note to come back in early September perhaps, when the summer heat would be lingering and the crowds would be gone at the end of the holidays in August. September is when everything begins in France. That would be the best time to return to these islands.
Criselda Yabes is a writer and journalist who has written about a dozen books, some of them on the military and Mindanao.
She now lives in northeast France and comes home to the Philippines when life calls for it.
More articles from Criselda Yabes
