I have a long-standing approach to catching trains or meeting appointments, I’d rather be an hour early than a minute late. To this end I had set the alarm for 04:30, we had plenty of time to get packed and showered to leave the hotel at 05:10, it only took us 20mins to get to the station so we were significantly early but at least we were on time – it was damned early though. One of the biggest advantages of catching such an early train is that they are practically empty, we found ourselves a 2nd class compartment and grabbed a bit of sleep. When we were woken up by a funky-haired ticket collector (dubbed Monsieur Funky-Hair) we chatted for a bit and spent the rest of our time doing Top Fives (Top 5 Scenes in Movies, Top 5 Fruit or Vegetables, etc). Having got so engrossed in what we were doing we arrived in Lyon not having read a single thing about it, we had not looked at the guidebooks once on our 5 hour journey.
The first surprise about Lyon is that it has a Metro, we’d presumed it was a fairly small town and wouldn’t really warrant an underground system, we grabbed the guidebook and used the metro map to negotiate our way to Vieux-Lyon (Old Lyon) where the hostel was situated. The maps in our guidebook had been a constant source of help and made large cities like Paris a doddle to navigate, unfortunately the one thing you don’t tend to find on guidebook maps is contour lines, in Lyon you need them. The hostel turned out to be halfway up an enormous hill, made all the worse by the fact that we were carrying about 15kg on our backs. To add to it all we got lost as well, we climbed the hill only to be told by a passer-by that the hostel was DOWN the hill to our RIGHT, we got there in the end although we later found out we could have caught a train to the top of the hill and walked back down to the hostel. C’est la vie.
We made a reservation at the hostel (it was lock-down time) and left our bags before heading into town to get some food, we went to a very nice Italian restaurant called Giovany’s which ate-up (literally) all the remaining cash we had. We stopped at Tourist Info to get directions to the nearest bureaux de change which was in the main town area of Lyon, we walked into town across a bridge over the Rhône and were utterly stunned by the size of the place. We had thought Lyon was a small-medium sized town but it turned out to be France’s second largest city. There was a demonstration of road safety in one of the plazas with skid-pan training, a car-rolling simulator and other bits and bobs, the city seemed active and buzzing. We changed-up our cash and headed back to the hostel through the metro, having decided to take the funicular railway up to Fourvére (on top of the hill) and walk down, unfortunately we got a little lost again and walked to the bottom of the hill only to have to walk back up to the hostel.
After checking-in to the
hostel we chilled for a while on a terrace overlooking the town and then read
our guidebooks in the room, we were sharing with one guy who seems to sleep
during the day and go to work in the evening in a 5-bed room. By this time we
were far too knackered to do much for the evening so we had a quick wander into
town to buy munchies then headed back to the hostel for an early night. We slept
relatively well until about 2am when a guy turned up and seemed to be climbing
over everything, I remember that he was from Niger and was coming here to study
but as it was 2am and I was knackered I can’t remember much else –
I talked to him for a good few minutes though.