20240604 Tuesday, June 4, 2024; The Paris Catacombs and Seine River Cruise
We ended up making a proper tourist day after all. When we got up Ben looked through the Viator App and found that we could get same day tickets for a combination Catacombs self guided tour and an hour audio guided Seine river cruise. The Catacombs official site shows tickets sold out a week in advance. This is most likely because Viator and other tour operators use robots to buy up all the timed entry tickets for resale. Guess it works for them.
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So after breakfast we headed out on the Metro to the Catacombs which are pretty far from the center of Paris. The idea at the time was the notion that keeping dead bodies in the city was a bad idea. This was long after the Black Death of the 1300’s, so it’s unclear what drove Parisians to evacuate all the bodies from cemeteries within city limits, but it did happen. As it happened, humans had been mining limestone for building material in Paris since the first century. These underground quarries began causing sink holes to open up unexpectedly as Paris began to build up. In the time of Louis XVI, they began to systematically map and reinforce the old quarries to prevent further collapses. So when it became all the rage to move all the bones from cemeteries from inside the city to the outskirts of the city, it was a convenient happenstance that they had all these excavated played out limestone quarries that they could fill.
So as they emptied cemeteries, the bones were then deposited in these underground galleries, typically labeled with which cemeteries they had come out of. Death was the ultimate equalizer because rich and poor alike had all their bones exhumed and then dumped into piles which were then Tetris’d into these quarries. The name catacombs was borrowed from the discovery of burial ossuaries in Rome by that name. They became a tourist attraction when they were opened to the public in the early 1800’s. In fact, at one point in time, they had an illegal underground symphony concert in one of the galleries underground. Kind of like a rage party of the early 1800’s.
When we arrived, we could see there were lines set up for ticket holders, and that there were signs that said the tickets were all sold out. The internet cautions that there are unscrupulous outlets that sell fake or counterfeit tickets that are no good, so we were a bit nervous until we actually got our tickets scanned and got in just fine. Because all the tickets are timed entry, there is minimal waiting but there is no “Skip the Line” because all ticket holders have to wait for their timed entry time to open, and because the robots have been buying up all the tickets days or weeks in advance, there are never any tickets that can be purchased at the door to stand in line to purchase. A bit of a scam on both ends.
The audio tour does explain the history and a few key points of interest along the self guided walk underground. There is a very long spiral staircase that leads down over 120 steps to get to the level of the catacombs.
That was a bit dizzying to get through. Once at the bottom, it’s fairly level. There are a few spots where the floor is a bit damp and slick, and it’s a lot like a cave tour. Not good for anyone over 6’ tall. There is a long walk through passages until you get to the actual ossuary, but when you do get there, there are a ton of bones Tetris’d into the cave walls. There’s a couple of places where they attempted to arrange the skulls and femurs into some decorative patterns, but for the most part, they are just stacked like cord wood. The Sedlec Ossuary we saw in the Czech Republic was a much more elaborate and amazing display of human bones as art. This was mostly a bulk storage facility. If you had never seen an ossuary before, this would be fascinating. For us, it was interesting and something we had not done before in Paris so it was worthwhile.
After emerging from the underground, we returned to the base of the Eiffel Tower where we made our way to the banks of the Seine and had a picnic lunch. We still had some leftover baguettes from Lille which we donated to the birds. Then we got into a Disney like line for the river cruise. The ticket bundle included an hour audio guided tour with no meal. The same company has boats that do gourmet lunch and dinner cruises, but those start at about £70 to over £125 per person. We figured we could spend that kind of loot in a real restaurant if we really wanted to.
We had a perfect day for the hour cruise with partly cloudy skies keeping us from getting too roasted on the open upper deck. The boat sailed from the Eiffel Tower to just past Notre Dame Cathedral, which as still under reconstruction after the 2019 fire, and back. The audio guide did provide interesting background on key buildings as well as some trivia for each sight. It was just about the right amount of time for what we wanted to do.
We got back to the hotel about 4:30pm and the hotel still had some croissants and sweets out for afternoon tea. That plus a nap refreshed us enough to venture out for dinner. We didn't wander far, eating at a restaurant called Naï pretty much just across the street. There is a terrific view of the Arc de Triomphe down the center of the street. It is a cute cafe with a red awning decorated with flowers and giant teddy bears. The owner is Lebanese and really keeps the place hopping. He was very friendly, funny and helpful. We had French Onion soup, mussels in a cream sauce, and Lebanese mixed grill platter with lamb, beef and chicken skewers.
The food was delicious, and a glass of Bordeaux red table wine went perfectly with dinner. We then ambled back to the hotel and began packing back up to head to Lyon tomorrow.
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