Marseille - Southern France

After being in Paris for four nights we were ready to move on to Marseille which was a smaller city and much more laid back. We arrived at our hostel after a metro ride and then bus ride and came to a very large house. The women sitting at the pool in the backyard came to greet us as we walked up and showed us to our room which was a huge room on the first floor of the house that she lives in with her husband and two kids. We also had our own bathroom and outside terrace which was a nice change from our hotel in Paris. We walked into the small town outside of the major city for dinner and ended only finding a pizza place that was open. The guys inside were watching soccer and were very friendly and one spoke English. We took the pizza back to the hostel and ate on the terrace. We then went and talked with the couple about how to get to the Calanques, which we had seen a picture of in our bathroom. The Calanques are a series of cliffs that make up an area of Southern France that touch the Mediterranean Sea. We were to take a metro and then a bus to reach them and then hike about 30 minutes into them to get to the water and beaches between the cliffs. We planned our trip for the next morning and also packed as were leaving the next day to head to Barcelona as well.

The next morning, August 31st, we woke up and ate the breakfast that the women made for us at the hostel, before her husband dropped us off at the metro and we were on our way to the Calanques. After the bus ride that dropped us off at the head of the trail that we were to take to hike in, we hiked about 20 minutes before seeing the cliffs open up and started to get really pretty views of the water. We hiked in some more and found our way down to the water where we went swimming and jumped off some of the rocks. Unfortunately we had a train to catch so we couldn't stay for very long. This was also one of my favorite parts of the trip and I would like to come back and spend more time here just hiking around and swimming. We promptly left and made our train, and arrived in Barcelona at 10 pm after about a seven hour train ride. We found our hostel and went to sleep, being very tired from hiking a lot of the day.