Why You Should Forget Paris

Instead, here are thirty authentic ways for you to experience France.

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I always seem to remember France by smells.

A pâtisserie. A boulangerie. The scent of flowering fields. The smell of the cities when you get into areas where graffiti meets 19th-century ornate bliss. The briny whiff of the sea. Maybe the smell of a train’s interior, because France has great trains that can take you across country in little time.

France is a country that almost everybody has been to.

I’m exaggerating. Not almost everybody, but a lot of people—it‘s the world’s most visited country. Or at least it was in 2019, when 89 million people visited France — 30 million of which visited Paris.

Euro Disney gets 15 million visitors a year, or it did before the COVID pandemic. The Eiffel Tower, guess how many? 7 million. Think how long the queues are at the Eiffel tower with 7 million people visiting each year.

South Africa is the only country in Africa that receives more than 1 million annual visitors. And that’s an entire country. The Eiffel Tower gets more foreign visitors than Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda, Uganda, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Sri Lanka, Oman, Guatemala, and a whole host of other countries combined.

That’s how popular it is. And that’s how popular France is. This is a country with over 20,000 hotels, 40,000 historic monuments, 44 sites on the World Heritage List, 4,000 museums, 1,500 chateaux open to the public.

The population of the country is 60 million, and they get 90 million tourists. That is insane.

I remember France by the smells — but I also want to remember it by the places that are not as popular.

I want to remember France by being behind-the-scenes at the Louvre. by taking a hot-air balloon above the Saint-Emilion vineyards. By going to Louis Vuitton’s house on a private visit.

Maybe by visiting the D-Day beaches. By taking a yacht on the French Riviera, by going on an after-hours tour of Versailles Castle, by visiting an oyster farm.

I want a France that includes a cooking class, a wine tour, tasting champagne in Champagne, a cruise along the River Seine. I want to walk in the footsteps of Napoleon, go truffle-hunting in Provence, find out about lavender production. I want to visit Avignon and go through the old city where the Pope used to live, who all those centuries ago.

How about wine tasting in Chateauneuf du Pape? Tasting olive oil. Seeing Nice and Cassis. Hiking in Gorges-du-Verdon. Visiting a Camembert farm in Normandy. Taking a perfume-making class. Cycling around the vineyards of Bordeaux and meeting the wine producers of Medoc. Cognac tasting in the only place you can really do cognac tasting — Cognac town. Staying in a castle.

Going off the beaten track. That’s what I want to experience in France.

Because I want a France that is not just the smells that everybody smells. I want a France that is personalized to me — even though it is the country that gets more visitors than anywhere else in the world.

Because despite that deluge of tourists, France is a country with an almost infinite variety of attractions and destinations. It has an endless array of beauties — from art to gastronomy, from beaches to hiking in nature, from chateaus to cities to towns to villages, to finding a great restaurant where the menu of the day cost nine euros and it’s just fine French cooking.

France is a country where you can get away from the usual. You don’t need to queue for the Eiffel Tower, because there’s so much more to see and do.

I’ve spent 24 hours in Paris. I camped in France as a kid, when I did a road trip through the country. As an adult, I did some hiking in Verdon Gorge. I’ve tasted champagne in Champagne.

But that’s that’s about it. I haven’t done much. I grew up in Britain and I’ve lived in Europe, so France has always been my next-door neighbor. And — it’s the usual paradox — I’ve seen just a tiny fraction of it.

So everything I’ve mentioned above is on my bucketlist. It’s what I want to do when I next go to France. Because I went to Euro Disney when I was young and I’ve been to Paris and I’ve queued for the Eiffel Tower.

And next time I go to France, I’m going to look beyond that.

I hope you will too.

By Stephen Bailey. Edited by Beatriz Becker.

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