The Ultimate Mission: To Walk the Whole La Petite Ceinture Railway in Paris Pt. II

So this post is a continuation of the previous post which you can see here. I probably never walked more than four stations in one go. This was mostly because every now and then there are barriers that were just too difficult to get through. But here I am trying to make sense of it all and put it into a coherent "tour" of the tracks. So the last station we looked at was Gare de Bel-Air-Ceinture, following this is Gare de l'Avenue de Vincennes.

For the non-Frenchies reading this, "gare" means station. Though you will probably figure this out. It appears in the name of each station so go figure...

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Gare de l'Avenue de Vincennes

This bit is very colourful (not surprising when you see the next few), and is the start/end depending on your perspective, of my favorite part. That is, now my old favorite part has been destroyed, ahem I mean renovated. 

ABOVE: Presumably the platform of this "station." As you can see this whole area has been attacked by colour and mildly nonsensical English. BELOW: "Rain is Pink" and "Free Smile." Well at least they are happy.

BELOW: I like this one. I seem to like chunky iron bridges. Is that weird? I hope not. And Here are some more photos of the area (and the next few stations).

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Gare de la Rue d'Avron

This part of the track is VERY lively. We walked through coming from the other direction to this virtual "tour" I am writing for you now. We ran into architecture students, graffiti artists and all sorts. 

This man had a groovy hat, sadly I did not get a very good shot of him...

This station didn't just have the little buildings you see scattered here, but also this, which of course we could not get into (we had a peek nonetheless).

The next station was Gare de Charonne-Marchanidises but it was destroyed, so I am not sure exactly where it was. We deff walked through it but as there was no sign of it I was not aware of it.

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Gare de Charonne

I first went to Gare de Charonne totally unaware that this is what it was, I was attending a concert in the now renovated La Fleche d'Or. Given the "ceinture" sign and railway clock, I worked out pretty fast that I was standing in a petite ceinture station. Given that the singer was pretty rubbish it deff was a highlight to the evening...!

 (NO I can't get away ^^)

Underneath the station however it is even more interesting. There were so many obscure structures hanging about. I found it fascinating. My friend however was quite content just watching me flit about- to be fair he had been down the catas the last few days and I had only been down there one night so probably had more energy than he!

Its like an industrial wonderland!

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Gare de Melimontant

OK, so if you read my last post you saw my last warning. But I am warning you here again. Between this station and the next one is a really long tunnel, in the middle of this tunnel my friend and I had our cameras and phones and money stolen. So perhaps skip this bit. I have reason to believe that they hang out there often. It is NOT worth it and there is zero chance of getting away from them. So do yourselves a favor. Don't bother.

Furthermore the station no longer exists. So why would you bother?

But here are some photos anyway because the first two times I went through I was lucky.

The tunnel we were mugged in.. Yes that tiny speck is how far away the light is. So don't do it.

This is just before it.

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Gare de Belleville-Villette

Here is another "station," there is little sign of it existing now. Nonetheless I have spent a surprising amount of time along here. Just before this, most probably around the site of the now also destroyed Gare de Paris-Bestiaux was this huge iron bridge I had been seeking out that now goes over the canal in Parc de Villette. 

 Aside from this bridge there is not much here now. But the bridge serves as a pretty easy way to get to the next station which is quite interesting.

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Gare du Pont de Flandre

The first time I saw this it was through a hole in the fence by a metro exit, where I took the photo above. I promised myself then that I WOULD get inside it. And I did a few months later. Now there is a man living in there running some kind of dance club out of it. He is very friendly, but I am rather untrusting of people that are THAT friendly. He also some how had wired up electricity, TV, the lot. It was actually pretty luxurious in comparison to where I was living at the time.

Just some little details I liked.

 I will probably do a whole post on this station at some point because I took a lot of pics here.

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I think this is probably the end of part II, I will have to write a part III for the rest. Wow this is becoming so long!

LPC: Gare Frigorifique Bercy

So continuing the mission of walking the WHOLE petite ceinture, I carried on where I left off from the previous (and rather intensive) weekend, here- near porte de Vincennes. After walking for what felt like hours last weekend, though in reality that was probably due to spending all night underground, we just weren't able to carry on any longer! 

I have collect a few pictures here to share with you... Because I am seriously not good at organisation, I have not done the ones from before yet! 

I love a good stretch of railway.

Look closely- this one has a mouse face.

There was even an abandoned train, sadly it was otherwise occupied.

We got chased out of here by a squatter. Needless to say it wasn't a very successful visit, mostly we had to keep a distance, despite the frustratingly unlocked gates and doors everywhere.

This is a side view of the station which you can see from the road. We had our picnic lunch on a piece of track on a bridge over the grimey Seine where we found this: 

Moss art! It means storm I believe, just made me think of The Tempest.

More to come soon (enjoying the bad English here).

Abandoned Places V: La Petite Ceinture Gare de l’Orléans-Ceinture (Bercy)

I have been rather busy of late, working on my MA and kick starting this photography thing and finding various freelance jobs that I could do to support myself longer living in Paris. As such I have opened a DA account here. In doing so I have started to learn the basics of photo editing to give my pictures a bit of extra oomph, so even though the pics there are the same as here, they are in fact better version. Subtle but necessary. But for now I give you another piece of the railway puzzle.

The hunt for this bit all started with a photo on instagram of a bridge I was dying to see, the only problem was it gave no indication as to which part of the railway it was actually on and so the search was on to find it. Crawling along Paris on google earth and maps, comparing what I saw with what I could see in the background of the photo, I narrowed it down to two places, here and somewhere else. It wasn't here, but it was not a wasted trip, I always enjoy uncovering a new part of the railway.

It turned out that a lot of the tracks were being ripped up to make way for new buildings, something that I find rather sad, though as my friend keeps reminding me- these places are transient and I need to make the most of it whilst it still exists. We do our best! 

I have a feeling that people don't come down here as much as the other parts, true it is much shorter than the other parts and there are no extra draws like entrances to the catacombs... But there was a lot of uprooted tracks, signal posts and other gear.

The truncated railway is shown above, alone with the signal point which I climbed up for no real reason other than I could. We also saw a little pink panther on our travels.

The best bit however was probably the rail station itself. Though getting in was not an option (it bordered an active construction site), I still enjoyed walking around it and taking a few pics. I also had a very difficult conversation with a local, my substandard French was met with his awkward English and in the end we just laughed and gave up.

I would imagine that this station is on the brink of destruction, though this is not as sad as finding out that the one by where I live is being flattened. Having spent many hours down there I know I will mourn its death.

The next part on the hit list is Pont de Flandre and the elusive cage-esque bridge.

Abandoned Places IV: La Petite Ceinture (Montsouris)

So in the spirit of walking as far down La Petite Ceinture as possible, we decided to go back down where we left off in the 14eme and see how far we could get before we hit another dead end. Having walked halfway from Parc George Brassens to Montsouris, we wanted to see what we would discover if we kept going (we also took a guest writer from New York down with us this time).

We came down through our "usual" entrance and covered the first bit of familiar territory, which however had been newly attacked with the artistic paws of the underground Parisians, as such the tunnel walls looked different to the last time we came down.  

Here are some more pictures of the tunnel walls.

My favorite part of this section was how green it was when we came to the end of what was, frankly, a very long tunnel. We presumed by this point we were below Montsouris, but it was quite hard to tell.

Next time we are going to head up to Bercy and see how much we can see over there. Since each section is so different from the last, I am excited to see what we will find up there...

(This is actually from another time we went down, for a night time walk, armed with candles and music. I quite liked this one as it was so different from the others).

Abandoned Places III: Jardin d'Agronomie Tropicale (Human Zoo)

So after weeks of planning to go, but not quite managing to for one reason or another, we finally made it to the Jardin d'Agronomie Tropicale. The Jardin d'Agronomie Tropicale, aka The Human Zoo, is located just outside Paris by the Nogent-sur-Marne commune and the bois de Vincennes (in English, a suburb just outside Paris Nogent-sur-Marne, bordering the Vincennes woods). Here lie the remains of the colonial exhibition of 1907, where buildings were constructed to represent the countries under French colonial rule, Indochina, Madagascar, Congo, Sudan, Tunisia and Morocco. There are also a few other Asian elements, a bridge amongst others. These buildings were made to represent the "villages" of the countries they represented and had inhabitants shipped over to live there whilst the exhibition was open, for people to come gawk at. Hence "Human Zoo". The entrance point is shown below with a typically Chinese archway. Being surrounded by such distinctly non-Parisian architecture was beyond surreal, knowing how close we were to Paris, yet feeling hundreds of miles away was indeed unsettling. Especially when you consider what the purpose of the place was.

The first section had a very strong Asian feel to it, and for me it was especially surreal having been born in Tokyo and travelled around various parts of Asia whilst very young but barely remembering it, I kept getting these ghost inklings of a memory that I could barely grasp. Below are some pictures of the Asian "village" followed by a picture of the Indochina building, the back of the pavilion and an interior shot of one of the Tunisian buildings. 

We got inside the Tunisian building fairly easily, walking through here you could clearly see how much it had fallen into a state of disrepair, and how much France don't want to draw attention to its existence.

There were also several greenhouses that housed exotic plants, one or two are still in use and the others were being potentially in the process of being revamped whilst we were there (our brief exchange with the gardener yielded little, aside from the generous permission to let us roam free inside the greenhouses).

 (This another shot of the inside of the Indochina building - I am still learning how to format blogspot how I want to…).

 Below: side view of a sweet little house that overlooks the veg plot, and the interior of one of the greenhouses.

Here is inside another greenhouse and the outside of another, followed by more pictures of the inside of the greenhouses.

Here are some photos from when we were wandering around the Moroccan area, which was especially "weathered".

The remains of a chair where presumably there was a fire at some point.

 Below are more photos of the Moroccan pavilion, which of course we snuck into too...

This building was particularly surreal, the remains of the shower blocks and kitchen was still visible, it just astounds me that they really shipped as many as 35 000 people to places such as these in the colonial era, just for people to look at… It was even stranger to be inside the buildings, watching people walk past the windows and look in at us (obviously wondering how/why we got in and whether we were actually supposed to be there)-- I can't even imagine how it must feel to be shipped to a foreign land for the sole purpose of being watched. 1984 anyone?

Clearly at some point, as is always inevitable, other people have gotten in and made their mark.

I love being in buildings such as these, that have been left to be taken over by nature and gradually collapse. Its an odd type of beauty, and a reminder that the mark of humanity can be eradicated, eventually.

 I especially adore the way the greenery completely takes over, how structures once completely man-made, are now under the control of nature.

Finally, at the end of our trail, we were met with a memorial and the back of the entrance point. This place really was stunning and very eerie. I would strongly recommend a visit if you are looking for something unusual in the Il de France region or feel in need of an escape from the Haussmannian boulevards of Paris (despite Haussmann's attempt at renovating Paris, it is somewhat claustrophobic at times). It will be well worth the trip.