WHEN A FAIRY TALE BECOMES REALITY…
An amazingly vain, truly fickle and ever-fluctuating creature is a human being. It is not easy to form a stable and uniform idea about it. And when it comes to modern tourists and seasoned travelers, you are completely at a loss: which of them is obsessed with new tourist trips and vivid impressions, and who may endure what they see, heard somehow without violent emotions, inside themselves. Although the expression of the eyes and facial expressions can be seen with the naked eye: this individual was still very impressed with the trip or excursion. That is why the tourism industry is strong, diverse and unique.
Such or approximately such thoughts arose when my wife and I went on a 10-day trip "Tour de France" from the Kyiv travel agency "Feeria".
After a charter flight Kyiv-Brussels on the not entirely comfortable airline "International Airlines of Ukraine", the group on a comfortable Polish bus "Volvo", together with the super-guide "Feeriya" Zhanna Onishchenko (fluent in French and all the qualities of virtue) went on a tour through Paris to Normandy and Brittany.
They were located quite in decent three-star hotels with decent breakfasts. The weather was generally good everywhere, which gave additional color and charm to both historical places, cities and towns, and natural landscapes. I was impressed by the evening and night Paris, the abbey of Mont Saint-Michel with an ancient monastery on a rock in the middle of the sea, the gardens and castles of the Loire, an unusual hour-long evening performance with computer graphics of fairy tales at the Cathedral in Rouen. It was in this version in Europe that I have not seen anything like it.
However, I can call my stay in the ancient city of Saint-Malo a personal apotheosis and a great symbolic impression. It is located on the shores of the English Channel, with long and high fortress walls, on which one could take hourly walks along the perimeter of the walls and even jog. At 32 degrees of heat and water temperature of +17-18 degrees, many members of our group happily, like children swam in the sea, took boat trips, and then wandered with pleasure the old streets of Saint-Malo. And when the tide began to ebb in the English Channel, the French and numerous tourists enthusiastically walked along the wide sandy and rocky coast, and in fact the seabed of the English Channel, went to several islands with small old fortresses and watched unsurpassed orange sunsets with glasses of French wine .
I confess that having visited more than 50 countries, I have never seen such natural beauty.
Unless it can be compared with the Himalayas and Tibet. Amazing stories that you need to see at least once. There were many other good impressions: big and small. The main thing is that they were there and helped to see this unusual world on French soil through the prism of different opinions. I recalled the words of Montaigne: "The hallmark of wisdom is an invariably joyful perception of life. " So I would like to thank the people who have invested their mind and work, creating an opportunity for us to have such joy, an amazing and inexpensive trip: the director of the Feeria Igor Zakharenko, the tour manager Alla Bezverkhaya, the guide Zhanna Onishchenko and the bus driver, the Pole Arkady. See you soon!...
Oleksandr Borshchevsky, editor-in-chief of the World of Martial Arts magazine, member of the National Union of Journalists of Ukraine, experienced tourist (author's photo)
