(Paris) They were 39 at the start and another 11 at the finish, 37 km and thirteen hours of walking later: in Paris, the night hike of the “Night Trotters” advocates surpassing oneself, as a team, to better appreciate the treasures of the capital.
Posted at 10:07 a.m.
It is 10 p.m. this Saturday evening, when initiates and novices meet on the slab of Rosa Parks, a new district in the northeast of the capital.
Of the 50 registered, about ten are missing. For a long cold night at the end of January, and given the defections linked to COVID-19 and its Omicron variant, this is already a performance.
Down jacket, hat and backpack, everyone has prepared accordingly. Except Claudia, 29, sparkling eyes behind square glasses, who arrives with her long camel coat, matching boots and her scooter.
Registered on a site that offers unexpected and blind expeditions, the foreign language student discovers that it is a question of crossing the city until the next day. “But… aren’t we sleeping?” “, she asks Faouzi Derbouz, the organizer of these courses.
Distribution of vitamin bars and bottles of water, reading of the rules, fireworks and group photo: as soon as this ritual is completed, the group sets off to attack the slopes of the Montmartre hill, under the curious eye of the passers-by.
“Only ‘goodbyes'”
“What are mountaineers doing here? “, laughs Mona, a teenager out with her friend Zoé and her mother Christine. “It looks too good, I see people smiling. »
It will be like this all night long, during the brief encounters of the walkers with drunken Parisian youth. “Compostelle, it’s this way! », the rooms of a Left Bank student.
Sacré-Coeur, Opéra Garnier, Place Vendôme, Samaritaine, Notre-Dame, Sorbonne: the monuments parade, the hours with them, and the group shrinks. “There is no abandonment, only ‘goodbyes'”, repeats Faouzi who only gets angry when walkers slip away on the sly, for “concern of cohesion”.
“We see things that we don’t see the day”, savors Fadila for whom it is a “good way to escape”. This 56-year-old accountant regularly walks between her home, near the Louvre, and her work in Saint-Denis. “I love Paris, I couldn’t live anywhere else. »
Cinema, intermittent fasting, Czech football or the search for “the man of his life”: conversations follow one another between people “coming from very different backgrounds”, underlines Ghizlane, a sports teacher who is used to walking alone at night to “clear your head”.
The only downside to this joyful procession: “we stop too much”, sighs Cynthia, 34, who has come for the first time. The scarcity of accessible toilets in the capital complicates the task, especially for ladies, and the smallest welcoming bar is taken by storm.
“Olympian calm” on arrival
After a picnic break at 3:45 a.m. in the monumental Saint-Michel fountain deprived of water, the walk on the quays of the Seine under a cloud-filled sky is magical. Place de la Concorde, the din of the bottled capital has given way to silence.
At 6:30 a.m., Hakim, a maths teacher in charge of his students’ papers, and his girlfriend Rihab pick up the phone to return to Tours, which they have left for the night out of “the desire to go crazy”.
At the foot of the Arc de Triomphe, they are only thirteen. Direction the Bois de Boulogne where the rising day carries its batches of cyclists.
“As usual, the last two hours are a little harder,” said regular Paul, 72, the oldest of the eleven survivors.
The arrival at 11.15 a.m. at Mont-Valérien, in Suresnes, takes place under the sun and in “Olympian calm, as often”, smiles Sabrina, Faouzi’s wife, who has come to set up a surprise welcome committee with their two children.
After a smoke bomb—the final ritual—croissants and coffee, the exhausted survivors can no longer separate themselves. Among them Claudia, who lost her voice and was “surprised by (her)self”. She will keep the memory of this “extraordinary path” of “exceptional discussions”.