Les secrets de la Ville de Lumiere

Unless otherwise noted, all pictures are copyright of my friend, travel partner, and fellow guerilla urbanist Steve Duncan. Steve is a wonderful photographer, and specializes in underground and urban photography. Prints are available - visit his website at http://www.undercity.org

After climbing the Tour St. Jacques, we decided we had better get a move on with our main goal - seeing as much as the Catacombs (or “Catas” as they’re referred to sometimes) as we could in our 2 weeks in Paris. David, Miru’s friend who was the Cata expert, had a lot of work to do but said he could show us around next week. Miru was leaving the next day, but said she’d take us on a quick trip in just to get acclimated. So off we went.

There’s only a few ways into the Catas anymore. David said that when he was a kid you could just get lost down there, knowing you could pretty much just climb up the next manhole or staircase that you ran into and you’d be out. Nowadays almost all of the manholes are welded shut, and the staircases generally end in a sheet of solid iron covered in concrete. Get lost, and you’ll probably be down there a while.

The most popular (and easiest) way in is to walk about a half-mile down some abandoned rail tracks until you get to a hole in a tunnel wall. We didn’t have a map, so we only spent a few hours and didn’t go too far. We didn’t have rubber boots, and the water in the Cata tunnels becomes knee-deep at points. We also didn’t have any good light sources, so Steve couldn’t take the kind of pictures he wanted to. This clearly was not something we could really play fast and loose with. More prep was needed before we headed in for a serious expedition.

Still, we saw some interesting things our first trip. There was a well, and also a little room where someone had left a computer, of all things. We saw that the ceilings of some of the rooms had small fossilized shells in them. And we got a little bit of an idea of the vast variety of different types of tunnels down there - included one that had old cables running through it. David told us a little later that the national telecommunications company, ITT, had decided to use the existing catacombs tunnels for their cables a few decades ago, but that it didn’t last too long.

Since we wanted to see as much as possible, and neither David, Rosie, nor Miru were heading in the next day, Steve and I decided to do a trip by ourselves. Plus, while it’s cool being led around by people who know what they’re doing, it’s also fun to just throw yourself in the pool and see if you can swim. I wanted to really get to know Paris on this trip - both the above- and below-ground version - and there’s only so much you can really know if you don’t go out and try and learn for yourself.

Luckily, David let us borrow two pairs of boots and his carbide lamp (a caving lamp that produces an open flame on a helment - a light source good for both underground photography and being able to see in all directions at once). We also got two copies of what turned out to be our most precious possession - the meter-square, highly detailed map of the Catacombs that pretty much everyone uses (what you see in the picture is a small section maybe 6 inches square). It really wasn’t until we saw this that we realized how complicated and enormous the catas were. Trying to do any kind of thorough exploration with the tiny map Steve had found on the internet would have been a recipe in futility - if not danger.

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This entry was posted on Friday, February 17th, 2006 at 5:20 pm and is filed under Below. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.