Les secrets de la Ville de Lumiere

After getting the supplies from David, we headed out. When we got to the beginning of the tunnel we would have to enter to get to the hole to the catas, we saw lights. We really didn’t know what to do. Was it cops? Bums? Fellow cataphiles? The last thing we wanted to do was find ourselves in a tight spot a few thousand miles from home - and with a few thousand dollars worth of photography equipment on us to boot. Still, we decided to go ahead. We had come too far to turn around and run away at the sight of a flashlight.

It proved to be a wise decision - it was simply other cataphiles coming out of the same hole. We introduced ourselves and chatted for a bit. They left, and about 5 minutes later another group came out. In fact, all in all, we passed at least 2 dozen people during our 5 trips into the catas - almost all near this particular entrance. Most were locals, but there were a couple Swedes and a German we also ran into down there. My favorites were the group of six guys with sleeping bags and a stereo playing “Eat the Rich,” and another guy we ran into later wearing sandals and a Hawaiian shirt. He was drinking a beer and called himself the “CataHawaiian.”

It’s interesting - there’s probably about 300-500 people who regularly visit the catacombs, and probably several hundred others who do so on a more sporadic basis (compare that to perhaps two dozen people in New York City who make a regular habit of similar benign-trespassing activities). There’s various different nouns they use to describe themselves - the most regular one being “Cataphile.” Literally translated, of course, this just means “Lover of the Catacombs.” In a cultural context, however, there’s a whole host of subtleties to this (and other) titles that we only just began to understand.

There are people, such as the guys behind www.zone-tour.com, who call themselves “Urban Explorers” instead, and won’t have any thing to do with people who even associate with anyone calling themselves “Cataphiles.” We were also told a new group of people were calling themselves “Catastars,” what ever that means. And, of course, there’s always the folks like ourselves - basically tourists. In fact I dubbed the kind of travel we were doing “extreme tourism.”

“Cataphiles” (or Urban Explorers) in France are pretty varied. Some go in just to hang out and party. Others paint murals, or write graffiti, or work on opening up closed sections of the catas, or take pictures, or just see what they can find. But the ones that are really into it don’t just visit the catacombs. Anywhere interesting that they can go, they do. And they don’t stop at just opening manholes and such - sometimes it seems like they give jewel thieves a run for their money with their tactics. I’ve heard stories about key impressioning, mountaineering ropes, and forged ID’s - all just to get somewhere interesting. David told us a story about being caught by the police on the roof of the Louvre - and then talking his way out of it and climbing back up the next day.

And that’s basically the difference - Europe is just a lot more chill. It’s a 100 Euro fine if you’re caught in the catacombs, and they don’t even take your map. The police are basically content to play a cat-and-mouse game with the cataphiles - entrances and sections of the catacombs are constantly being sealed up by the authorities and broken back into by the cataphiles. In fact, it’s actually illegal for the IGC (basically the government agency in charge of maintaining and patrolling the catacombs) to seal up all the entrances because it might mean trapping somebody down there.

In New York, if all you’re doing is crossing a “no-trespassing” sign it’s generally not that big a deal if you get caught, even in the subway tunnels. But if you add stuff like forgery and lockpicking (or even just writing graffiti) or start climbing up famous landmarks cat burglar-style, it’s a very different story. And the populace at large in Paris is much more chill also. In addition to our experience climbing the Tour St. Jacques, we also did stuff like open up manholes in broad daylight, with nobody giving us a second look.

Even knowing all of this, breaking the law in a foreign country is never that great of an idea. Still, it didn’t stop us from heading in for our first solo expedition…

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.