Why Kiwis Should Discover the Real France Beyond Paris
- francoishusillos
- 5 days ago
- 4 min read
Imagine this.
It's a Tuesday morning somewhere in the southwest of France. The market has been set up since dawn — soft pyramids of tomatoes still warm from the garden, rounds of cheese wrapped in paper, a woman selling honey from hives she tends herself in the hills above the village.
You're not in a hurry. Nobody is. A coffee has appeared in front of you without being asked for, and the light is doing something extraordinary to the stone walls across the square.
This is France. Not the France on the postcards — the one behind velvet ropes and tourist queues. The other one. The one that breathes.
And here's the thing: most visitors never find it. Not because it's difficult to reach. But because they never slow down enough to look.
Why France Feels Different Outside the Cities
The moment you leave the motorway and take the smaller road — the one that winds through oak forests and past farms that have been in the same family for two hundred years — something shifts.
Outside the cities, time is measured differently. A meal isn't an interruption, it's the event itself. A conversation with the man selling vegetables at the market isn't a distraction — it's the whole point.
For New Zealanders, who carry in their DNA a love of open space and genuine encounters, this pace doesn't feel foreign. It feels, strangely, like coming home.
This is the France I show my Kiwi guests — from the Basque coast to the châteaux of the Loire, from the vineyards of Bordeaux to the wild headlands of Brittany. Four very different regions. One unmistakable feeling.
The Food That Tells You Exactly Where You Are
Some meals you eat. Others you remember for the rest of your life.
In the Basque Country, you find yourself at a zinc bar in Bayonne on a Thursday evening, surrounded by locals who have been coming here since before you were born. The pintxos arrive in waves — small, perfect, unapologetically flavourful. In Espelette, twenty minutes inland, the pepper that carries the village's name hangs drying on every stone wall.
In the Périgord, a duck confit arrives at your table in a restaurant with six tables and no menu in English, and you understand in the first mouthful why French cuisine became the language the whole world learned to speak.
In the Loire Valley, lunch happens at a long table on a wine estate terrace, with a château visible through the vines and a bottle of Chinon that tastes like liquid history.
This is food with a story, eaten in places with a soul. And once you've eaten like this, everything else feels like a rehearsal.
What a Local Guide Changes — and Why It Matters
There is a particular kind of magic that happens when someone who truly loves a place shows it to you.
Not the version from the guidebook. The real version — the bakery that's been there since 1923, the viewpoint that only locals know about, the village fête happening this weekend that no website will tell you about because nobody thought to write it down.
My tours are built on a simple principle: six guests, maximum. Always. Because beyond that number, something essential is lost — the ability to linger, to change course, to say yes when the vineyard owner invites you in for one more glass.
You've made a long journey from New Zealand. Every single day should count.
What a Local Guide Changes — and Why It Matters
There is a particular kind of magic that happens when someone who truly loves a place shows it to you.
Not the version from the guidebook. The real version — the bakery that's been there since 1923, the viewpoint that only locals know about, the village fête happening this weekend that no website will tell you about because nobody thought to write it down.
My tours are built on a simple principle: six guests, maximum. Always. Because beyond that number, something essential is lost — the ability to linger, to change course, to say yes when the vineyard owner invites you in for one more glass.
You've made a long journey from New Zealand. Every single day should count.
Why Now Is the Right Time to Start Planning
Kiwis, in my experience, tend to think about France for a long time before they come. The idea builds slowly — a photograph, a conversation, a birthday with a zero on the end. And then one day something tips, and the dream becomes a plan.
Our 2027 tours are now open — the Basque Country, Bordeaux and the Périgord, the Loire Valley, Brittany and Normandy. Four journeys, each one designed exclusively for New Zealanders who want more than a postcard. Prices start from NZ$5,750 per person, small groups guaranteed.
The best time to have the conversation is before you need to rush it.
Final thought
The France beyond Paris isn't a consolation prize. It isn't the second choice for people who couldn't get tickets to the Louvre.
It's where France actually lives — in its kitchens and its markets, its village squares at dusk, its vineyards and its coastlines and its long, unhurried lunches that somehow always end with someone producing a local digestif you've never heard of and will spend the rest of your life looking for.
Come and find it with us. There's nothing quite like it in the world.
→ Explore our tours · Write to us · Let's start planning your 2027 journey.
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