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Enjoy lazy days on France’s Canal du Midi aboard the luxury Clair de Lune.
Ineeded a holiday away from roads and Wi-Fi. Past experience suggests the best way forward is a canal cruise. Not one where you steer yourself, crash into locks and become the laughing stock of inland navigation. I’ve done that and it was as relaxing as a civil war. What I needed was the luxury embrace of a barge hotel, where the driving, and every other single thing, is done for you.
So we are soon by France’s Canal du Midi in the little port of Le Somail, near Narbonne. It’s hailing distance from the Mediterranean. The stone village has bars, a tanned ambience, an unexpected antiquarian bookshop and a sense of continuity back to the days when barges were towed by horses, or women. “The great days of feminism,” I say to my wife, to mixed acclaim.
Awaiting us is Clair de Lune, a converted cocoa barge 30.5m long, 5m wide. Any bigger and it wouldn’t fit in the locks. Even then, it requires nous. Driven properly, the boat slides into locks as a cigar into a cigar tube. Also awaiting us are the four crew, all beaming as if our arrival makes their happiness complete. At these prices, of course, you expect a decent beam. But these people — captain Julian, guide Nicole, chef Tina and hostess Audrey — have it mastered. They dissolve efficiency in charm and humour, a hell of a trick to hold up over a season.
That was four crew for, um, four passengers; the others are a couple from New Zealand, an enormous stroke of luck, for were they not genial, we’d have been doomed to a six-day house party through gritted teeth.
Instead, we have a ball. “It usually works that way,” says captain Julian, as he would.
But that is in the future. First of all, I rip around the boat, looking at stuff, before relaxation sets in. Downstairs is the distillation of a manor house hotel: wood panels, polished furniture, fresh flowers, drinks cabinets of special-occasion spirits available 24/7. Want a 20-year-old cognac pre-breakfast? Go right ahead, it’s included.
Granted, cabins are more snug than on other barges on other canals (bathrooms, too) — a matter of tailoring everything to 17th-century lock size — but big windows help, and how long are you going to spend in your cabin? You are more likely to be on deck, with its table, loungers and hot tub, and here the crew host a champagne welcome and Julian delivers a safety lecture which, were he been less polite, could be condensed to, “Don’t be bloody stupid.” Coming to grief on a canal barge requires determination. And so we cast off and slip out of the clogged-up 21st century into a parallel universe of serenity, sunlight and diminishing alarm. A significant problem is thinking up whims to be catered to. Another is generating sufficient appetite for meals which, were I a Michelin man, I’d sprinkle with stars. We have reeled back to a medieval pace, overtaken by cyclists and joggers. Grapes ripen from sharp to sugary before we’ve drifted beyond their vineyard. If we floated any more slowly past canalside villages, we could have stood in the local elections.
Minds on the loose fix on the unlikely, such as the insane narrowness of canal bridges, the disease destroying the canal’s honour guard of plane trees, the relative merits of legendary footballers Tom Finney and Stanley Matthews. Fellow passenger Bill, just retired from New Zealand’s fruit industry, has himself been a considerable football player. With distant family origins in Lancashire, he’s followed the county’s soccer from half a world away. Bill’s wife Robyn, a special needs teacher, shares my own wife’s mysterious indifference to soccer.
Unless chartering the entire boat with family or friends, fellow passengers are vital and entirely pot luck. They’ll likely be American, or otherwise English-speaking. My wife is only the second French person Julian has welcomed on board in more than 12 years as captain. As my wife remarks, “French people with that kind of money go to Mauritius.”
When guilt at sloth kicks in, we walk or cycle the towpath, then leave the barge daily for attainable bits of surrounding Languedoc. Guide Nicole drives the minibus and rocky foothills give forth an ancient winery, a goat farm and an olive oil co-operative where a young woman tries to persuade us that single variety olive oils are worth three times the price of big-name brands. Narbonne has a market raucous with the abundance of southern France, the region’s finest Gothic cathedral, and an original stretch of the Via Domitia out front. Higher up, perched above gorges, Minerve sacrificed a good number of Cathars in 1210 (read about the 13th-century heretics before this trip; they crop up all over).
Back to the boat. “It’s like coming home,” says my wife. “Since when did our house have wood-panelling, four staff and a diesel engine?” I wonder. But she’s already sorting out the boules. Each evening, we take a table and drinks off the boat to the canal bank, where we have a New Zealand v Europe petanque match. And, over a series of five, as any fool would predict, NZ wins. They win an egg cup marked “Carcassonne”, now doubtless displayed prominently on a mantelpiece in Auckland.
Carcassonne is the end point, and a fine one, what with Europe’s greatest medieval city, shoe shops sufficient for Robyn’s obsession and a final-night captain’s dinner on a table even more beautifully dressed than usual. If a trip were to be judged by the quantity of warm memories generated, this is a winner. Despite its soar-away price, however, it doesn’t always attract clientele of the calibre deserved. One morning, as the sun burns off the mist, captain Julian recalls an American guest who asked: “Hey, Julian, do they heat the canal overnight?” “Certainly,” he answered. “To keep the fish warm.”
CHECKLIST
The 241km-long Canal du Midi is France’s best-known canal. This cruise from near Narbonne to Carcassonne (vice versa, on alternate weeks) takes six nights (five full days). You’d do the same trip in a car in less than an hour. Which is exactly the point.
Sоurсе: theaustralian.com.au