|
 Travel on the Canal du Midi, and you enter a time machine. It’s not so much that you go back in history, but that the feel of time and place is transformed, that the heartbeat of time gradually slows, that the warmth and colour of the weather, that the richness of the experience strengthens as you potter along.
Navigating the Canal du Midi, through the splendid landscape of vineyards, historic villages and lock keepers’ cottages, rolling hills and saltmarsh lagoons, is one of the most pleasurable and deeply meditative experiences to be enjoyed anywhere in southern France. Mooring to stakes driven into the bank on a lonely reach each evening, we settled down to evening drinks. Later we prepared our dinner in the golden glow of nightfall, serenaded by soft acoustic Cary Lewincamp music from Tasmania on the iPod. Nowhere else in the world can you experience morning and evening light shafting between ancient plane trees as you can on the Midi. Not everybody gets it, of course. We met people who couldn’t get off their mobile phones, couldn’t do without the Blackberry, and found the canal ‘boring’. They drank a lot, blundered about, and moaned about the French. I wonder why they ever thought the canal was for them? How frustrated they must have been when joggers or cyclists on ancient ‘sit up and beg’ machines whizzed past at a breathtaking 10 kmh. For us, every day of our trip in October 2007 was a delight, and now, a few months later, and having survived the rest of our holidays and the gruelling flight home to Australia, the four of us are quietly thinking of organising another adventure on the Midi in 2009. We first thought seriously of travelling on the canal after reading a travel article in The Australian about the hotel barges. These splendid 30-metre iron ships, like the Anjodi used by Rick Stein for his French Odyssey TV series, cater for demanding wealthy tourists who expect to be pampered and spoiled in every possible way. After a lifetime of self-reliant messing about in boats, that option was quite unattractive to us and, anyway, the cost was way beyond our means, so we researched further. We soon found that there are essentially two kinds of boats available for hire on the canal — companies like Crown Blue Line offer motor launch-style boats, while Locaboat offers little barges — Pénichettes. There are also a few English-style narrow boats on offer, but they wouldn’t be my choice. All boats on the canal are restricted to 6 kilometres an hour, however streamlined they may be, so don’t be fooled by futuristic hull shapes! Rick Stein patronisingly referred to the hire boats collectively as ‘Noddy boats’.  We hired our 12.6-metre Pénichette, Carcassonne, through the Locaboat hire company, using the services of an extremely helpful agent in New Zealand, John Reese. Now I expect readers will want to know how much boat hire costs. We thought it was a great bargain, even considering our rate of exchange. Each day was about the equivalent of staying at a one or two-star hotel. We ate almost all our meals on board, as the galley was very good, and cycling to villages for ingredients for meals as we went, was a great part of the fun.
Accompanied by our friends, Terry and Vicky, who own a vineyard near Melbourne, we travelled for 10 blissful days on three legs of the canal. From the base at Argens-Minervois, we navigated west to Trèbes and Carcassone, south to Port-la-Nouvelle on the Canal de la Robine, east to Argeliers, and finally back to Argens. Getting started was exciting for us, but routine for Patris, the Locaboat manager. After a 20-minute orientation to the boat and all its systems and a 15-minute ‘driving lesson’, he wished us ‘bon voyage’ and we tottered tentatively out into the canal from the harbour. We were in the first lock before we had time to think...  Speaking of locks, what a workout they give you! Rarely can you tootle more than 2 or 3 kilometres before your meditation is interrupted by the flurry of squeezing in — usually with 2 or 3 other boats — as the water rushes in or out of the lock chamber. The turbulence, the roar of the incoming water, the bouncing on a metre-high bow wave, gives the sensation of uncontrollable surfing, and the abrupt rise or fall of 5 or more metres is quite exciting. As you may have gathered, we were swept away by the experience!
Just 20 years ago, the French government recognised the recreational potential of this faded masterwork and encouraged the hire fleets to become established. The state pays for the lock keepers, the maintenance of the structures, the endless pruning of the overhead branches, and above all the provision of water from the reservoirs in the Pyrenees. Water is channeled to the highest reach of the canal, at an altitude of 190 metres, and there the stream runs east and west as each working of the locks dumps tonnes of water downstream. The Canal du Midi has rightly been given World Heritage status, in recognition of the extraordinary beauty of the stone-built structures — the locks, the lock-keepers’ houses, the bridges and aqueducts; the beauty of the landscape through which it meanders; and above all for its cultural significance as the first substantial canal project of the modern era. The Midi exists as it is today, largely because of benefits brought by the canal. Together with the Garonne Lateral Canal, Canal du Midi links the Atlantic to the Mediterranean and runs along a route roughly parallel to the Pyrenees and the border with Spain. Technically, most of the canal is in Languedoc-Roussillon. Only the eastern part of the canal through the Camargue is actually in Provence, but cela ne fait rien! And it was all due to the vision of one individual, Pierre-Paul Riquet, who conceived the project in its entirety and persuaded Colbert, the finance Minister of Lous XIV, to support the project. What made the project possible was the construction of the first major artificial water reservoir in France, from which water flowed to the high point of the proposed canal at Naurouze, to flow from there gently towards the sea in the west and the east. Sadly Riquet died in 1680, just 6 months before the construction was complete. It had taken an incredibly short 18 years, and largely what you see today is what was built then. A few bridges and canal aqueducts have been improved, but the unique and beautiful oval locks are still the same. The Romans had built short canals, of course, but this canal was the first to employ the new technology of Da Vinci’s double-swinging mitred lock gates. When it was built, it immediately became a major transport link and for the next 300 years, before motor transport, it was vital to the economic growth of the region. It also provided a ‘short cut’ for cargo between Britain and southern France.  Today, there is little commercial traffic, and most of the travellers are holidaymakers like ourselves, but the canal is nevertheless busier than it ever was in the past. Many kinds of boats pass along it. The biggest are the hotel barges, but most of the boats, like ours, are sturdy fibreglass barges carrying 4-8 people. In Australia, we call retired people travelling by caravan or motor home ‘grey nomads’, and on the Canal, we met Dutch and German grey nomads travelling year-round in their own magnificent barges and motor cruisers. At the end of the northern summer they travel down the Rhône to enjoy the mild Mediterranean winter and the wonderful food of the Midi and the Camargue, before heading off again in spring.
From the start, we all worked hard at handling the boat better, dealing with the locks more confidently, coping better with sharing the locks with other boats. Our boat handling improved exponentially, but every time we got over-confident, we did something we wished had been done better. Looking back, I am embarrassed at how poorly I handled the last dozen metres into the dockside at Argens at the very end of the trip. Fortunately, Terry took over when I gave up in disgust after several attempts and moored us expertly. Sometimes barging is like that, but never mind; think of the harmless fun our mistakes provided for the onlookers. Thank goodness all the boats are well cushioned by fenders and rubbing strakes, and minor bumps and scrapes are accepted as all part of the fun. For us, the joy was in the journey. We never had a time-table or a destination. We chatted with innumerable locals, and with holidaymakers from France, Canada, Britain, Switzerland, and Israel. We talked rugby every day, though being from Victoria, the home of Australian football, our heart wasn’t really in it. Many lock keepers have a garden with fruit or tomatoes for sale, and others sold local wines. Our friends visited vineyards, tried cellar doors, but always came back to buying wine from the lock keepers, since they were so well informed and friendly.  I won’t go on boringly about the villages, but one must be mentioned… At Le Somail there is a wonderful second-hand bookshop, the Librairie Ancienne — a veritable cathedral of books. No one who loves books could fail to be thrilled by the atmosphere of this marvellous room, a converted wine cave, an old warehouse on the canal bank.
And as for towns, while Narbonne is nothing special to drive through, with its awful traffic, its dreary apartment buildings and its beat-up industrial areas, from the canal it is an absolute delight. After passing under the Pont des Marchands, the last bridge in France with shops and houses, you may tie up in the centre of town, just a stroll from the wonderful food market. The banks are decorated with colourful flower boxes, and a section of the cobbles of the Via Domitia has been exposed in the square. We certainly hope to return as soon as possible, to drink more of the Rosé and the Muscat, to watch the sunset across the lagoons and the pink flamingos in flight, and — above all — to simply experience the profound sense of sharing a rich landscape with wonderful people. Read our canal trip diary: http://www.stevecraddock.id.au/Canal_diary.html Visit the Librairie Ancienne: http://gourgues.julien.9online.fr/ Check out Locaboat: http://www.boatingholidays.com/south-of-france-boating-holidays.htm John Reese: http://www.france.co.nz/boating/index.html The Athos hotel barge: http://www.athosdumidi.com/ Mouringh’s Canal du Midi diary: http://www.home.zonnet.nl/Mouringh.Marga/Canaldumidi_eng.htm |
