La Ciotat

La Ciotat is a charming spot, the Old Port is full of yachts and fishing boats and is surrounded by shops and cafes on three sides and by the massive cranes of a shipyard that builds and repairs oil tankers on the other.  After Chris and John left, Sue and I strolled around the port taking in the almost too perfect harbour atmosphere – quiet cafes, strolling couples, the reflection of street lights rippling across the water of the harbour.  We settled down at one of the cafes where I tucked into moules frites.  Inside were a party from “Topolino” a British yacht we had first met in Avignon – two crusty old blokes and the charming partner of one of them, who clearly makes sure that the old blokes survive and have clean underpants.  Outside, where we were sitting, three young Brits and Antipodeans were at a nearby table, the “Topolino” people explained that they were carrying out work on a boat in the harbour.  Also outside a party of two French thirty-something couples were sharing an enormous Bouillabaisse which the two young guys who ran the restaurant had carefully presented and shared among the four diners.  As the thirty-somethings started dismantling their Bouillabaisse a small woman with blond dyed hair in, I guess, her seventies began to serenade the outside tables, while a man of similar age, holding her bag containing sheet music, looked on.  It was dark now and she sang what sounded to me like French cabaret and traditional songs with what was clearly a trained voice.  The performance was rendered both pathetic and heart-rending by her style of delivery – that of a young Chanteuse and her seeming failure to have any idea that this style no longer fitted her age, her looks, or her failing voice, creating the impression of a person chronically deluded.  Her breast rose and sank with the effort of the songs and the emotion of their delivery.  The thirty-somethings and the Brit lads tried hard to stifle their laughter and the guys who ran the restaurant, to their total credit, were indulgent and polite.  The old man looked at her and from time to time at us diners with an expression that said, “I am here because I love her, I’ve done my best to stop her doing this, but I cannot and so I must give her my support”.  The performance was excruciating, but not long enough to be tedious as after a few songs she passed her hat round before disappearing with her partner to another restaurant.

Next morning at about eight o’clock we awoke to the unmistakable sound of a prat in charge of a public address system within feet of our mooring -  “un, deux, trois” (sound of blowing followed by fragment of Europop), “un, deux, trois” etc, etc.  Sticking my head bleary eyed out of the hatch I was actually rather relieved to find that we were right in the middle of the preparations for the La Ciotat town fete which was clearly about to take place.  All around the harbour stalls were being erected representing every club and society active in the town, from the folk music society to the radio controlled model sailing yacht club.  Later Sue and I strolled around the stalls and followed the local brass band as it tromboned and trumpeted its way around the harbour.  In the late morning we set off from the harbour for a leisurely sail to Bandol, a few miles down the coast and I have to say I was sorry to leave, for me La Ciotat has the unpretentious charm of a working port and is probably the first place we have come to where I could seriously think about living longer term.

Bandol was our first real Mediterranean resort, it is on the Cote Bleu, not the Cote d’Azure, doubtless a marketing invention for a coast that doesn’t quite have the cachet of the real French Riviera – rather more Marks and Spencer than Prada.  We stayed a couple of days in the town Marina, pleased to find that out of season (July, August and to a lesser extent September) berths are not too hard to find and prices are actually rather cheaper than in the UK.

Le Mistral

The Mistral at Frioul was my first real experience of a wind with its own name.  Sailing in the Med has given Sue and I an increasingly personal interest in the weather and how it works and we’ve started to read up on it.  Our “Mediterranean Cruising Handbook” lists thirty-five different named winds in the Med from the “Arifi” (the Sirocco from Morocco) to the “Vardaarac”, which must have been christened by a Scrabble enthusiast from its native Greece where it whistles down mountain slopes and out of the Gulf of Thessalonica.  The Mistral is one of the most feared of this lot and is apparently a “mountain gap wind” produced by cold air getting bottled up in Central France behind the Massif Central and the Alps and then suddenly blasting its way down the Rhone Valley, which is the gap between the two.  The Mistral lasts for as long as there is a reservoir of cold air, three, six, nine days or more – rather like squeezing a spot.

I can see how these winds can drive people mad.  On day one and to a lesser extent day two they’re quite interesting – “so this is what a Mistral is like, well it does have its good points, its ever so sunny and you can see for miles, fancy a walk?”  By day three its boring and irritating, having to walk backwards holding one’s hat is no longer fun and the constant whine of the wind in one’s ears is like living with a relative who is always complaining and can’t see any good in anything.  By day four it’s starting to get personal, this bloody wind has deliberately got it in for you and is actually blowing harder in your corner of the marina than anywhere else.  By day five you’ve forgotten what it’s like when the wind doesn’t blow and you don’t want to get out of bed.  Then it pulls its next trick by actually easing off for an hour or two, allowing you to emerge from your pit of bedclothes and despair and to start making plans again – maybe, after all, it is possible to sail in the Mediterranean, perhaps the Cote d’Azure really is within reach.  Then it starts again with renewed ferocity, so that by day six you want to jump up and down and scream and shake your fist at it Lear-like.  “Just bloody stop it will you!”  By day seven ... well fortunately on day seven, Friday 27^th September, it did actually stop, just as Sue and the weather forecasters had insisted that it would, eventually.

After days of inactivity it took us all morning to get the boat ready to sail and to pay our dues.  My suspicions of the Marina’s corruption were confirmed when I went to the office to pay for our last day and was greeted by a rheumy-eyed official breathing stale booze across the desk and dragging on a “Gauloise” directly under the “defense de fumer” sign.  After shuffling through the heap of record cards on his desk with quivering hands for the third time, he declared that he would just have to take on trust that we only owed one days charges and then promptly rounded down the fee to the nearest euro – the marina, of course, only accepts cash.  I’m almost sure he winked at me in return for my cynical and slightly exasperated smile as I handed over the loot.

In the afternoon we motor-sailed in sunny conditions around rocky headlands and into La Ciotat, where after motoring around the busy harbour for a while we found a berth on the harbour wall.  After we had settled into our berth Chris and John from Sapphire came over in their tender from their anchorage outside the harbour and joined us for what was, in effect, a farewell drink, at least for the time being.  They had left Frioul that day too and were keen to press on to Italy and were leaving early the next morning.  I think we will meet again at some point down the road.

Frioul

Well, now we know what a Mistral is!  There is bright sunshine and the air is almost halucinogenically clear – in the middle distance I can see the towers of the Chateau D’If, where Dumas’ Count of Monte Christo was imprisoned, standing on its own island not far from the entrance to the Old Port of Marseilles.  The wind is screaming at us from the North West, blowing down the Rhone Valley at gale force or more.  The sea is dark blue with foaming white horses racing across it and the air is full of salt spray.  Standing in the cockpit it is difficult to keep my balance as “La Fulica” vibrates and bucks against the seas, her rigging moaning with the force of the wind.

Fortunately, we’re in a marina, so the feeling of man fighting the elements is more imagined than real.  And what an odd marina it is – Port du Frioul, six hundred yacht berths sandwiched between two rocky islands a couple of miles from the centre of Marseilles. Essentially it’s the Marseilles’ Old Port overspill marina and there is nothing here except a small grocery store, four or five cafes, some old Napoleonic fortifications and a castle-like isolation hospital where presumably sickly crew were left to die before their ships went into Marseilles.  The Old Port has over 3,000 yacht berths and is right at the heart of the City, so every yottie heads there first knowing that there are only ten or twenty visitor’s berths and that they will almost certainly be told to go to Frioul – a kind of exile for the not so rich and not so chic.  When we arrived in the Old Port on “La Fulica” I tried charm and when that failed I begged, to no effect – “If you want to stay in Marseilles then its Frioul for you my lad, or otherwise you can bugger off.”

So here we are.

One of the lessons we have yet to learn is that if we want to continue sailing out of season we are going to have to let the weather forecasts decide how long we stay in particular ports and anchorages.  Wanting to visit Marseilles and to explore Frioul we paid for three days in the marina, only to find that two of these had really good sailing weather and that by the third day the Mistral was looming, so that on our fourth day it had set in and nobody was going anywhere.  Now we’re stuck here until it blows out, maybe after five days.  We’ve been into Marseilles twice and a fantastic place it is.  There are hourly ferries from Frioul, though only until 6.30pm sadly, after which time you have to pay an arm and a leg for a water taxi.  The ferry arrives in the middle of the Old Port, which is itself in the City Centre.  Immediately you are hit by the smell of fresh fish being sold on the quayside and by the buzz of a vibrant City.  We wandered the streets and shops taking in the sites, sounds and smells of the place and trying out the inevitable Bouillabaisse – a fish stew which has the air of a “manufactured” local delicacy, not necessarily eaten by anyone other than tourists.

Although Frioul is looked down upon by many yotties as the place for people who failed to get a berth in the Old Port, it too has its own fascination.  There are two islands covered in rock and scrub with lots of bays, inlets, the odd sandy beach and Napoleonic fortifications scattered around the place.  The walking is great and we have had our first swim in the Med since Antibes in early September.  Even with the Mistral screaming around the place, when you find a sheltered spot the sun really burns.

All or most of Frioul seems to be owned by the State in one form or another, which can be the only reason why it has not blossomed with really up market marinas, artificial beaches and tourist development, given its Mediterranean weather and location right at the mouth of the Old Port.  Instead, there is a scruffy and I think corrupt municipal marina (when you pay you are never given a receipt and if you ask for one you are assured that all the details have been entered on the appropriate record card, stacked in a haphazard heap in the marina office), some tired social housing, a school activities centre and some cheap cafes.  There is currently a debate about the future of the islands and I’m sure there is a story here, the place has the smell of misplaced European Community funds, dodgy deals and local government corruption.  Maybe this is my preconception of Marseilles, but I guess I do have a nose for these things.

While waiting for the Mistral to stop we have been socialising with other English yotties in a similar position.  Chris (female by the way) and John on Sapphire have given up lying at anchor for the time being and have come into the marina.  They came round for supper the night before last and we’ve also been boat visiting with another traditional sailing boat from Guernsey, a tiny twenty-two footer which has been the home of Tara and Darcy for the last three years.  In their late twenties they decided to set off from Guernsey for the Med in May this year for the hell of it and seem to be enjoying every minute.

So, when the Mistral does stop, although at the moment it has become our way of life and shows no sigh of abating, where the hell do we go next?  Our plans are still fluid, you might say, although we currently have a general intention to coast-hop along the Cote d’Azure to Italy and then stop at some point when the weather gets too tedious and we like the look of somewhere and can afford the mooring fees.  But, like all our plans so far, I’m sure that will change, maybe.

Life in Port St Louis

We left Port St Louis on Wednesday 18th September, having spent eleven days there going quietly stir crazy.  Why so long?  Well it rained a lot and frankly after the journey down the canals and rivers we were actually quite tired.  Two or three days disappeared lying in bed listening to the rain and making the odd dash to the local Intermarche supermarket for supplies.  Our French is improving, although slowly and through listening to the radio we heard that there had been major flooding further up the Rhone.  From the local paper we learned that there had been a breach of the Rhone’s banks just down river from Avignon and that more than twenty people had died.  Also, that a group of Australian yachtsmen had been rescued from the mooring at Arles only two days after we had stayed there.  A little later we got the other side of this story.  At the mooring in Arles we had met Russell an Australian who had befriended Thomas, Nicole and Joshi some time before we had met them.  We instantly got on with him and having just been to the bullfight in Arles reinforced him in his conviction to go himself.  Russell went to the fight then stayed another day and then the rains came.  As the level of the Rhone rose a community spirit developed on the moorings and much booze was drunk as the water inched higher and higher and the yotties and motorboat owners circulated from boat to boat discussing the situation.  Eventually the moorings were cut off and the lifeboatmen arrived to “rescue” everyone.  The boaters were transferred to a local community hall where they were fed sandwiches and given beds, although much to Russell’s chagrin (he hadn’t been too keen on being “rescued” in the first place) no booze was provided or allowed.  A couple of days later everyone returned to their boats, which were undamaged.

After our initial torpor at Port St Louis we slowly got stuck in to turning “La Fulica” back into a sail boat and thinking about the challenges of sailing in the Mediterranean.  The biggest issue was how to get weather information and having got it how to understand and interpret it.  We acquired a short wave radio, supposedly essential for picking up forecasts from a variety of sources in the Med, including English language, but so far we have succeeded only in getting very crackly and indistinct transmissions from the World Service.  Also an incredibly good value French Mediterranean Almanac with excellent information on weather services, pilotage around the coast and access to marinas and charges.  Now we monitor the VHF for the French coastguard weather reports, look at the forecasts posted every day in marinas and check the Internet whenever we can find an Internet cafe.  From this a picture emerges, usually depressing.

In between getting the boat ready we explored Port St Louis (that took a short afternoon) and met some old and new faces.  Principal among the new faces were Alan and Niamh (pronounced “Neave”), brother and sister from Eire and their sailboat “Storm Along” – a great name for an Irish boat or perhaps an Irish racehorse.  Alan, who is thirty, earned some money as a software writer and is now keen to spend it bumming around the Med on a yacht for a while.  Niamh is his younger sister, keeping an eye on mad older brother for several weeks before returning to Eire in a week or so.  After meeting many yotties who are careful planners and out to save every penny to extend their cruising time, Alan was a breath of fresh air, off the wall, impetuous and romantic, albeit self-consciously so.  Alan and Naimh had broken their journey to get a train to Monaco to attend the wedding of a friend of Alan’s in Monaco.  There he had blown so much money in a weekend that he was probably going to have to shorten his Med trip by six months or, God forbid, get a job for a few months.  Unsurprisingly, we spent a heavy night on the town with the two of them, including a visit to Port St Louis’ “comedy club” where I lost heavily at pool to Alan and Niamh spilled the beans to Sue about how she had fallen for the very rich and very sexy best man at the Monaco wedding.

Among the old faces Chris and John and their yacht “Sapphire” were the most notable.  We first met them on the Rhone at Viviers and then also at Avignon.  In their early fifties they, like us, appear to have no fixed plans or objectives, other than a vague intention to head somewhere in the direction of Rome for this Winter, where one of their daughters lives.

Port St Louis is a small town surrounded by refineries and heavy industry.  I had expected an industrial wasteland and a haze of pollution.  Actually, one cannot see the industry from the town and the impression one gets is of a pleasant little working class town with a mix of social and private housing developed in a period of municipal socialism, perhaps in the 1960s and 1970s.  One of the groups of flat blocks is called the “Salvador Allende” Estate, so I think we can assume a socialist influence at some point, not to mention the Rue Jean Jaures.  There is a Social and Cultural Centre which contains an internet cafe open in the afternoons – twenty desktop PCs and one chap at a desk with just me and one German yottie actually using the place.

During our stay we found one decent restaurant and when we were not working on the boat our main entertainment was watching the comings and goings of local and visiting boats and the odd commercial vessel taking the ship lock down onto the Rhone.  One especially ghastly English couple arrived while we there – it is so good to be able to take a real dislike to people sometimes.  They managed to smack their yacht into the neighbouring boat on the way to a berth and complained loudly about the French to us, assuming I guess that no French people actually speak English.  They were the sort who live in a world of their own preconceptions, for whom every new experience simply reinforces their prejudices and on whom travel is frankly wasted.  I wish such people would stay in their link-detached houses in Stevenage and give their spare cash to people that could really enjoy it.

By contrast a Swiss motorboat limped into the marina one afternoon with engine trouble and occupied by a delightful middle aged couple, their very soppy Alsatian and six cats who they had picked up in various marinas around the Med over the last five or six years.  The chap was a pipe-smoking multi-linguist with a delightful sense of humour and the ability to gently take the piss out of the locals.  On meeting him for the first time I offered a jaunty “Bonjour” to which he replied “You are English?  Good day.  I am sorry but my English is not particulary good, but then one gets so few opportunities to practice it” ... “err ... oui”, I humbly replied.

Port St Louis du Rhone

So here we are in a marina on the Mediterranean.  We arrived yesterday in bright sunshine to find a large palm fringed dock full of yachts and small fishing boats.  Actually, today it is pissing down and we’re stuck on La Fulica listening to the thunder and the French version of Radio 2, but at least the rain is warm, well warmish.  Port St Louis is a working class little town with a busy marina, run I think by the municipality I would guess by their attitude to cashflow – “ pay us when you leave, it’s easier to work out the charges”.  There is a more up market marina just outside the town, but in true yottie style we’ve decided to slum it with the local boats and save some money.  Although a sleepy town it’s not quiet, this weekend there is a motorcycle club meet and the place is full of middle-aged blokes squeezed precariously into leather trousers and gunning their Harley Davidsons round and round the port.  The rain is a mixed blessing as all the Harleys are now under cover to avoid getting their chrome rusty.  Once I’ve finished this missive maybe I’ll go to the facilities block to have a shower ... maybe not.

Yesterday we set off from Arles for the last twenty or so miles of the Rhone down to Port St Louis in bright sunny Mediterranean weather.  The hills of the Rhone valley finally dissipating into the flat marshy wastes of the Camargue – not that we could really see the Camargue itself as the river is still embanked and is lined with trees.  And so, here we are at Port St Louis.  For me this segment of our journey from St Jean de Losne, down the rivers to the sea, has had two strong themes – friendship and theatre.


Not just the friendship of Andre and Marie-Pierre, who we seemed to get along with instantly when we met at Dunkirk, but also Miriam and Bruno who made us feel equally at home in the apartment at Antibes and Thomas, Nicole and Joshi.  We first saw Joshi, who is not quite two years old, in a restaurant in Pontailler where we joined the Saone and we instantly fell in love with his smile and his flirtatious charm.  For such a young child he really has an exceptionally strong and developed personality.  Later we ran across the three of them in a restaurant in Chalon sur Saone.  We met again in Lyon, where they stopped off for an extra day to worship at the culinary temple of Paul Bocuse, whose restaurant they managed to get a table at, I suspect through Joshi’s winning smile.  Later on the Rhone we travelled together for two days down to Avignon, where we shared a delightful meal in the cockpit of La Fulica, with a cheese and desert wine to follow on Prinzess Pearl.  We bought the ingredients in Avignon’s excellent market and Thomas did the cooking – happy days.


Thomas and Nicole are taking a year’s career break from teaching to travel down to Spain.  The whole trip is centred around Joshi’s needs and having both parents in such close contact at such a young age I am sure will benefit him for the rest of his life.  Every morning Thomas or Nicole takes Joshi for his exercise before setting off. Travelling through the big locks on the Rhone I was touched to see Joshi strapped into his car seat in the cockpit with Thomas and Nicole taking turns to talk or sing to him to keep him occupied and happy.

A running theme of our conversation with Thomas and Nicole has been the meaning of “cool” and what is cool and what is not, using as our benchmark Miles Davis and his music.  Sue and I are both agreed that “Joshi is cool”.  We are probably taking different routes in the Med, but I am sure we will stay in touch with them and meet again at some point.

As for theatre there was the bullfight, of course, but also Nice Old Town.  My image of Nice was of a palm fringed Esplanade, smart hotels and the inevitable billionaire’s yachts.   But the Old Town is full of narrow medieval streets, tall shuttered tenements and the pastel colours of the Med.  Poverty and wealth seem to co-exist here in a proximity similar to Victorian London.  Walking around the Old Town on a hot humid night with thunder and lightning reverberating from the mountains above the city, life seemed to be being played out by the Nicoise in the street cafes in an atmosphere that felt like the set of an Italian opera.

Last time I wrote I said that I felt like a traveller, but going towards the area I wanted to travel in.  Well now we have certainly arrived and the pace of movement has slowed, but the experiences have intensified.  I think we “arrived” when we reached Lyons, which also closed a loop of anticipation opened when we first flew to the City last year.  That sense of “arrival” has intensified with each new place we have stopped.  Now we are on the edge of the Med with no more rivers or locks and we must get La Fulica ready for sea sailing.  Our choices now become much wider and as the translator of our Canal Guides might have said (but didn’t):

“Now the arrival of Port St Louis du Rhone at the terminals of the ‘King River’.  From here the way is no longer certain, free from the guiding hand of the Inland Navigations Board of France and the grandeur of its alimentations ....”

Bullfighting in Arles

During our stay in Avignon the weather was mainly sunny but with a couple of spectacular thunderstorms and downpours, after which much debris would flow down the Rhone, including large tree trunks and in one case an entire tree.  One of these storms caused us to delay our departure and we finally left on 6th September.  After the last of the Rhone locks we tied up in Arles, famous for its near complete Roman Amphitheatre and as the place where Van Gogh cut part of his ear off.  As luck would have it there was a bullfight in the Amphitheatre that night, so never having been to a nearly complete Roman Amphitheatre or a bullfight before, we bought tickets.

Although there is a tame Provencal version of the bullfight, this was a real Spanish corrida.  It was a one-sided affair, Matadors 6, Bulls 0.  Actually, I enjoyed it a lot and Sue was not as upset or disgusted as she thought she might be.  However, having read Hemmingway’s biography and got half way through “Death in the Afternoon” and having now actually seen a bullfight, I think his attitude to it was probably a bit pretentious and overdone.  Yes, it is intense and dangerous and cruel, but also rather sentimental at times and with elements of the tacky showmanship of, of all things, professional wrestling.  It was also rather slower and balletic than I expected, the matador at times almost caressing the bull and performing a kind of hypnotic dance of death with the bloody, confused and frightened animal.

Afterwards, every cafe and restaurant in town seemed to be having a paella party, with great pans of the stuff simmering to the sound of rock, reggae and the Gypsy Kings.  We went back to the boat and listened to the shouts of the drunks and the kids rattling the railings of the nearby bridge over the Rhone.  We cooked a paella ready meal, which had been mouldering in our store cupboard since Calais and which somehow seemed appropriate.

Avignon

On the 26th August we said goodbye to Lyons and continued our journey South, joining the big old river Rhone just after the City centre.  When the two rivers meet you quickly see who is boss as the size of the river grows and the current increases from something barely perceptible to a knot or more, helping us southward that much faster.  Our first day on the Rhone was actually quite a stressful affair, for much of the day a strong south wind blew up the Rhone valley making the river choppy and uncomfortable.  Early in the day we ran over a big lump of timber which hit our prop and stalled our engine for the second time on the trip – not a comfortable situation with the current running quite strongly and a large river cruise ship heading up river towards us.  Fortunately the engine restarted easily.  A bit later we tried to moor at the large town of Vienne to see the Roman temple there, but the chop on the river was just too great for us to tie up to the town quay as the boat seesawed violently up and down in the swell.  But, things got much better after that and mainly in concert with Thomas and Nicole and their charming son Joshua (“Joshi”, pronounced “yoshi” for short) of the yacht “Prinzess Pearl” we made good progress to Avignon, arriving there on 29th August.

The trip down the Rhone to Avignon has left a strong impression on me for a number of different reasons.  Scenically, the Rhone is much wilder than the Saone and it lies in a much more pronounced river valley with steep hills either side for much of the way.  This is some of France’s most famous wine producing country and many of the hills are lined with vineyards with the producer’s name displayed proudly on the hillside and wine producing cooperatives in many of the towns and villages.  This is also country that has been fought over and there are many castles, towers and fortified farmhouses throughout what must be one of the oldest through routes in Europe.  Overall, the impression is much more like what I imagined the Rhine to be as realised in the background to a painting by Duhrer, with steep wooded and vine covered valley sides, rocky outcrops, soaring birds of prey and remote castles and towers.

From the boater’s point of view the Rhone is the biggest commercial waterway of the trip from the Channel Ports to the Med.  There are only fourteen locks on the river but they are huge.  In area they are 190 metres long by twelve metres wide, large enough to take very substantial coasters and river cruise ships or by my rough calculation ten peniches, forty-five English narrow boats or fifty-one “La Fulicas”.  Their depth is equally impressive, typically each lock dropped us about fifteen metres, though the largest, Bollesme, has a rise and fall of around twenty-three metres.  Technically, they are not difficult, they are controlled by traffic lights from towers above each lock where lock-keepers sit in comfortable swivel chairs surrounded by instrument panels and looking out over the river through tinted windows.  Inside the locks are floating bollards which rise and fall with the water level and the main problem when entering the lock is rather like that one is faced with in an empty car park – “just where the hell does one stop when there is so much choice?”  Once inside the lock and with the gates closed the water level drops fast, sometimes accompanied by an eerie metallic squeal from the floating bollard as it drops down its metal track.  By the time the water level has dropped to its lowest, in the deeper locks you are in a chamber the size of the knave of a large cathedral, but with walls of green slime, with the lock control tower about thirty metres above you at the edge of a small rectangle of blue sky.  On leaving the lock I usually raised a hand in thanks to the lock-keeper, unsure whether or not he was actually looking at me through his bronzed windows.  In many cases we were the only boat in the lock, although the cost of operating each one for our benefit was almost certainly a multiple of the price of the eighty odd pounds licence fee we paid.  In some cases we had to wait up to an hour while commercial vessels worked through the lock, but one can hardly complain.

Economically and culturally the Rhone is of great interest too.  On a small scale map it can be seen as France’s main river artery and it has been used by trading boats since Greek and Roman times.  But the river was wild, unpredictable and prone to floods and a vast civil engineering project to tame the river was conducted from the 1930s to the 1970s by the Compagnie Nationale du Rhone (CNR).  The impact of this enormous project can be seen not just in the locks but also in the long sections of canal that bypass the river and by artificially raised banks that have dwarfed many riverside towns and villages.  Throughout its length the river is dotted with hydro-electric barrages and nuclear power stations, one of which, disturbingly, has a hundred plus foot image of a young child painted on one of its associated cooling towers.  As I looked at this image in the mid-day sun a couple of French air force Mirage jets came screaming up the Rhone Valley, one doing barrel rolls and there seemed something uniquely French about the whole scene –symbolic of a militancy in the way the French state gets things done – make a policy decision and then throw vast sums of cash at it and the people affected by it to get the thing done.  But I think the last word on the Rhone should be left to the canal guide and its description of one of the places we stayed overnight on the river:

“The life of this charming village is linked with the ‘king river’, whose Romantic site is now blended with the CNR’s gigantic installations.”

Says it all really.

The marina at Avignon is just upstream of the famous bridge, well half a bridge, on a section of the Rhone now bypassed by canal, so you have to turn back upstream for a mile or so to reach it.  The current on this stretch runs at up to three knots I guess, which makes coming and going from the marina a bit of an adventure, especially for Mediterranean yachtsmen with little experience of tides or currents.  But once safely tied up to a pontoon you are in a brilliant spot, close to the bridge, under the city walls and on top of the Palace of the Popes.

We stayed in Avignon for a week to sightsee, rest and visit the friends we made in Dunkirk, Andre and Marie-Pierre at their timeshare apartment near Antibes.  As we had only met them for a couple of days in Dunkirk we were a little nervous that maybe we would not all get on so well in different circumstances, but this was immediately dispelled when we arrived at their local station on the Cote d’Azure – as the train pulled in we heard the strain of the bagpipes as Andre piped us onto the platform.  We stayed two nights at the apartment with Andre and Marie-Pierre and Andre’s daughter Miriam and her partner Bruno.  I know it’s a cliché, but they really made us feel like part of the family.  While with them we dined in Nice Old Town, walked around Cap D’Antibes, visited the Picasso Museum and had drinks in the delightfully silly Pam Pam cocktail bar in Juan-les-Pins.  When we parted at Antibes Station it felt like we had been together for much longer and I really felt sad to be leaving.

When we returned to Avignon, all the yotties we had met, including Thomas and Nicole had already headed down river, leaving us a little low after the fun of Antibes and still with no clear idea of where to go when we reached the Med.  This was partly decided when a large northbound German yacht tied up next to us with nearly new charts for sale of the French and Italian Rivieras, Corsica and Sardinia, which we snapped up for less than half price.