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 ....”