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.