Life

Travel: Slow boat ride on the Canal du Midi is a fabulous way to unwind

There are more taxing ways to spend a holiday than puttering along the Canal du Midi, a 150-mile manmade waterway in southern France, with good friends, good wine and good food, as travel writer Geoff Hill well knows. But why would you want to?

IT was the cocktail hour. Time to moor the boat in the tree-lined shade, pour a pastis and watch with pleasure as the water turned it milky green.

And then to sit on deck in the dappled sun, talk and read for a while and note with pleasure that the little restaurant which looked perfect for dinner was no more than 10 yards away.

It was a perfect end to another perfect day of pottering along the Canal du Midi, with the sun on your back and a cooling breeze on your face, the dappled light limpid on the water and the vines dancing in the afternoon light all the way to the horizon.

We had been on this canal before, on the barge Anjodi, a week of fine food and wine conjured up every evening by the on-board chef, but this time we were fending for ourselves on a little cruiser with old friends Cliff and Bernie from when we were all at university together in 1846 or so, and newer friends Peter Murtagh, a fellow journalist and biker, and his wife Moira.

We’d been cruising with all of them before, on Lough Erne and Lough Derg, but this was our first thrilling jaunt outside Ireland, and so far so good – apart from Moira not speaking to Peter because being a biker who travels light, he’d only booked them hand baggage on the flight from Dublin to Carcassonne.

“When are you going to start speaking to me again, dear?” said Peter as we unpacked our stuff and picked our cabins from the three en-suite ones on board.

“As soon as you pour me a glass of wine,” said Moira.

During our week on the boat, we alternated between cooking on board and eating out, since in France, you are never too far from a little provincial restaurant where the food far exceeds the bill.

“You folks look happy,” said the harbour master at Capestang, wandering up to relieve us of a mere €10 for mooring, electricity and water for the night.

“That's never a French accent,” I said, handing him a note.

“Not a bit. Bob from Glasgow,” he said, offering his hand.

“Which bit?” I said, shaking it.

“The Gorbals. I was 10 before I saw a tree.”

“So do you find this different to the Gorbals at all?” I said.

“Aye, just a wee bit,” he grinned.

“You know, I just got so fed up living in Britain. Everybody was miserable, and the NHS, which used to be brilliant, was useless because it was being run by accountants. So I got on my boat and sailed down through France until I got here, and I thought to myself, this is it."

A converted barge chugged by, its owner narrowing his eyes as he worked out whether he could squeeze under the old stone bridge ahead.

We passed several of these every day, like horizontal town houses often containing entire families including dogs, cats and grandmothers, or occasionally retired couples who, like Bob, had got fed up with lives of polite misery in the rain, sold the semi-detached and now spent their autumn years pottering along the canal in the sun, their idyllic retirement punctuated only by the occasional thud as they rammed a bridge, since the only disadvantage of a boat the size of a small oil tanker is that it takes as long to stop as a small oil tanker.

On those things, you steer or apply the throttle, then wait five minutes to see what happens.

By late afternoon the next day we were in Le Somail, which was so delightful we decided to stay put for the night. And good thing we did, for although it was little more than a hamlet, it had an antiquarian bookshop with 50,000 volumes, a hat museum, two canalside restaurants and a village shop on a barge where you could order your croissants and pain au chocolat for the morning.

What more could you possibly need, I thought as we wandered between shelves filled with everything from Tacitus to Tin-Tin.

At dinner, a squadron of ducks bobbed by our table, seeing off four truculent geese then an otter as they waited patiently for their reward of leftover bread. Which they got, then, having run out of anything to chase, chased each other until bedtime.

In the morning, after tucking into our freshly made croissants from the floating bakery, we wandered down the road to the hat museum, a surreal collection of 6,500 pieces from 84 countries gathered over four decades by the owner, interspersed with the occasional stuffed fox and seagull.

What a shame it is, I thought as we wandered past kepis, pickelhaubes, bonnets and trilbies, that apart from in Ecuador, the wearing of hats has almost vanished from the world, leaving it a less elegant place as a result. I made a note to wear my fedora more when we got home, and we set off for more pottering.

Every so often, kingfishers would erupt from the bank, flickering jewels of cobalt blue or iridescent green.

We stopped for lunch as the clock struck two, tucking into bread and cheese washed down by a bottle of beer which left us feeling so content that we could have curled up and gone to sleep until Christmas Eve, then gone shopping for presents and wine.

It was our wedding anniversary, and the plan was dinner in a lovely little restaurant. It was a plan which was perfect in all but one small but significant detail: the lovely little restaurant was closed when we got there.

“They've obviously decided it's not worth opening on a Tuesday,” said Bill the harbour master, who was from Sussex – half the population of Britain seemed to be employed as harbour masters in France.

Bill looked at his watch. It was just gone seven.

“The village shop may still be open, if you're quick,” he said.

We were, but it wasn't; until the shopkeeper came walking down the street.

“De quoi avez-vous besoin?” she said.

“Dîner,” I said. “C'est notre anniversaire de mariage.”

“In that case, I am open again,” she said, rattling up the shutters and revealing enough ingredients on the shelves to rustle up a perfect cassoulet.

“Bonne anniversaire!” she said as we walked back to the boat, my knapsack bulging with sausages, beans, garlic, herbs and wine.

Dinner, since you ask, was superb, and even more superb the next night, when we had that most French of pleasures, eating out at a little table in a village square, with the simplest of food, beautifully prepared and washed down with a jug of local wine.

And then walking back to our boat with the rest of the gang to sleep the sleep of the truly blessed, whose only decision is where to potter to the next day.

FACT FILE

:: We were on a Continentale, which sleeps up to six people in three cabins, from £1,122 for seven nights.

:: Call 023 9222 2186 or visit www.leboat.co.uk for details or to book.

We flew to Carcassone from Dublin with Ryanair, www.ryanair.com.