Whatever Floats Your Boat Friday 1st August

Villatelle - the base camp of Canoe Nature

Jean’s sister Michelle was married to Mr Michel and between the two of them, they spent the summer months running an excellent canoe rental business on the Vidourle River. Tragically, Mr Michelle died last year and Michelle has struggled on alone running the enterprise. At this time of year she is frantically busy and also manages to keep her hair-dressing business going. As she wisely points out, the tourists who rent the canoes are only here for two months of the year, but her regular customers need to be tended to, as it is they who keep the bills paid for the rest of the year.

We decided to drive out this afternoon and see her base camp at Villetele, and what a lovely spot it is. For a start, the drive down there through Beaulieu, St Christol and Serranargues was unexpectedly beautiful. The country changed quite markedly from the area we are in, despite the fact that it is barely a twenty minute drive away. Great vistas of rolling hills and broad sweeps of landscape draw the eye away towards the distant coast. Ancient villages dot the countryside which is now wall-to-wall vineyards, and handsome mas nestle in among the vines, looking as though they have been there since man discovered the joys of turning grapes into wine.

We cautiously manoevered our way through the narrow streets, and since I seem to do most of the driving, I have quickly learned to be prepared to come to a dead stop or tuck my nose into a few extra inches of space on the right hand side in order to allow some determined driver coming towards me to pass without taking his foot off the accelerator. Our local registration is 34 and invariably, anyone driving a car larger than an oversized matchbox will have a registration from “out of town” and the real monsters who have no place on our narrow roads are usually either from Belgium or worse still from Paris. I note that the southerners have little or no patience with their countrymen from the north, and sneer openly at any display of wealth such as a convertible car or a large four wheel drive vehicle.

The river at Villatelle where Michelle has the canoe business is a delightful spot. The river has been held back at this point by a weir, and below the flow of water is a large shallow lake where the children can play and paddle in safety. We were sitting under the shade of a large plane tree when a gentleman wandered over to chat with Michelle. He has been living in the area for some time and his hobby is building radio controlled boats from kits. He informed us that he was about to launch his most recent one and we all went and stood at the waters edge to watch the proceedings. I thought that the moment called for a miniscule bottle of champagne to be broken over her bows, but with none on hand, we watched as the little craft nosed out into the lake and made her way sturdily across the open water before returning to her point of departure. Her owner made various clucking noises and adjusted bits of string and timber before sending her out once more, but by this time, we remembered that our water supplies were running low and we had better make it to the local supermarket and stock up, lest we be forced to drink wine instead.

Despite the rather strange places in which I have lived, it has never occurred to me that one of life’s necessities was pure drinking water. I seemed to survive the water from the little town of Mohales Hoek in Lesotho with only the occasional outbreak of Montezuma’s revenge, and in Florida we ran our tap water through a filter simply because it tasted nicer. But here in the south of France, the calcium level in the water is so high that I fear ones insides would fur up within a month. We have invested in a mini water bottle stand and we buy the big three litre bottles that are upended and ready for easy access, and it amazes me just how much we get through. It certainly is remarkably cheap and I am happy to see that just about all the plastic bottles are recycled, so when in Rome, we do as the Romans do and buy water, although I am quite sure that when in Rome, all the Romans are buying wine.