A slow boat through the Camargue

To me, holidays on canal barges do not immediately conjure up a mental picture of conspicuous luxury. Or, indeed, of any luxury at all. Before stepping aboard Pivoine (Peony), one of Belmond’s seven private-hire boats in France, my only previous experience of barging, as its fans call it, was on the Grand Union Canal in southern England, in 1978. It became legendary: our worst-ever family holiday.

That boat was dirty, cramped and the toilet smelled. The vibe was akin to camping, and we were not a camping family. It rained nonstop. Then our dozy dog fell into the canal, my father lacerated his leg rescuing her and there was a massive row that ended with my mother stalking off down the towpath, cursing the lot of us. We went home early.

So my expectations were, candidly, mixed when I walked gingerly up the gangplank to a boat moored near the village of Gallician, in southern France. How was a barge, however high-end, bespoke, curated etc (I could chuck in all the luxury travel jargon here), going to be worth an eye-watering €9,400 per head, per week? Would taps still splutter and cabins be drenched in the sweet aroma of diesel fuel?

As I boarded the barge, my first impression was that Pivoine isn’t showy. All of Belmond’s luxury barges are conversions of old hulls, and this one was once a nondescript 38-metre Belgian commercial vessel built in 1959, and repurposed in 2018. (I think one can call that sustainability.)

The boat’s communal interior is hotel-lobby bland, with lots of seating, huge windows, and a dining table. It’s very comfortable — but would be cramped for eight people who aren’t intimate with each other. I understood immediately why the company only books private hires, usually intergenerational families or groups of friends, on to its boats. (Sometimes a big family will book two vessels, sailing and mooring alongside each other.) The company describes Pivoine and its other boats as “floating villas”, and that’s exactly how it feels to live aboard.

The real magic, and the space, is in the clever carve-out for the guest cabins: four big rooms with boutique-hotel bathrooms, complete with Diptyque products and five-star fluffy towels. (And that signifier of true luxury: a shower gel bottle that isn’t bolted on to the wall.) Three rooms are tucked away downstairs with portholes at the waterline, and one is upstairs. You feel totally cocooned here: the sight and sound of the water lulls you, and I heard nothing from anyone else’s room throughout my stay.

We were taking a three-night trip to sample Pivoine’s new route for 2024 and beyond. Having previously sailed in Burgundy, Champagne and Provence, the boat will now operate in southern Provence and the Camargue, using canals and the Rhône. We would travel from rural Gallician to Avignon, ending our journey moored just moments from the tourist hotspots of the medieval city. (The usual, full-week trip, takes guests between Sète, near Montpellier, and Avignon.)

There was a bracingly early start for the first day. We left the boat moored in the lush countryside and headed to a nearby nature reserve, the Réserve de Mahistre et Musette, to go bird watching. It’s closed to the public — one has to go with a guide. In the hide, all we could hear were the birds — including cuckoos, a common sound in my childhood, but now, sadly, a rarity in England. We didn’t see anything startling — just the flamingos and ducks that populate the salt flats — but the unique experience of being with an expert local ornithologist, in a truly silent place with no other humans for miles around, was an affecting moment of stillness in an otherwise packed trip.

We headed back to the boat, and Pivoine set off at a surprisingly brisk pace on Le Petit Rhône, past some giant industrial plants, towards Vallabrègues — our mooring for night two. It was a suitably jarring preamble to our next trip, deep into the very different region of the Camargue. This is a scarcely populated place — we saw more flamingoes than people — and salt marshes dominate the landscape. We headed to the walled town of Aigues-Mortes (“dead waters”), which has been at the centre of French salt production for millennia. 

We were there for a “behind the scenes” salt works tour. The factory and its enormous salt-lake hinterland turned out to be a big tourist attraction (who doesn’t want to climb an actual mountain of salt? It was awesome). The Belmond “extra” was that we got to travel in a guide’s battered Land Rover, going way beyond the tourist paths into a kind of lunar landscape. When I tried to put the seatbelt on, I was barked at in rapid French. Eventually, I understood that it wasn’t that the seatbelt didn’t work: I was being told not to put it on: “Here, one lives free,” I was told. I didn’t argue and enjoyed the sanctioned thrill of bumping unrestrained along the dirt tracks. That nonconformist spirit seemed to sum up exactly what the wild Camargue is all about.

The afternoon turned into a memorable and unpredictable journey, ending up at the pools where the famed Fleur de sel is harvested, the delicate crystals being scraped from the surface of the water. We were each given a big freezer-bag filled with the stuff that felt, frankly, wrong when going through airport customs.

The slow, almost comical flight pattern of a big group of the pink birds is an extraordinary sight

We drove on to what felt like the edge of the world: the salt marshes where we watched thousands of recently arrived migratory flamingos, here for the summer. The slow, almost comical flight pattern of a big group of the pink birds is an extraordinary sight. 

Back at the boat, five experienced on-board crew members took care of everything (once you get the bug for working on the barges, they told me, it becomes a summer lifestyle that can last for ever). All the food is cooked fresh from whatever the chef finds in season at local markets. Breakfast and lunch are “help yourself” affairs, although the lunchtime quiches, salads and local cheeses — along with wine — have to be handled with care. The temptation to eat and drink everything is strong, but then the afternoon would be obliterated. I am sure many guests do just this, and I can’t blame them. There is a kind of perfection in watching rural France going by, while sitting on your private deck with a glass of chilled wine, then cooling off in the onboard swimming pool.

Dinner is a work of choreographed skill from the crew, given the limited space. There are three generous courses plus the French cheese interlude, alongside carefully paired wines — either unusual local bottles or expensive big hitters. I don’t eat meat, and there were one-off dishes just for me: tempura prawns with broad beans and radicchio, or langoustine on a bed of delicate pasta and the perfect tomato sauce. Desserts were often beautifully prepared fruit assemblies: sliced melon and mango, with a passion fruit coulis and edible flowers. 

It struck me that canal boat charters seem understated as a venture for Belmond, famous for its Orient Express trains, the Hotel Cipriani in Venice, and other big names in luxury travel. (Since 2019, the company has been part of the LVMH group.)

Jonathan Foschini, a charming French-Canadian, 20-year veteran of the French barging scene and guest experience manager for Les Bateaux Belmond, explained the particular appeal of a low-key barge holiday for the company’s wealthy clientele: “It’s carefree, you have nothing to worry about, and everything is taken care of. The kinds of people we have with us are CEOs and people who have huge responsibilities. The real treat for them is not to have to make any decisions.”

On our final day we toured a lavender farm over the regional border in Provence, where we learnt how climate change is affecting growth and harvest (everything is happening earlier). The group bonded over stirring the ingredients for our own lavender face cream — not something I was looking forward to, but the most surprisingly fun thing I’ve done in months, and we learnt some chemistry along the way.

This kind of all-access luxury may be a long way from the Grand Union Canal in the 1970s, but I was right to think that a French barge holiday has not traditionally been a high-end option. It was the British — and one man in particular — who came up with the idea of converting commercial barges into floating hotels.

The locals thought Richard Parsons, now in his eighties, was mad; the first customers who experienced the adventure were Americans. “One of the passengers wrote a book called Floating Island (1968), and from that ‘barging’ was born,” Foschini told me. He worked for Parsons at the start of the 2000s on mid-range hotel boats, each sleeping more than 20 people. An American boat operator was the first to see the potential for high-end cruising and created the first luxury barges for just a few guests: many of Les Bateaux Belmond’s customers still come from the US.

Barging is emphatically not for thrill seekers. Most guests are older, and often retired, although the new Camargue trips are designed to attract younger families. But we did glimpse one wild and extraordinary thing, on the far-flung L’Espiguette beach, which we reached only after driving along endless winding promontories and getting lost several times.

We had come to meet French “horse whisperer” Jean-François Pignon, who is famous for his trained Camargue horses. Normally, you’d have to go to his ranch or attend a major event to see the horses perform. (Stella McCartney had them at one of her fashion shows in 2023.) Here, against vast cloudy skies, Pignon had set up a makeshift arena on the beach. When the show started, I didn’t love it — to me, it was contrived and out of date to make the horses line up in their contrasting black and white colour lines, or to lie down and play dead.

But when the showmanship stopped and horses ran free again, there was a magical force to it. Barge travel may be sedate, but there are still wild moments to be savoured (albeit at a price) in this otherworldly and silent region, where the marshland meets the sea.

Isabel Berwick is host of the FT’s ‘Working It’ podcast and author of ‘The Future-Proof Career’. She was a guest of Belmond (belmond.com), which offers a week’s all-inclusive charter of Pivoine, sleeping eight, in Provence and Camargue, from €75,075

More boating in the Camargue

For those not on a Belmond budget, there are other options for a waterborne exploration of the Camargue.

Le Boat (leboat.co.uk) rents self-drive, live-aboard boats in eight European countries and Canada, and guests need no prior experience or qualifications. It has two bases in southern France: Port Cassafières, just east of Béziers on the Canal du Midi, or Saint Gilles, west of Arles on the Petit Rhône – it’s possible to do round trips from either or a one-way journey between the two. The boats sleep between four and 12; prices start at £1,219 for boat for four for a week.

French company Locaboat (locaboat.com) has been renting self-drive boats since 1977 and developed the Pénichette, a houseboat for tourists based on the commercial barges of France’s inland waterways. It has bases at Bram (near Carcassone) and Argens on the Canal du Midi, and Lattes, just outside Montpellier. A week on a Pénichette sleeping six, starting and ending at Lattes, costs from about €2,020

Alternatively, for those who would like someone else at the helm (and in the kitchen), the MS Anne-Marie (croisieurope.co.uk), is a 38-metre barge that sleeps 22 and cruises from Arles to Sete. Stops en-route include Aigues-Mortes, Gallician and Palavas-les-Flots. Rates for a week’s trip start from £1,991 per person, including meals and drinks.

Find out about our latest stories first — follow FTWeekend on Instagram and X, and subscribe to our podcast Life and Art wherever you listen