La Marseillaise

We call this progress.

If you enlarge the photo, you'll see that Enki is wearing her new name on the bow (Christoph's tarot emblem stays for the moment - I want to know more). Her name, port and official number are on the stern too, but I'm withholding that photo till we've re-done the letters, which are a tad crooked. The wind doesn't help when you're standing on a ladder with water, transfers and a blank canvas.

We've now received a copy of her Australian registration papers, scanned and emailed from Canberra, and that was enough to call Christoph back down to Port Napoleon.  We pick him up from the Arles station in a couple of hours. Tomorrow morning we all go to see the French customs agent who will, we understand, sign off Christoph and shepherd us through the French customs process. The less said the better at this stage. The champagne is still in the fridge. Perhaps we'll get to open it tomorrow night. Perhaps.

Alex is like a pig in shit. He has more mobility, and needs no encouragement to root around in lockers, lazarettes and of course, the engine room. Right now he's beaming. He's found the source of a leak identified by the marine surveyor in the generator. A hose clamp had rotted through; a fitting on the coolant reservoir was loose - "obviously sucking air and pissing out coolant". Imagine that!

Yesterday we ventured into a different kind of cavern, the Carrefour shopping centre at Port du Bouc, one of a string of huge seaports between here and Marseilles. We came out with a small espresso machine and pots, Tefal pots to be precise, the finest sort we could buy with detachable handles. Call that a strike for Tefal, which is a big sponsor of the French Film Festival in Sydney. We absorbed the Tefal message through our pores as we waited for the main feature, more times than we can bear to remember.

The new pots and frying pans stack brilliantly. I have a new pressure cooker too, the sort which (as the ad says) you can open and close with one hand. How did I ever live without it? Most of our galley equipment, plus ropes and anchors and lifejackets etc etc, will come in a box from Australia - that's the plan, anyway. But it was fun to get into the aisles and pick out a few appliances. Because Enki has a generator and, when Alex has finished with her, will have a large inverter, we'll be able to plug in a toaster or an espresso machine - or even an iron, for that matter - when the fancy takes us. This level of comfort comes with a bigger boat, but then again, we'll be slaves to the production of power even more than we ever were on Kukka.

On Friday, we had a play day in Marseilles. My treat. We arrived at about 11.30 am. The sky was cloudless, the heat and glare intense and the traffic grinding around the Vieux Port particularly clogged. Perhaps it always is, but I learned from the Saturday paper that at exactly that hour, a notorious gangster, known variously as The Cobra, Joel the Turk, and, more mysteriously M. Pierre, was shot three times, twice in the head and once in the neck as he sat down at his local cafe and opened up his computer. He died on the way to hospital. We must have heard the sirens. Surely.

The Vieux Port, Marseilles

Marseilles is a city with form. I love it. We need to run now - there's a Provencal jousting tournament we want to find in Port St Louis du Rhone before we pick up Christoph from the train station. So please make do with happy snaps. You've heard enough about our eating and shopping and passion for museums by now, I think.

La Tavola, 40 rue Sainte

Rue Paradis - and Eden Park

La Vieille Charite - site of the Museum of Mediterranean Archeology.

We come from a land downunder

Every so often it rains solidly. Today is Wednesday, market day, and solid rain is a complication. It’s a complication for the stallholders, but it’s a particular complication for me because, for the first time since Christophe went back to Zurich about two weeks ago, we have people coming to dinner.  I had thought “fresh tuna, with some young potatoes, green beans, a salad, a few cheeses, then strawberries and raspberries, perhaps melon too….”

The apartment is light on kitchen equipment. We can muster four plates and wine glasses and cutlery. However most importantly for our guests, two young women who are living on a 39 foot boat in the yard, we can offer space.  Ori is one of the professionals I spoke about. She’s been hired to fix up and then race the boat in question, a Swan (nice). The boat is in bad shape after a winter of neglect,  however, and she’s doubtful if the owner will get more than a month of racing out of her this season.  Apparently he’s already talking of buying a bigger Swan, a 60 footer.  That sort of appetite keeps the marine industry down here busy.

Ori helped us with a contact for the all-important marking board which you need to fix to your boat for the purposes of Australian registration. The registration process is what’s keeping us here in France. It’s long-winded, and even more so because Australia is far away and in a different time zone.  We have a helpful registrar in Canberra, and all modern  communications  systems at our disposal – couriers, email and fax -  but still, we are talking weeks, not days to complete the purchase of Enki. The law demands original documents, signed and witnessed. When the boat is registered under her new flag, we front up to the French customs, as the new owners, and – well, that’s where we hope our expectations prove correct, so to speak. When she’s  been re-imported into the EU under our names, we can go home.  No-one said it was going to be easy, did they?

Alex’s crummy back has been keeping us battened down more tightly that we (I) would like, but we drove again to Arles on Sunday night to hear Angus and Julia Stone play before a packed house and then to Avignon on Monday to extend the rental on our car. Angus (On-goose, as his name sounds in French) and Julia didn’t need any support from us or any other Australian cheer squad (those who weren’t in Paris that day to watch the triumph of Kadel Evans in the Tour de France, that is ). The Stone kids are HUGE in France. I don’t get it, really. They’re young and their voices are tender and bruised. Their music is, I suppose, like a cool shower to wash away dry dusty French pop which gets into everything here. But why does one band succeed and another not? Good luck to On-goose et  Julia.

Avignon was bursting with players. I drank up the energy, and the urbanity of the place. Another time, I told myself….Alex took pictures in black and white because that’s where his head was. For me, the festival was all about colour. I have it in my head still (the bra and panties set was red, by the way). 

A place for romance

I've been told several times by people I love that it's time for the photo of the two of us which has introduced this blog since its beginning to go. I'm very fond of that photo, but they're right. So it's gone. So too has Kukka's bio on the side of the blog. We will make the transition slowly from one boat to the other, but this is a start. There will be more romantic photos (beware).

Beats the Entertainment Centre 

Speaking of which, we got to the Bryan Ferry concert in Arles the other night. Before the show we ate in a deeply shaded courtyard restaurant, and struck up a conversation with a young Swiss couple at the next table on the basis of a bottle of red (ours) and a baby (theirs).  They were curious about Bryan Ferry - recognised the name, but couldn't quite place the music. I would have been the same if he hadn't recorded an album of Bob Dylan's music a couple of years ago. We've played it over and over. He has a voice I don't seem to tire of,  and it was for that we went to Arles, not so much a hit of Roxy Music nostalgia. That and the Roman amphitheatre.

Spending money pleasurably

Enki's cockpit, with the all-important hard top

I'd forgotten we had taken photos of Enki back in June when we first saw her. She was still in the water then. But now's perhaps a better time to show her off.  We made full payment for Enki yesterday.  The reality of that hasn’t yet sunk in. The euros have gone from our bank account, the registration papers are on their way to Canberra, but that’s not what I’m talking about.  Enki will feel like our boat only after a certain period of time has passed. 

Aft cabin - there's also a single bed on the port side, on the other side of the chair

Forward cabin

Nav station and saloon bench seat  

A boat, liked a house, changes hands at its own pace, which is quite separate from the legal machinery involved. The spirit of the previous owner stays around in the myriad of decisions he or she has made about what should and shouldn’t be on the boat. On Kukka, we were very aware of Mr Tada (her original owner) during our first season aboard. During our second cruising season, he retreated. We’d made her ours.

Christoph shows me the stove - is it big enough for the bread pot?

Christoph, who built Enki and lived aboard her for five years, is a minimalist. He wears sober colours and he doesn’t chatter.  He’s an architect, a Swiss architect.  Enki is sober too., verging on stern.  What we like very much about her, among many other things, is that she isn’t over-accessorized.  She is strong on essentials, light on bling.  Her extras, for instance, include well- thought-out partitioning inside drawers and around the galley, and an enviable stack of vegetable baskets built into the hanging locker of the passage cabin. She has no television or airconditioning. That we found to be the exception rather than the rule. TV isn’t our thing, more than ever so at sea, and airconditioning ducts take up a lot of space which would otherwise be available for storage.  Christoph also did without a bowthruster. That’s unusual these days on a boat her size.  We part company from him on that point.

There’s a bit more waiting to do. The registration papers have to cross the world and come back again, completed, and then we will accompany Christoph on a visit to French customs. He’ll sign Enki out and we’ll her sign in. While we wait, we’ll begin to absorb our new ownership.

We will also continue to eat well. Some of you will be surprised that up till now I have posted so few pictures of food and/or markets. Well, here they are.

The weekly Port St Louis du Rhone market happens on a Wednesday morning when the main street is blocked off.  The stalls are a mix of what the British call tat (cheap clothing, trinkets, the kind of stuff which in the old days used to be sold by tinkers) and fresh produce. We are just two, so I’m holding back most of the time. One slice of tomme de brebis, or hard sheep’s cheese this week (last week I bought a soft sheep’s cheese and a mid-ripe goat’s cheese). A whole slice from the belly of a tuna. Yellow peaches, apricots, strawberries, small green plums (Claude Reine), massive tomatoes, courgettes shaped like plump pears, eggplant, salted almonds….We still have not finished the sausage from last week, made from half pork, half bull (taureau). It’s strong. We passed on the donkey sausage (true).

Port St Louis is a working town. Its market is not for tourists.  There are no panama hats or olive oil soaps or Opinel knives or bunches of lavender. But there is street theatre in the summer. Yesterday, three men dressed in suits were being led on leashes by a woman.  They were billed to appear again last night at the port. But we stayed home last night, cooked our tuna, and nursed Alex’s back. Tonight we’re going to hear Bryan Ferry at the Roman theatre in Arles. He’s got to be concert fit!

Doing the hard yards

In the evenings here at Port Napoleon, we often take a turn around the yard. At first I was nervous about walking near the cradles. It felt dangerous, like walking under a ladder or standing too close to a big piece of machinery. But I’ve grown to like being around the keels, near the rough under- bellies of boats.  

Alex gets his strength back

The first time were here, when we got our first look at Enki in the second week of June, Port Napoleon was like a cemetery with so many “dead” boats packed tight up against each other, and barely a living soul in sight. Now, with summer in full swing, the place is buzzing with “professionals” (the young men who turn old men’s dreams into reality) and with owners and their families who arrive every day to prepare their boats for the water. Mostly they are French, but there are plenty of people from further north – Germany, England, Norway, Belgium and so on.  We usually have a beer in early evening at the Jospehine, the bar/restaurant down below (we take the laptop with us, as everyone does, because the wireless signal is faster there). We now recognize the professionals and the marina staff,  but other faces change almost daily.  Families open up their boats, clean them, anti-foul them (if they’re not already done) and then they’re gone, in the water, off on their summer holiday.

Professionals at work

Boat arrives from Amsterdam by truck

New mast waiting for installation

Because the evenings are so long and warm, we take it slowly, walking right around the perimeter of the yard and then up and down a few pontoons.  There are some big new masts going in, new sails being hoisted. We passed a rigger last night working on one of those ‘wow’ boats, the sort which smells like a new car.  Then there are the hulks, the old timers, and of course, the super-sleek racehorses which are just panting for a run. There are comparatively few “serious” cruising boats here, of the sort we saw in the Pacific, decked out with wind generators and solar panels. Mostly what we see are European production cruisers set up for Mediterranean sailing.  Who needs a hard top when the sea is smooth and winds fair?

Brand new Jeanneau 54 deck saloon 

Alex’s back has been playing up lately, but Port Napoleon is completely flat with plenty of sights to take his mind off the pain – the perfect backyard, in fact. Throughout the day we can see boats being moved around the yard, and on our walk we notice where they’ve gone from. Big holes are appearing, as if teeth have been removed, in the rows of hard stands. Lots of boats have cars parked next to the keel, under the hull, and ladders going up to the deck. Owners stay on their boats while they are preparing them, sleeping on board and climbing down to use the toilet and shower block, and to eat and drink at the Josephine. Not my cup of tea. From our deck we see a 60-something man who seems to be living permanently on his huge motor cruiser (the boat’s for sale).  The caravan or campervan tucked in between the hardware is a smarter idea, I reckon.

If you don’t rent an apartment, as we are doing, or a “bungalow” (a room in a converted container), there aren’t too many other options.  Port Napoleon is out on a limb. When five French military heliopters flew over this morning (coming back from Libya?) they wouldn’t have woken much of a neighbourhood. Across the Rhone to the west (pictured below at Port St Louis) there's the wilderness of the Camargue, and east there's the wilderness of the gigantic Gulf of Fos and Marseille seaport. 

From our room with a view

What’s surprising is not how much activity there is around the yard, but how many boats are still on their cradles. It’s the second half of July already! The summer is half gone. I hope we’re not still here in August, but I’m curious to know how many boats don’t get in the water at all over summer. My feeling is that it must be a lot. There are large sections of the yard which still feel like a graveyard, where there are no cars, and no ladders. There are a lot of boats for sale, some of them pretty, like this boat below, which is registered in Port Vila, Vanuatu (what is its story?), but many of them have no particular attraction, as far as I can see. Who buys ordinary old boats? Why would you pick this one, say, over that one in a line-up? I should know by now, having spent a month examining boats, but none of the boats we looked at was ordinary, as such. Or that’s my opinion.

Tania, out of Port Vila FOR SALE

We walk past Enki every night, and are anxious to make her our boat. But we are waiting for documentation from Zurich. It’s in the post., Christoph has informed us.  We are crossing our fingers it arrives in good order by mid-week.  The anxiety of a private sale is not something I’d go through again, by choice.  So while it may seem monotonous, and  a bit odd-ball to be walking around the boatyard each evening, it’s also soothing. We are among boats, we can see the boat we intend to buy.  If we could be in the water, it would be even better, but for now we’ll be happy if can just complete the sale, and be aboard Enki,  Start getting to know her.

Missing a beat

I've been missing music, terribly. Alex brought an iPod with him, but I'm not an iPod person. I've tried, but I want music to come towards me in waves, not bore directly into my brain.  In Sydney, where invasive commercial music is like a weed infestation in the city's public and private spaces, I find myself more and more choosing not to listen to background music. I treasure the silence of home.  But at Port Napoleon, where we have no musical options at all bar French television and the high-pitched noise of the wind, I find myself longing for sweet sounds, rich sounds, moody and upbeat sounds.

Quiet as a library in our apartment 

Yesterday was a good day for music. We drove across the Camargue to St Maries de la Mer in search of bulls and horses and we found both - not in action in the ring or on the streets, as I'd hoped, but close enough and very much in the flesh. Here they are.

Poster for the weekend's sport

But as bonus we walked into a square behind the town's austere stone church and found Spanish flamenco musicians and a dancer were performing for the patrons of restaurants and lunch places.  I was entranced. She wasn't a classical Spanish beauty, but her arms moved like fish through water, and Spanish song is unlike any other. It breaks into your heart as easily and quickly in a crowd of midday tourists as under a moon at midnight.

From St Maries, we drove back across the marshy plains towards home, and stopped in at the Chateau d'Avignon. Again we got lucky, arriving at the state-owned former hunting lodge (below) in good time for a concert of traditional Languedoc hillbilly music, brought to us courtesy of Les Suds festival in Arles which I mentioned in the previous post.

The musicians, from a place called Black Mountain about 30 km north of Carcassonne, were  playing the bodega, a bizarre-looking piped instrument with the bag made out of the hide of goat, legs and all. It sounds very like the bagpipes, but more sonorous - a deeper, more mysterious pipe. The leader of the band, Sophie Jacques, held her bag in front of her, like a baby in a sling, while the boys each tucked their goat under one arm.

The music was for mostly made dancing, like Irish jigs. We were sitting outdoors, under large plane trees, behind the chateau which in the late 19th century had been ostentiously renovated by a very wealthy Marseille wine merchant called Noilly Prat. A couple of women kicked up their heels at the back of the crowd, Sophie (credited with rescuing the bodega from obscurity) told legends of the Black Mountain, Alex focused on the lovely eyebrows of the woman behind the camera, drums and brass and concertina added a touch of the Marseille waterfront and we all clapped and tapped our feet.

Inside the Chateau d'Avignon was one of the most wonderous and whimsical art exhibitions I've ever seen - mostly sculpture which riffed on the theme of humans and animals (think hunting lodge). If I could have whisked my sculptor daughter across the world on a magic carpet to enjoy its ingenuity with me I would have, because there's no other way for her to see these fabulous creations but to be here. There's no catalogue (yet), and Alex was nabbed for taking pictures, and forced to delete them under the don't-mess-with-me eye of chateau security. Perhaps you can make out an intricate paper cut-out of a dress stuck to the first floor window above where the concert was taking place in the the chateau's shaded but still glowing northern side. That's just a whisper of what's inside.

Last Sunday, before the mistral blew in and when the late evenings were still and warm and the mosquitoes rife, we took ourselves off to another outdoor concert, this time in our nearest town, Port St Louis du Rhone (sample architecture below). A European youth orchestra, with a Belgian conductor, took on the bugs and the local petrol heads to play a programme of Beethoven's 5th piano concerto (with a perfunctory Florentine soloist who wiped the keyboard and his head periodically for sweat or bugs, or both), a short Mendelssohn overture and a robust Rimski-Korsakov piece, supposedly Spanish in flavour, but definitely an anti-dote to the Germans. We forgot to bring the camera, which is a pity because le tout Port St Louis was out that night, with local pollies kissing and hand-shaking row by row - bypassing us, the obvious strangers.

Then there were the Indians. They played Port St Louis on the eve of 14 July, a huge night in any French town.  I don't know what you'd call their style - breezy brassy jazz mixed with carnival, possibly. It was jolly, and loud, and it went down well with the mussels and frites brigade, the beer, the aperifs and the barbecued fish. How the Jaipur Jazz band came to be invited to this scruffy seaport, marine industry and fishing town is anyone's guess. But the cultural programmers in Provence are a busy and imaginative lot. If we can find this much live music with so little effort in a week in a region which is far from fashionable, then bravo them. All of it was free too.