We’ve fallen in love with Moissac – the small town in the Tarn-et-Garonne department of the Occitane region of southern France that has become our new home for the European summer. We’ve just left our Dutch barge Karanja in Moissac port for the winter and migrated like geese to the Southern Hemisphere.

In case you were wondering, the pink umbrella installation in Moissac’s Rue des Arts appeared a few days ago in honour of Pink Ribbon October.

This isn’t our first time here. Exactly three years ago, Roy and I came to Moissac to do the boat-handling course and get the ICC and CEVNI qualifications that you need to navigate the inland waterways of Europe on your own boat.

(Hire-boaters, on the other hand, require no such thing. As I’ve mentioned before, the six-year-old child of parents who’ve received 15 minutes’ “training” from a hire-boat company is considered legally qualified to pilot his extended family of twelve on the Canal du Midi.)

As we pack for our flight back to South Africa via Paris, it’s hard to believe we’ve been in Moissac for a whole month. What with visits from daughter Wendy (from Saint-Malo in Brittany) and friend Jule Fost (from Souiech in the Midi-Pyrénées), plus a side trip to family in the Dordogne, the time has flashed past.

Reasons to Celebrate

There are lots of reason to celebrate Moissac. Apart from its location on the wide and lovely river Tarn that winds lazily through fertile farmlands and abundant fruit orchards, its weekend markets are destinations in their own right.

Then there’s magnificent Saint Peter’s Abbey, especially its cloisters and its tympanum (both UNESCO Heritage Sites). The latter, by the way, is the beautiful carving above the main doorway, below, said to depict St John’s dream of the Apocalypse.

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Above: Completed in the year 1100 and now a UNESCO Heritage Site, the Abbey cloisters boast 76 Corinthian capitals that are regarded as some of the best surviving examples of Roman art; simply stunning!

Fêtons Moissac – Let’s Celebrate Moissac!

Held over a weekend in the middle of September, Fêtons Moissac is an annual highlight. Our great friend Julia Fost drove up from her home in Soueich, two hours south from here, in her sexy new baby – a soft-top Mercedes CLK. She’d just been to Spain, so she came laden with Spanish tapas stuff that worked perfectly for l’apéro.

Every hotel room in town was booked up well in advance for the festival, which celebrates the harvest of the Chasselas table grape (it’s not used for making wine) that Moissac is famous for. It’s also a celebration of patrimoine, or heritage; a day when heritage sites like the Abbey’s famous cloisters (in the slideshow above; usually €6.50 to get in) are open to the public free of charge.

Off the cloisters, one of the huge rooms in the Abbatiale complex was given over to a display of Chasselas grapes from different growers in the area.

After stopping at one of the festival stalls to taste local walnut products such as candies, cakes and tarts, and at another to buy a delicious rustic pâté flavoured with ceps, we took a look at the Hôtel des Arts, behind the Abbey. Steep, sometimes slippery steps up the medieval tower took us to the roof terrace and its super view of the town of Moissac.

I’d booked a table at Fromage Rit (get it?), just down from the Abbey, for Saturday night dinner. Generally voted the most inventive eatery in town, its menu changes every week – this week, it centred around the Chasselas grape. We had a choice of two starters (black Thai rice, or salmon and spaghetti squash) and two mains (a complicated veal dish, or fish en papillote), plus salad with an awesome cheese (creamy Camembert sandwiching a layer of Gorgonzola, nuts and grapes), and a finale of freshly made black sesame ice cream.

Sunday Market

After coffee at Bar Le Compostelle III, always popular on market days, we took a quick turn around the stalls – stopping only to pick up an obligatory baguette and for Jule to buy me a gorgeous red potimarron pumpkin – before claiming some counter-space at the covered market’s seafood stall.

It sells freshly shucked oysters, plus all manner of beautifully prepared, ready-to-eat seafood such as whelks, prawns, whitebait, the best-ever chilled moules marinières, marinated octopus chunks, plus a dish of potatoes mashed with salted cod that made Roy’s day – washed down with a bottle (or two) of chilled white. Inevitably, we made friends with several exceptionally jolly local men who must have been there most of the morning.

Above: The red potimarron pumpkin has gustatory overtones of chestnuts

Below: Roasted in the oven with plenty of garlic, olive oil and rosemary, it’s almost a meal in itself

Cleaning House

Roy having blasted the Flexiteak decking with the Kärcher, there was no getting away from the next task: cleaning the engine room.

Like a benighted Victorian chimney sweep, I’m squeezed into inaccessible corners with a bottle of Savon Noir, a bucket of water, a sponge and a roll of wipes to remove the yucky, sticky black stern-thruster carbon that casts its pall over the previously white engine room paint that Roy was so proud of.

Worse was to come. We cowered in bed as long as decently possible the next morning, but then there was no avoiding it: today was the day for the applying black paint to the “war wounds” on Karanja’s rubbing strip. This entailed craning the dinghy into the water, Roy getting into it, and me holding on to the dinghy ropes while he sanded the offending surfaces and then applied the paint with a little roller. With a white dinghy and its white ropes, and white paint on either side of the black rubbing strip, you can imagine the potential for disaster.

(There was a fallout from all this labour. That night, what had appeared to be an ingrowing thumbnail became increasingly painful and mightily infected, swelling my thumb up to twice its normal size and turning it a zombie-like palette of colours; I shall spare you the revolting photographs. Fortunately, the Urgences (Emergency) section of the local hospital is just 800m from port.)

L’Apéro on the Tarn

To recover from our labours, we joined our new French friend Anne Godefroy from Hodi, plus Tony and Julia from Melbourne-registered Dilli gaf  (she’s English-Australian and he’s Irish-Australian) for an apéro or three on board Rovi I, owned by Melburnians Cherie and Rob and moored on the Tarn. It was wonderful how a cold day blossomed into a beautifully warm sunset.

Walk Don’t Run

With my painfully infected thumb – not to mention the hangover that follows a highly injudicious mixture of alcohol and antibiotics – running was out of the question during our last week in Moissac. But Anne’s a walker, and the area’s great for it.

Goodbye for now to all our new friends in Moissac, and we hope to see you next summer!