Ignore the smell, soak up the ambience of the Canal du Midi

We're on the Canal du Midi, a thin sliver of waterway that divides France in two across its southern heartland

I've figured it out. The French way. That je ne sais quoi thing.

It's not the romance of the French life and it is more than just the sensory image of good wine and smelly cheese.

Nor is it the history, the food (for it seems hard for the French to mangle cuisine in the English manner) and it's not the snooty waitresses for they are outnumbered by the nice ones, It's olfactory. That is the difference.

We're on the Canal du Midi, a thin sliver of waterway that divides France in two across its southern heartland.

Built in the 1600s for commercial purposes, its rebranding as a tourist trap to siphon off baby-boomers’ retirement savings, sees hordes of budding ancient mariners trying their hands at extreme canal boating.

Vineyards, treelined canal, small chateau, blessed villages and waterside cafes make for a very pleasant relaxing and stress-free journey, maximum speed 4 knots. My yacht is faster.

And after a hard day's motoring and lock lifting, you park your floating camper van where you wish and go about your socialising and all the other things canal boaters do.

Freedom camping on water.

But the French have a higher tolerance of olfactory assault than southern hemispherians. The camembert that permeated our hire car superbly exemplified this, that odour of ten-day old split milk had me perplexed until a small sample of a Normandy fromagers handiwork emerged from a foil-sealed, plastic-wrapped chilly bin behind the back seat. Kiwi camembert just doesn't compare.

Quite how the locals can ignore the l'odour du egouts that permeates many areas of the canal I know not, and one could well believe you were on the lesser known Le Canal Craponne further east in Provence.

Mind you, malodour like this is not uncommon in many of the cities I have visited over the past few weeks but when it comes to olfaction, the French excel.

The canal authorities maintain the Midi is not polluted and the sludgy, brown-green colour of its water is resultant not from pollution, but from the silt in the bottom of this slow-moving canal.

Proof of this is that the kids around Villesquelande happily swim in the canal and are still living, plus there is abundant life in the waters...ducks, otters, frogs and some kind of fish the locals like to catch and probably sell to the canal-side restaurants.

Might have been that Mediterranean cod we had last night.

The trouble is the hundreds of rental canal boats plying the waters between Toulouse and the Med all dump their sewerage into the canal and the authorities tolerate this.

We failed to find a pump-out facility and learnt from a Pommie canal inhabitant they are few and far between.

Apparently, its best to ablute not when anchored but on the go, so to speak. This is human waste and there are too many humans.

But when in France, do as the French do and just close your nose, lie back, sip the wine, savour the cheese, suffer the coffee and absorb the ambience of the superb testament to French thinking and Bourbon-era engineering that is the Canal du Midi.