Smelling the drains beneath your feet

St-Maurin (47), Castelsagrat (82), Valence d'Agen, Moissac, Lizac, La Française, Montastruc, Lamothe-Capedeville, Albias, St-Etienne-de-Tulmont, Chouastruc, Bonanech, Monclar-de-Quercy, Le Fiscalou (81)

Behind this fountain in the centre of Valence d'Agen is a bar. It is like all the other bars in France other than that my English friend, George, got locked in the toilet there. I forget just how it happened but the situation for some reason could be rectified only from the outside. George spoke no French and felt too foolish to yell for help in English. He had to wait until someone arrived to use the same cubicle, whereupon he could escape under the gaze of a startled Frenchman.

If you want a good trick - other than quoting meaningless proverbs, that is - try saying "Some people do nothing but moan, don't they?"

The reply will be "Yes, I hate that... they just..." And off you'll be into a litany of moaning from someone who insists that, no, not me, I'm not a moaner.

Just a few - thankfully only a few - need no prompting at all. I'd just had an enjoyable half an hour riding beside the canal that crosses France from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean. It was one of the engineering marvels of the world when it was built, a waterway that crossed an entire country from sea to sea. But it was barely finished when

The canal from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean never did much for commercial traffic but it has become a leafy highway for boats, walkers...

some tomfool invented the railway and rendered the waterway obsolete by building tracks beside it. Now you could rush along at a cinder-smattering 50kmh while the barges alongside washed at the speed of the horse that pulled them.

Over a century the railway prospered and the canal fell on ever harder times. But attitudes change and so does prosperity. One of France's supermarket chains now uses canals when it can to restock its shelves. Water which once lay stagnant and smelling has profited from thicker wallets and longer holidays to offer weekend admirals the chance to steer their plastic hire galleons from one town to the next. They come from all over, the men at the wheel and wearing captain's caps, the women peeling potatoes or allowed to perform minor tasks at each lock while the head sailor bellows orders.

In the last years the path beside the canal has been levelled and surfaced to a wonderful smoothness, turned into a voie verte, a greenway which will run all the way from Bordeaux to the Mediterranean coast at Sète. It makes part of the Chemin de St Jacques, the gorgon-headed trail to Santiago whose many routes from northern Europe converge around here to tackle the shallowest crossings of the Pyrenees. The pilgrims can ride a bicycle or

sit on a horse but mainly they walk, sturdy-calved middle-agers whose rucksacks carry the white shell, like the five fingers of an outspread hand, that identifies them as Jacquots. There are hundreds of thousands a year now. It is a boom industry and once they reach Spain the pilgrims - I call them that though many walk for the challenge and not for spiritual gain - will see long lines of fellow walkers spread between them and the horizon. It is a business.

For a cyclist, the path is a beautiful ride through trees and beside deep green water. It is the best route through the Garonne valley, which has little of the charm of the Lot and Dordogne to the north. It can get bottom and brain-numbing because it is dead flat, of course, and because there is little sense of progress. But after Moissac the path deteriorates and that determined the end of my nautical progress.

It was just after Moissac that I met a British couple on a tandem. They were standing on a bridge, taking pictures. I called to them and stopped, to exchange travellers' tales in the manner obligatory to all voyagers. Despite the heat - this has been France's hottest summer since the heat wave that killed 15,000 people seven years ago - they wore long pants and thick tops. They were probably in their late 60s, he stick-thin with wingnut ears and she grandmotherly, with grey, almost white hair and an expression that suggested she was immediately above one of life's smelliest drains.

They were headed west and I asked if they planned to ride the canal path I had just enjoyed.

"We rode that three years ago and it was awful."

"How so, awful?"

"It was unridable, all muddy ruts and tree roots. It was awful, the worst ride of our life."

I said it wasn't like that now, that it was as smooth as any cyclist could wish. "Just like that but better," I said, pointing at the road beneath our feet.

"Well, it wasn't like that three years ago," the woman persisted, determined that nothing in life ever got better.

"It is now, though. It's perfect."

"It wasn't three years ago," she insisted.

"You can ride all the way from Moissac to just short of Bordeaux now and it's perfect," I said, pulling down the flags in the face of defeat.

"We're not going to Moissac," the man said.

"And we're not going to Bordeaux either," the woman added, happy to have a further something to moan about. "Especially not if the path is like it was three years ago."

I changed the subject and asked where they'd been. "Across the Massif Central," Wingnut said, naming France's third mountain range, which is in fact the Alps but separated by the Rhône valley.

"That was terrible, the Massif," the woman said.

"And where are you headed?"

"Down to Lourdes, to pick up the European Bike Bus," they said. The bus runs a regular route round France and Spain, picking up cyclists in England and taking them back when their ride is over.

"Across the Gers, then," I said. I waved my hand up and down, palm downwards, to suggest the terrain that lay ahead.

The Gers - never high but never flat: a cyclist feels like an ant trapped on bubblewrap.

The Gers, the département just south of the Garonne but not far enough west to smell the Atlantic, never gets high but it is permanently hilly. A cyclist feels like an ant trapped on a sheet of bubble wrap.

"Oh, we know the Gers," the woman said, pronouncing it "Chair." It actually rhymes with "scarce." "We rode that several years ago. It was terrible."

"Are you not enjoying it much, then?" I asked the man, determined to cut Moaning Minnie out of the conversation.

"Not enjoying it?", he answered flabbergasted. "We're having our best trip in ages."

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