Anjodi, Canal du Midi, France

luxury barge cruise vacations on the Anjodi, cruising the
Canal du Midi, South of France

Up a lazy river, champers to hand. The boat's luxurious, the service impeccable. Cassandra Jardine and family impersonate the super-rich on the Canal du Midi

The narrowboat familiar from British canals does not, for all its charms, offer profound luxury - unless you are a masochist who enjoys banging your head on the ceiling and sleeping on a table. So when my family and I were sent to try a hotel barge on the Canal du Midi, a holiday that would normally leave little change from £13 ,000, I thought someone was pulling a fast one.

Even if there were to be four staff dedicated solely to the comfort and amusement of me and mine, it seemed a lot to pay for discomfort. I rapidly discovered my mistake. With five children aged from three to 12, our holidays are normally anything but a rest; the main attraction being a change of supermarket. This was different. Within minutes of boarding the Anjodi, I could see why hotel barging is so popular among the wealthy retired and why it could catch on among well-heeled families.

"Frankly, it's the perfect holiday," I annnounced to my husband while we were still moored on a glassy lagoon at Marseillan, by the Mediterranean coast. "Mmm," he muttered, already perfecting his impersonation of the kind of big shot who cannot remember when he last fixed his own drink.

The first point to note about these hotel barges is that they bear the same relationship to a narrowboat as a Mini Metro bears to an S-Class Mercedes. For one thing they are wide - 16ft 6in as opposed to 6ft 10in - and long - more than 100ft - so the total volume is nearly three times greater. That provides plenty of room for the essentials - from large stocks of Champagne to storage for the Louis Vuitton trunks favoured by those who tend to take these holidays.

The idea is that a week on a hotel barge should compete, on price and comfort, with a four-star hotel, luxury villa or the rental of a small chateau. From the moment guests are picked up on a Sunday afternoon in the barge's minibus, there is no need to lift a finger, except to request another drink. Wonderful food appears (duck, terrines, local cheeses, plateaux de fruits de mer), rooms are tidied discreetly, and our captain, Gordon had booked the locks so we glided past the self-drive boats and bagged the best moorings.

The walls of the four cabins are thick and the floors carpeted so, had we taken a room rather than the whole boat, we would never have needed to know about our neighbours' personal habits - an aspect of flimsier boats that wrecked a Nile cruise. Despite showers and loos that actually worked, air conditioning also , there was a cosy quality to the Anjodi, which Derek Banks, the owner of European Waterways, transformed 20 years ago from a working Dutch barge into a wood-panelled home on which he and his family have often spent their holidays.

There's an ample cabin for eating, listening to CDs and browsing through the boat's library but, except when it was too hot, we spent every waking moment on deck, watching the world go by. It provided a perfectly safe, but never dull, environment for the children. The only person to fall in was my husband and that was self-sacrifice in pursuit of a child's shoe. For a whole week we scarcely saw anything of the children except the tops of their heads as they splashed in front of us in the on-deck Jacuzzi. Occasionally we put down our books as they brushed past on their way to one of the meals prepared by the cook, Michelle, who quickly realised that interesting salads were less popular than mounds of mash studded with sausages to look like a hedgehog.

By day, guests are generally happy to visit vineyards and Cathar fortresses; we resisted almost all attempts to extract us from the barge. Out went the Noilly Prat vermouth factory and the Corbieres tour, in came sand from the beach and dust from bike rides along the canal banks. European Waterways operates hotel barges on canals from Scotland to Germany but the Canal du Midi, sunny and spectacular, is the top attraction.

Two thousand years ago the Emperor Nero first had the idea of linking the Atlantic to the Mediterranean by a canal connected to the Garonne near Toulouse, but it was not until 1667 that Pierre-Paul Riquet, an engineer from Beziers, made it happen. Riquet died bankrupt in l680, a year before the canal's completion, but it soon proved its worth.

A few commercial vessels lie rotting along its banks but the canal is now wholly given over to pleasure. It suits the purpose for it passes through tiny villages, hugging the side of hills as it makes a winding descent through vineyards. The banks are lined with tall plane trees, which provide twinkly shade and make its snaking line visible far ahead. In August, we were not alone in appreciating its charms, but the waterway is wide enough for easy passing and never felt like a wet version of the M25. The Languedoc is still some way from becoming the new Provence.

The worst aspect of the week was the sense of deep mourning that descended upon us when we were made to walk down the gangplank back to reality on Saturday morning. "The thing is, we need at least three full-time staff to run this family," grumped my husband as he reluctantly resumed his duties as chauffeur, maid and tour guide.

Copyright: Telegraph Group Ltd

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