Oceania Sirena visits Villefranche

Saturday 26 September 2026. It's early morning and the colours are muted still as we gaze out over the ship's rail at the French resort of Villefranche which sits neatly between Nice and Monaco's Monte Carlo.

It is, I think, our fifth visit to this lovely village on the Frenh Riviera. It has a wide bay but a shallow harbour and so we are anchored safely in the bay whilst the ship's tender boats take us into the harbour, weaving through the moored fishing boats and pleasure craft to drop us conveniently at the western edge of the village.

I know that plenty of passengers look upon the prospect of getting on and off these smaller boats as something of an ordeal, but the crew will tell you when to stand still and when to step on or off and hands are waiting to ensure you make it across safely. Grasp at forearms not at hands to make it as easy as possbily. Yes the boats can move up and down quite a bit relatively to the ship's gangway, which will follow the side of the ship, not hang out over open water. But follow instructions and you will soon find yourself on or off the boat.

We have for the last few visits, made our way along to the opposite end of the attractive seafront to the very last cafe before you reach the railway station. The cafe was there but shut. And from the state of the interior, it didn't look like it was about to open soon as boxes and chairs were stacked on tables and the place looked somewhat deserted.

But almost the entire seafront is lined with cafes and tables and we had no trouble at all in finding somewhere to sit, which action soon brought forth a waiter from the cafe across the road.

And then to our surprise, there came the sound of laughter and an accordion and a small group of folk dancers appeared along the seafront road.

Stopping not far in front of our table, they did a short sequence of dance moves without a single hobby horse, wave of hanky or banging of sticks and then turned off up a narrow street where a series of steps led up into the town proper.

We made our way back towards the maritime building but stopped for almost an hour on a bench on a raised platform of land that on a previous visit had housed a collection of market stalls and where my mother had wandered off heading in the opposite direction to that which we had told her. Luckily I spotted her, just about to disappear into the town and had to go running after her... I did 75% of the pencil sketch whilst we were sitting there then finished it later in Baristas.

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Bandol and Sanary-Sur-Mer

Tuesday, 17 May 2011. The Thomson Destiny docks in the French naval port of Toulon and we have booked an excursion out to two different resorts, Bandol and Sanary-Sur-Mer.

It took us a while to get to Bandol. First there was the problem of the two passengers who were somewhat wider than the door of the coach. The driver had to get off and push the two ladies on from behind... Then he had to push them up the steps... I've never seen a man in such an intimate position with a woman look so aghast... Once back in the driver's seat, the courier had to prod him before he could move himself to set off...

Then we immediately joined a traffic queue. A cyclist had been involved in an accident. 15 minutes later we had crawled past the accident enough to join another queue. This time it was a bus with a very flat tyre!

Eventually we reached Bandol about halfway from Toulon to St Tropez. It was a nice looking place, but we didn't see too much of it as all the women on the bus made a beeline for the market along the marina. It did have some nice stuff on some of the stalls. Mainly because it was French. I suppose the locals were mooching around saying "It's all the same as always isn't it?". Seeing the rolls of bin liners on Preston Market would have excited them no end. And their market did the same for us. Miss Franny called upon my meagre knowledge of French to buy a shawl styled top for a wedding later in the year.

We thought the crockery might have weighed a bit much, quite apart from the risk of opening cases in England to find it was now a 532 piece set... The bus returned - he had had to drive somewhere else as the road didn't have the space for him to wait. Or perhaps he just needed to settle his nerves before helping the two women back on the bus again. Anyway, it was no easier a time for him. They were late. Not just late but a quarter of an hour late.

A gendarme had created a space the coach could wait in and the two ladies eventually returned after the courier had almost torn his hair out, making lots of frantic calls back to the ship and the bus company. They had "had to go to the toilet"... So had most of the rest of us I presumed, but we had got back on time. Anyway the driver went through the same palaver as before, which took another good quarter of an hour and sat muttering feverishly about taking up his cousin's offer of fishing for sharks from a rowing boat in the mid Atlantic... He was not a happy homme...

Sanary-Sur-Mer turned out to be one of the most delightful places I've ever had the luck to find myself. I could easily have spent the full day there rather than the mere 45 minutes that we had.

Even that was long enough to walk the length of the Promenade and back, drinking in the sheer delight of the scenery. The buildings, the boats, moored against the sea wall and floating piers of the marina, the pavement cafes with the bright table umbrellas.

We bought an ice cream and sat on a bench, drinking it all in until the wind got up and one of the table umbrellas detached itself from its weighted foot and knocked over three tables, on a wild flight from its original spot towards us! Luckily it caught on another table and stuck, the pole bent and useless. The cafe owner rushed out in haste somewhere around ten minutes after...

We walked back to the coach the long way to stay near the seafront as long as possible. Our way took us through a small park with a formal garden with an oblong pond into which twenty fountains sprayed an arch of water.

Back at the coach the courier was consoling a weeping driver saying "It's the last time Jacques, the last time," in French over and over.

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Port Grimaud

Thursday 10 July 2008. Following our look around St Tropez, the coach took us to Port Grimaud.

This is a fairly modern town, having been created in 1966 by François Spoerry, who wanted to recreate something of Venice.

He created a town that has waterways instead of roads, where every house has a mooring point for the owner's yacht. Consequently the residents are fairly well off. Joan Collins is an example.

We only had an hour here, so we didn't call round to see Joanie. What you actually find here isn't all that much like Venice but is quite pleasing never-the-less.

Cars and vans are kept out unless making deliveries. There are huge coach and car parks just outside the main entrance and the lack of traffic on roads and the numerous waterways means that you can wander at will over numerous hump-backed bridges over the canals, looking at the brightly painted houses with their boats and yachts.

Port Grimaud is a bit like every marina. The boats (and in this case the houses) are owned mainly by people who don't live here.

They just come every now and then and so the boats stay tied up and unmoving, the property of people with too much money to value their ownership.

We had a walk and I bought a few postcards - it looked the sort of place I could have sat and sketched but with only an hour overall, we settled for a can of coke and a stroll instead.

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