Provence, In Bloom

The smell reaches you before the color does. Then the plateau of Valensole opens out, 800 square kilometers of it, almost all almond trees in the nineteenth century. Most of the purple now is lavandin, a cross between true lavender and spike lavender that arrived in the 1920s and gives far more oil.

On a family farm you learn why nobody cuts at dawn: the plant makes its oil to protect itself from the heat, so the harvest waits for the hot part of the day. True lavender needs about five times the flowers for the same oil. In a hot year the cutting has started when you arrive, and the still runs from morning to night.

Then, around nine, back into the rows with the sun going down sideways across them. Everybody takes the same photograph. Everybody is right to.

Half past eight, the first boats of the day, and the water where the Verdon meets the lake is a color that looks fake in every photograph and is not. You paddle into the mouth of the gorge, about two kilometers in, until the limestone rises on both sides and the loudest sound is a paddle hitting another paddle. Nobody lands and nobody swims in there. The cliffs make a good argument for both rules.

The lake behind you, 2,200 hectares of it, did not exist before 1973. The Verdon was dammed and the water came up over Les Salles-sur-Verdon, taken down house by house first. Its church was blown up in March 1974. The old bells hang in the new village on the slope above.

Afternoon on a beach on the same lake. Tomorrow you see this river from the very top.

The Route des Crêtes took from 1949 to 1972 to finish, which tells you something about the ground it is built on. It follows the rim of the Verdon's canyon, up to seven hundred meters deep, past about fifteen viewpoints, and its middle stretch is one-way because it is that narrow. Three of France's four vulture species nest in these walls. The green thread at the bottom is the river you paddled yesterday.

Then the slow part, on purpose. Moustiers-Sainte-Marie has 683 people, seven faience workshops and a gold star on a chain 135 meters long, strung between the cliffs above the village. Nobody agrees who hung the first one. The current star fell in 1995, and the village had it regilded and hung it back up.

The evening is yours. Pétanque was invented down the coast for a man whose rheumatism had stopped him taking a run-up, so all it asks is that you stand still.

One last pass across the plateau on the way down. Depending on the year, some of the rows you stood in on day 2 are already cut to tidy gray-green stubble, and the air near the farms smells like the still. Marseille by lunchtime.

The afternoon goes to the Calanques, a national park since 2012 with France's second city on one side of it: white limestone inlets dropping into water an unreasonable shade of blue. The boat stops in a cove, and you go off the side. After a lake and a river, the salt is a small shock and a good one.

Farewell dinner on the Vieux-Port, the harbor Pytheas sailed out of on day 1. He was in no hurry to come home either.

Last morning, back under the mirror on the quay where it started. Six days ago the group in that reflection was a list of names. Now there is a group chat renamed after a star on a chain, a camera roll that is mostly purple, and a lot of people to hug.

Anyone with a late flight has the old town and a coffee on the port. Everybody has a bag that smells of lavender, and it will for weeks.