He went and took my bags indoors and meanwhile Chantal loaded wicker baskets into the front of one of the boats.

“You can take Rose in your boat,” Chantal told Pierre when he returned.

Pierre stared at me. “How do I get her into the boat?”

Chantal rolled her eyes. “Lift her, of course!”

And he did. This totally strange lad I’d never met before stood in front of my wheelchair and lifted me up and plonked me down on the prow bench of the punting boat as if I were a sack of flour being taken to market.

“Hey!” I squeaked.

It was such a different motion – bobbing up and down inside a tiny boat after a week inside a cramped horse carriage. I looked over the edge into the water and saw that it was shallow and murky beneath us.

“When the tide is out, the boat may sometimes touch the bottom with two of us in it,” Pierre said, clearly not realising that my objection was to being thrown into a boat rather than whether the water was deep enough. “This is high tide now, though, so we will float, I’m sure.”

And with me in the prow, and Chantal accompanying us in the boat alongside – which was stacked high at one end with wicker baskets – Pierre used a stick to punt us off from the shore. Then he stood up and used it to strike the bottom of the swamp and push us on. Chantal did the same thing in her vessel.

“Why don’t you just row?” I asked.

“The water isn’t deep enough to scoop in the oars,” Pierre said poking the punting pole down to show me just how shallow it was. “Punting is easier, especially as we get further into the rice paddies.”

On the carriage ride from Paris we had passed many wheat fields, and these rice paddies looked a little like them, except that instead of being planted in the ground, these crops were in water, with tiny canals that we could punt along between the rows. We moved silently through the rice fields, sometimes scaring a duck here and there off its nest so that it would quack accusations at us as we glided gently past. Beyond the paddies, we entered the estuaries where the groomed landscape gave way to the wilderness of the salt marshes. Here, the only things that grew in this bitter, salty soil were stalky outcrops of sea lavender and grey-green purslane. Wading through the expanses of these slowly moving waterways was a flock of pink flamingos. They had such long legs that the water only came up to their knee joints. Their plumage was unlike that of any bird I had ever seen, with feathers the colour of a rose-tinted sunset.