"No one is born in the Camargue, and no one dies in the Camargue."
-- Rhone Delta saying
The flooded paddies, I soon discovered, gingerly following the mud embankments that divided each field, were home not only to edible frogs and exotic snakes with yellow and emerald patterns on their backs, but to a thirsty swarm of mosquitoes. The windows of the modest, squat houses in the nearest village, I noted, were sensibly covered in wire mesh. What with the mosquitoes, the tangle of creepers burying a fragment of ancient wall and the humid, salt-impregnated air, this landscape and its insect and reptilian life could well have been those of an agricultural coastal hamlet on the South China Sea, were it not for the abandoned cemetery that came into view. Among the mottled slabs and time-worn crosses lay the remains of a Crusader effigy, its stone depiction of chain-mail and sword still visible under the grass.
The Camargue, France's vast flatland of marsh, rice fields, crumbling Crusader ports, Christian pilgrimage sites, migrant gypsies and vestiges of medieval superstition, seems somehow out of place, less easily packaged than the tidy lavender fields of the Vaucluse or the carefully plotted Cezanne and Van Gogh walking courses of nearby Aix-en-Provence or Arles.