France made a wise decision in acquiring Corsica, a place that posesses beauty to compete with anything I’ve ever seen. It has jagged peaks to match the rockies, carved red stone to match the deserts of Utah, and beaches as beautiful as anything I’ve seen in the Carribean. Scatter about that landscape castles, fortresses, and ancient towns clinging to hillsides, and you can picture Corsica. I have only seen its likes captured on the covers of science fiction and fantasy novels.
I arrived by ferry from Nice to the town of Bastia. At the docks in Nice, I was compelled to help a middle eastern couple with so many bags you would have thought their whole family was traveling to Corsica, but it was just an out of shape older couple taking turns ferrying their eight bags about 20 yards at a time. As I was helping them to get their bags onto the ship and up to the main level, I couldn’t help but try to imagine how they had gotten the bags to the terminal. Had they taken a taxi, or had they been ferrying the bags in this fashion all the way from their previous destination?
Once they were squared away on the main deck of the ship, I took off to explore. To my surprise, this ship was every bit a cruise ship including staterooms for sleeping and an outdoor pool and bar. So complete was the experience that by the end of the trip, there was one guy poolside who had drunken himself into a stupor and was now staggering about the pool area as fellow passengers gave him a wide berth should he stumble, or worse yet, vomit up the past five hours worth of libations.
Once in Bastia, I headed for the tourist info desk to find out there was a hotel to be had for $75 a night if I was willing to have a shared bathroom. According to my guide book, this was about the lowest price I might expect to find in this town so I headed for the hotel. Along the way, I recalled having read about a nice little hotel from which you could watch the fishing boats bob up and down in the harbor, so I stopped to look it up in my book. It turns out I was close to that hotel, but when I got there, there were at least four backpackers already waiting in line. Given that it was already 7pm, and I didn’t actually know the price of this place, I decided to make a beeline for the other place before they sold out of the cheap rooms. I only planned to spend the night in Bastia before catching the morning train so I didn’t fancy paying more than $75 for just a couple hours of my head on the pillow. It turned out to be the right decision as I noticed the proprieter pull the last key from the wall as I checked in.
Having accommodations secured, I headed down to the old part of town for dinner. In Nice, I had noticed that a French coastal favorite seems to be mussels with french fries, an odd combination in my opinion, but I am here to experience French culture, so I ordered a bucket of mussels and chased them down with fries while sitting along the water front and watching the fishing boats while I’m sure some of those backpackers mentioned earlier were still canvassing the town for a place to sleep.
In the morning, I packed up what little I had taken out of my backpack and walked across town looking for the train station. I had a map, but I have found they tend to leave out a good number of side streets on the tourist maps so I had to make my best guesses and eventually crested a hill to see the train station below, exactly where it was illustrated on my map. I was a bit early so I went out to find a cafe for some breakfast to get me through what was expected to be a three hour journey through the mountains. In fact, it turned out to be a journey across the rugged spine of mountains that divides Corsica’s east and west sides. The train was a rickety two cars that wobbled back and forth as we climbed. The engine was located fully within the second car so if you were unfortunate enough to have sat there, you would have left the train with a dull sense of hearing and dripping with sweat. I had the forsight to choose the front car, but I picked the wrong side for all the great views and had to resign myself to looking over people’s heads as the gorgeous scenery passed by. There were stops in a dozen little towns as we ambled along, and I could see that many (mostly Germans) used the train to take them from one trailhead to another within the mountains. What an ideal way to spend the day before heading back to the coast.
When we arrived in the western coastal town of Ajaccio (pronounced Ajaxio), I again headed to the tourist office for help to find a cheap hotel. They were able to point me to one for $75, but when I got there, it was closed. There was no indication as to when they would reopen or if they would reopen at all so I headed instead to the car rental office to check into renting a car to the more remote portion of the island. It was located in the lobby of a hotel so after they quoted me the rental price for the car, I inquired about their hotel rates. Their rooms were about a $100 so I headed out to check into another place I had seen advertised while walking around. The place I strolled into with rates advertised at $70 had the feel of a place I might stay when traveling in the middle east, and the desk clerk told me they only had $90 rooms available, so I headed back to the place with the rental cars. The clerk at the original place told me that since I was renting the car, he would give me a reduced rate on the hotel room. Why hadn’t he just mentioned that originally? The French seem to have no concept of capitalism or customer service, but the end result was a nice room and the cheapest rental car in town, mind you at $100 a day.
All the hotels offer breakfast, but the more expensive the hotel, the more expensive the breakfast. At the hostels, breakfast was free. In the hotels, I’ve seen breakfast up to $15, and the irony is that the breakfast is always the same: coffee, watered down orange juice, an assortment of rolls, and a couple cereals. So I always opt for the more traditional experience of ordering a tea and croissant at some sidewalk cafe for about half the hotel price. Where I do run into trouble though is that I prefer tea to coffee, and as it turns out, tea is the most expensive drink you can order from the menu. And mind you, we’re talking Lipton black tea. It’s as if the French charge by volume of liquid, espresso being a single shot and tea being a whole cup.
All these french towns with their narrow streets and laundry hanging out the windows were starting to look the same to me, and I was just anxious to get out and explore the countryside so I set my alarm and hit the rental desk as soon as it opened. The owner gave me a map of the island that looked like a cartoon sketch, and I ventured to ask him whether I could accurately navigate the island using this map, causing the girl standing next to me at the counter to burst out with a laugh. Excited to encounter the first person on this island to speak English, I asked her if she wanted to split a car with me and explore the coast. To her and my surprise, she said yes so we packed up the car with our bags and 30 minutes later were navigating along the lines of our cartoon map.
The first town we stopped in was Piana, which had been recommended to me by a fellow hosteler. It was a bucolic hill town set in a landscape of jagged red sandstone. My Australian co-pilot had a book which described all of the Corsican culinary delicacies and suggested we get started on trying them so I ordered a platter of four different pates, and she ordered some blend of seafood stuffed into a crab shell. After lunch, we set about photographing the town from every angle. As it turns out, she too is a reformed architect, so at least we understood eachothers penchant for getting the photgraph framed just right.
After Piana, we continued along a highway that weaved through the jagged sandstone, an area called Las Calanches. Between those rocks and the beautiful highwayside beaches with turquoise blue waters, we must have stopped a dozen times before reaching Calvi. The rental car was beginning to pay for itself.
What I found when arriving in Corsica is that pretty much everything closes on October 1st, most notably any public or private bus services that might normally take you around the island, which is why I was foced to hire a car at an exhorbitant rate to see the areas of the islands that I could not have seen otherwise.
Having so quickly made it half the way to Calvi, however, I was beginning to think I may have made a mistake in renting the car for two days when it appeared I could complete the loop in one. My fears subsided though as we climbed the windy mountain roads that would complete our journey to the north, and we arrived in Calvi as dusk was setting in.
Calvi turned out to be different than the other Corsican towns I had seen and actually reminded me of the coastal towns with which I am so familiar, with its crashing surf, squaking seagulls, and the smell of salty air throughout town. Continuing on our pilgrimidge to eat local foods, I had wild boar stew, and my Aussie traveler had all forms of pig served to her in a luxurious manner on a wooden platter. We washed it down with some Corsican wine.
When I got back to the room, I hung up my wet clothes from the day. The Mediterranean sea is very salty, and in addition to causing you to float like a cork, it causes your clothing to stiffen when it dries as if they’ve been startched and pressed. When I awoke in the morning, I had to bend as opposed to fold my clothes to get them back into my bag.
I spent the morning exploring the cliffside fortress guarding over the town after the usual tea and croissant. This fortress was amzing with its sheer walls to the cliffs below and an entire town located within. Growing on the cliffs were all sorts of exotic succulents, and red and green leafed vines creeped up the walls, the only living things able to scale the fortress. That and the tourists who had begun to trickle up the winding streets into the narrow streets filled with restaurants and churches that had not quite opened.
We hopped into the car and headed back to Ajaccio, this time through the interior of Corsica where I was again treated to views of towering mountains, and my passenger was treated to my driving as I raced along the single lane road that wove the precipitous cliff edge. It was nice to drive through the interior because we got a chance to stop and take in some of the magnificent views that I’d missed as a result of my poor seating choice on the train a couple days earlier.
We got to Ajaccio at 3:00, I dropped off my passenger, and headed to the bus station where I expected to catch the 4:30 bus to Bonifacio. As it turns out, however, the tourist office had given me an expired schedule, and the 4:30 bus only came within 15 kilometers of my intended destination. I struggled with a multitude of possibilities at that point, but the next time for catching a direct bus from Ajaccio to Bonifacio was on Monday, two days from now! Not wanting to pay for two nights to stay in a town I didn’t particularly like, I opted to take the station agent’s recommendation to buy a ticket for today’s destination and work out the last 15 km when I got there. He told me that the bus driver would drop me at a pay phone where I could call a taxi from the nearby to take me the rest of the way. I also figured I could hitch hike or walk 15km if I had to.
The bus trip followed more beautiful coastline and hill towns that cemented my feeling that this island is worth at least a month long visit or an entire summer to explore all its hidden treasures. At some point along the way, I began to get nervous as I pictured myself, in one of these tiny towns we were passing through, struggling to locate the number of a taxi company and communicate to a driver as to where I was and what I wanted to do. Given my previous attempts to communicate in French, I began to think it was looking more like I was going to be doing the walking option, especially since dusk was starting to set in. I took a chance and tried to ask one of the other passenger if she spoke English. She didn’t, but after I managed to communicate what I was thinking, I believe she told me not to worry and that she would drive me to Bonifacio once we got to the terminus.
All seemed well and good until the bus driver got wind of this, and some big commotion ensued with everyone on the bus seeming to discuss the best way for this American tourist, who came to France with no knowledge of the French language, to get to where he was going. In the end, it was agreed that someone would call for a taxi to meet us at a particular point, and I could be taken the rest of the way. The taxi driver, knowing my vulnerable position on a Saturday evening at dusk, quoted me the equivalent of $75 to take me 15 kilometers, about 9 miles. Highway robbery, to be sure, but it was still cheaper than what it would have cost to stay in Ajaccio for another 2 nights, so I considered myself fortunate when we pulled into Bonifacio, especially as I got out of the cab to see a crescent shaped moon rising over the hilltop town.
I got up the next morning just in time to photograph the orange glow of the rising sun spilling upon the white stone of the citadel whose great walls encircled the town in a protective embrace. Joined along the wharf by a dog, who I guess assumed as long as I was walking could take him for a walk, I headed along the headlands to get a better perspective of this unique town. The perspective didn’t change my amazement as I saw what appeared to be houses just hanging from the edge of sheer white cliffs, and in some cases, the rock beneath the town was even undercut so that parts of the town were naturally cantelievered over the ocean.
I came back to the town and scaled down the cliffs to get the view from below, no less stunning, and finally headed into the town itself through a huge wooden door that I’m sure at one point was used to keep out unwanted intruders. I walked through the maze of streets, and even paid $3 to take a staircase that had been carrved from the fortress to the rocks below. I was shocked at the bottom to see a secret entrance into the cliffs. I have pretty much read about this place in one of my fantasy books, In fact the street that led to the stairs was named after one of the characters in the book, or vice versa. I have found that a lot of the tales in those books are based loosely on a history of Medieval times.
In the afternoon, I went for a swim and snorkel to give my legs a bit of rest from another of their 8 hour stints of walking. Dinner was something I found unique to Europe, a can of tuna with corn tomatoes and broccoli included. A complete meal for under $3. After what I’d been spending on this island, I had to give my wallet a little relief, and I wasn’t hungry enough anyway to justify a $15 salad at one of the restaurants.
The next morning, I altered breakfast a bit to match my sweet tooth: hot chocolate and a chocolate croissant, which somehow is cheaper than tea and a regular croissant in France. It was just what I needed for my morning boat trip to the Lavezzi islands. I’m pretty sure these are the beaches I saw in pictures when I made my decision to come to Corsica. I had brough my mask and snorkel but was so mesmerised by the landscape, I spent the entire time there snapping photos and apologizing in my head to everyone for what was soon to appear on my Facebook page as a hundred pictures of the same white rocks and blue water lapped beach; but to me, the view was different at every turn. The boat trip back to Bonifacio afforded me an opportunity to take pictures of the cliff topped town from the angle I had seen on placemats all over the island.
I returned to the harbor, ate some lunch, and went to check into the Sardinia ferry crossing I would make the next day. It seemed easy enough: just show up an hour before to purchase my walk on ticket, but I was struck with a sudden chill. I know even less Italian than I do French! Bonjiorno Ialia is all I would be able to say as I landed in the morning on the island of Sardinia.