Corsica : a tour in May 1999
1. Bastia to Porto.
2. Porto to Zonza.
3. Zonza to Corte.
4. Corte to Bastia.
Part 4. Corte to Bastia
Friday 28 May 1999
We are now sitting on a bench in the shade at the parking place in Corte. We have been stuck here for the past four hours because we didn't realise when we parked last night that the car park had to be emptied between 6 am and 1 pm on Fridays as the weekly market is held here. Apart from discovering a mussel seller parked directly blocking our exit, we also found a fine stuck to our windscreen for causing an inconvenience. The mussel seller has stoically refused to let us move his stand temporarily and replace it for him, so we have no alternative but to change our plans for the day and wait. It is cool and interesting to sit here watching the general bustle, but the market is pretty poor by French standards. We have bought a pound of cherries from a dear little man who looks as if he has simply filled some boxes with fruit from his garden and trundled down from one of the mountain villages with some rusty, inaccurate old scales. I'm sure he has given us nearer a kilo than 500 grams. We have also bought some of the popular deep-fried, batter-wrapped cheese, some plain, others rolled in sugar. Both are delicious, very hot, and bad for you. The lady gave us an extra one for free. People are generally very nice; even the mussel seller joked with us, saying we could buy some of his mussels to eat until he was ready to go. However, we are not great amateurs of eating raw mussels in car parks.
The lady at the hotel this morning was charming. When we paid the bill, it was 510 francs but she refused the ten francs and wished us a really nice final couple of days in Corsica. Then, when we realised that we were stuck here for several hours, we went for a coffee. The lady there saw us puzzling over the French fine, and was shocked that they had imposed a fine on visitors. Still, as we are driving a local car, I suppose the authorities expected us to know. Anyway the police station is miles away and without our car we cannot get to it, so we have decided to ignore the 75 franc fine and write to appeal once we are back in England. I think this be an excellent example of how we did not understand the language so didn't realise what we were supposed to do. We certainly didn't realise about the car park, but after a little searching today we did see a small warning notice at the entrance.
Later Friday 28 May, Hotel du Centre, Saint Florent.
About fifty minutes after the time the stallholder agreed to let us out, he finally dismantled his stall. He was one of the very last to go and I doubt he sold any mussels all morning anyway. Still, about 1 pm we finally left Corte about four hours later than intended, and we have still got the bother of the fine to sort out once we have reached home. One of the only areas we have not yet explored was Castagniccia, the high chestnut forests that lie between Corte and the east coast. We took really minor roads, mainly single-track with poorly maintained road surfaces. At first it was very pleasant with green hillsides and shrubs. This got steadily more sparse as we got higher until the landscape became dry and arid without trees or birds, with no shade from the hot sun and no water anywhere. The ascent was steep and tortuous, the landscape very inhospitable with no sign of life, not even other vehicles on the roads. Our route took us up from Corte through Sermano village. There were wonderful views but the village was run down and neglected with abandoned houses, slates lying broken at the base of buildings, everything dusty and crumbling with a few chickens under some fruit trees and very little else. We continued through several mountain hamlets in similar states of disrepair and neglect, some perched inaccessibly on hilltops, very picturesque but virtually deserted. We started to descend, and the road became worse than an average unmetalled track because broken bits of tarmac and road chippings had been washed around by winter weather leaving potholes everywhere. Rounding bends among chestnut trees, we came upon several troops of pigs lying in the dust by the roadside, trying to escape some of the stifling heat of the day. It was today that we really discovered the joys or air conditioning in a car. On the open hillside, invariably on narrow unfenced bends, we met several solitary cattle, or a cow and calf, or occasionally half a dozen cows accompanied by a bull. All seemed placid enough, but they wandered freely on the hillside. Heavens knows what they found to eat.
As we got lower, the vegetation increased again, and the chestnut trees and maquis were replaced by mixed woodland and little fields. Beside a river we saw a goatherd peacefully enjoying the afternoon as he watched his flock of some thirty goats while a gentle clanging of goat bells was the only sound - there were still no birds. I have been really surprised how few there are, and they are only around human habitation, or in the woodland near streams. There are many yellow wagtails, but hardly any seagulls to be seen, even in the little coastal ports.
We eventually reached the main road which we followed up to Ponte Leccia, the railway line from Corte running beside it. There is nothing at Ponte Leccia, but it is the Clapham Junction of Corsica, being the place where all the trains pass when going from Ajaccio to Bastia or Calvi. We went over a level crossing and were amused to see the warning sign "Un train peut en cacher un autre". It can be the only one in Corsica as the railway system is entirely single-track with passing places, one of which is at Ponte Leccia. We speculated whether, with the timetable as it is, there ever actually could be an occasion when one train could ever actually hide another on this particular level crossing - we don't think it can.
We followed the Calvi road and turned off to the right on the D 105 which rose very steeply up the hillside twisting round and round on itself, so we could look down from above and observe all the route we had made. Up here the landscape was almost frighteningly beautiful, covered in maquis and pink roses. Far below on the valley floor we could see back down the valley with far down the valley with the road and railway to Bastia running down the middle following the river. We stopped, hoping to picnic with such an eagle's view over the countryside, but despite it being after 3 pm it was suffocatingly hot out of the car, and shadows were virtually non-existent. Further on we found some abandoned terraces with broken dry-stone walling. Inside were some ancient olive trees. We squeezed the car off the narrow road and climbed up to the ancient terrace where we had a lovely late lunch under the cool trees with a beautiful view down the route we had just climbed and upward to where the road, a scratch on the mountainside, finally disappeared from view behind a high crag. The only sound as a distant bleating of a goat and the occasional sound of gunfire, presumably from hunters.
The road became frighteningly narrow but fortunately we met nothing at all on the road except for the odd cow and a few goats. We reached the lovely village of Costa Roda, perched on the most inaccessible place imaginable with wonderful views from near the church. As we looked, we were approached by a resident who wanted to know if we liked his village and was inclined to chat. He was delightful and told us there were no young people left in his village now. There was no work in the mountains. He was retired by had worked in Marseille, coming here for holidays, but now he was here permanently. Another elderly man joined us, and shook hands as if we were real friends. Ian commented on the abandoned terraces, and they said they could remember them being worked and they were quite productive, but had fallen into disuse since the War, when there was nobody left to work them. Our first friend asked where in England we came from and said that it must be very different from here; his daughter had been to London once and said that it wasn't like Corsica at all! We asked whether many tourists got to such remote villages as this. Oh yes, said the other man, sometimes they got up to five cars an hour going through.
The first man said that he knew his village was beautiful, but beauty wasn't everything. You couldn't live on beauty and, apart from two herds of goats that employed one shepherd, there was absolutely nothing in the way of work up here. All they had was mountains formed from Corsican stone and, unless the world started crying out for their stone. they had nothing to produce. The soil is barren, he said, crops don't survive, not even vegetables. There are no longer snows up here, and most years between April and November there was no rain at all. At the moment the field above which we were standing was a meadow of beautiful flowers, but by July it would be baked solid, no grass, just like concrete.
When Ian asked what they thought about Corsican independence and the Corsican nationalists, they raised their hands in despair. How could Corsica survive if it were independent? There was nobody to work the land, it was non-productive. What young people there are, are all in Bastia and Ajaccio to work. The nationalists didn't have the support of the Corsican people generally, and the ten per cent who did support them all lived on the coast in the towns where poverty wasn't as bad and there was some employment. The mountain people had always been ignored right through history, they claimed. The Genoese had only been interested in the fertile, accessible areas around the coast, the mountains were barren and ignored, along with the people who lived there. It was no different today. France talked abut the "Ile de beauté" but again its interest was in the coastal regions. Tourism was the main industry, but what did it do for the mountain villages? He also said that the nationalists want to make Corse the official language rather than French. That's not going to help the only profitable industry the island has, tourism, if instead of French everyone speaks an obscure dialect of Italian!
All in all, it was a really interesting half-hour chat we had with two delightful, friendly gentlemen who seemed to speak a lot of common sense. They shook hands with us as we left and then, as I got into the driver's seat of the car, our first friend hurried after to ask whether I was scared driving a left-hand drive car on a different side of the road. He said that he couldn't imagine driving a right-hand drive car at all - it would terrify him. As we left the village, we noticed three or four donkeys sheltering from the heat under an olive tree.
At Lento we stopped to look in at the church as the door was open. Several ladies inside beckoned us in as we hesitated by the door. They smiled and told us to feel free to look around. They seemed to have used the church as a cool place for a general chat, but every now and then they joined together for a prayer before resuming the chatting. I suppose it was a sort of Mothers' Union. Again, every name on the war memorial outside the church was Italian. It also mentioned several World War 2 resistance fighters from the village shot by the Germans in 1944.
Then up over the Col de Bigorno (885 meters) and down into more fertile land on the other side, at first with only a few trees and the only livestock goats and cattle. Lizards shot across the hot road surface head of me and at one point I had to stop and wait while a long snake slithered across and disappeared into the maquis. It is the only one I have seen and was probably not venomous. Corsica only has two species of snake, the grass snake and the western whip snake, the latter a type of viper, generally considered non-venomous.
And then, suddenly, we were at the chapel of San-Michele, the beautifully chequered church set on the hilltop where we saw the wild tortoise on 18 May. For only the third time on the tour of the island we returned to a point we had previously touched on. This is partly design; as we near the end of our holiday we want to be near Bastia for the flight home on Sunday. We also like this area very much. The sea certainly has much to offer in Corsica, and it seems so bright and inviting looking down on it from high in the austere, sparse mountains. We could look across the hills down onto the sea and along the coast of the Cap toward Nonza.
In the Castagniccia
We decided to descend into St Florent where we are now staying. This hotel seemed nicer than the one we stayed in last time. It is 230 Francs per night and we have a very pleasant room but, in common with all hotels in French towns. It is very noisy with cars and motorbikes passing below and the sounds of restaurants clearing up after the last customers depart.
We ate our supper down on the Port de Plaisance again, watching the sunset and accompanied by a little grey cat. I gave him some sausage but it was spurned. Later a man came along to feed it. He said that it had been abandoned, so he fed it by the port each night. We walked around the town, up into the deserted little citadel by moonlight, overgrown with dry grasses and poppies where the sound of the sea made gentle slapping noises on the rocks and the walls were still warm from the heat of the day. Returning down to the port again, we could peer into the clear still water and see thousands of little fish just below the surface, with bigger ones below and bigger one still below them. There were many different species and the water seemed to teem with them. Then back to our hotel for a shower and sleep.
Saturday 29 May, 1999
Our last full day! This morning the sun was already hot by the time we left our hotel. There was also a strong wind which later blew up into a sort of tornado. It was hot but very violent, seeming to come from all directions at once. We began the day with a leisurely stroll around St Florent, the town we have most liked in Corsica. There is not a great deal there, but it has a pleasant, relaxed and happy atmosphere. The Port de Plaisance is really very large, and we discovered a lovely sandy beach on the far side where I paddled in the clear cold water and we gathered several light brown balls of a sort of coconut matting or sisal material. We can't work out what they are or where they come from, perhaps a seed pod from a palm, but there are hundreds on the west coach beaches, and when they are taken apart they appear to have nothing inside except more fibres. (We have since learned that they are formed from fibres of the seagrass posidonia oceanica, commonly known as Neptune grass and these "Neptune balls" trap large quantities of microplastics.)
We also did a little souvenir type shopping, a pretty blue dress for Kate, Asterix en Corse for Neil, essential oils from the maquis for work friends, and a couple of cards, including a French birth congratulation card for a friend. Finally we left St Florent reluctantly behind and headed toward Bastia, stopping at Patrimonio to look at the well preserved menhir, an isolated standing stone, and the very imposing church set on a high promontory in the village, giving excellent views from its steps over the surrounding vineyards, upon which the economy of the village is based, and the arid hills beyond, the sea just visible between them.
Patrimonio
Patrimonio, with view toward Golfe de St Florent
The church was locked and dust storms were being blown up all around us, so we headed up into the hills, the air-conditioning in the car going all out as it was a suffocating hot wind roaring and tossing outside, blowing the clouds up from one side of the mountains, causing them to roll and tumble over the top and down the far side like a vapour of dry ice. We kept having to stop to admire the wonderful views but if we got out of the car we had to hang on tight to each other for fear of being blown over.
We drove gingerly over the Col de Teghine, leaving the west coast behind and came down toward Bastia, where the wind disappeared and it was just very very hot, the sunshine being quite unremitting. The views down onto Bastia and the flat eastern seaboard were different from anything we had seen so far. The town is very sprawling and from the hills we had an eagle's view of the whole town, the port, the sea, and the long, curious lagoon of Biguglia with the sandspit between it and the sea. We could also see the airstrip of Bastia airport.
Col de Teghine (536 meters), view of Golfe de St Florent
Col de Teghine, view of Etang de Biguglia
We drove down to Bastia and parked near the Palais de Justice to walk into the town. With hindsight, it was not a wise move to spend such a hot day in a busy city, full of car fumes and traffic chaos. The Corsicans seem incredibly bad drivers and think nothing of triple parking in the main thoroughfares so it is like weaving an obstacle race to get anywhere in the town. The streets off the main road are dirty and neglected, full of fallen masonry, cigarette butts and canine excrement, with stray cats wandering everywhere and washing hanging from street windows. Below in the street, amid the general street chaos, tables are set for meals or people sit drinking and talking on their mobile phones at any possible point that a table can be fitted in, and the cars simply drive round them. Eventually it became unbearable, wandering aimlessly around in the stifling heat. We had tended to move from church to church, of which there are fortunately many, and they are all open and beautifully dark and cool after the searing heat and dazzling light outside. We visited the Église Ste Marie in the citadel with the silver statue of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin which is carried around the streets on certain occasions. Then round the corner to the Chapelle Sainte Croix, decorated in rococo style with much gilt work. It has a statue of Christ on the cross carved in dark wood, found floating in the sea by fishermen in 1428 and brought to the church, where it is still venerated by fishermen today. Next to the chapel of the Immaculate Conception where from 1794 the sessions of the Anglo-Corse parliament were held in the presence of the British viceroy. This continued until 1795 when Britain gave up ownership of Corsica because it was too expensive and handed it back to the French. It seems very strange to think that they played "God save the King" on the organ before each session!
Unable to bear Bastia any longer, we returned to the car and drove northwards along the route of Cap Corse until we reached Erbalunga. The only hotel was full, so we sat by the sea under a tamarisk tree eating home-made chocolate ice-cream before returning to Bastia and driving down through a tunnel under the bay to avoid the chaos in the streets of the town centre, so I've now driven through "le tunnel sous la Méd".
We continued out along the sandspit between the sea and the Biguglia lagoon. Despite its off-putting name, it proved to be a very pleasant area, very different from the rest of the island. It is a nature reserve for birds and plants on the the lagoon side; the seaward side was a sandy beach, packed with families from Bastia taking a day out to swim and sunbathe. There was a massive queue of people returning to Bastia as by this time its was about 6 pm. We tried several hotels along the sandspit. It would have been very nice to stay there for our last night amid the sand dunes with pine trees and tamarisks but everywhere was either full or too expensive. Eventually we left the sandspit and turned back toward Bastia again, desperate to find a hotel for our last night. We are now in a rather grotty place which at 260 francs is both the most expensive and least agreeable room we have had. However, even this hotel was full and, seeing us looking a bit Joseph and Mary-ish, the hotel lady said she did have a spare room in the stable. I don't think I'm likely to give birth tonight - just as well as there is certainly no manger handy! She said she had lots of Germans staying but did have one twin-bedded room in an annexe, if we wanted it. We weren't going to carry on searching, so here we are. It seems reasonably quiet but has a view over the back of the hotel with stray cats and dumped rubbish. No doubt, as it is right by the airport, we will be woken in the early hours by planes arriving and leaving. I only hope that we can get the car sorted out with petrol, as it has only just occurred to us that tomorrow is Sunday and garages are usually closed. It is essential that we return the car with a full tank.
Sunday 30 May, 1999.
We leave Corsica at 3.30 this afternoon. We have just had breakfast downstairs in the hotel as we have used up all our own food supplies. The patronne, a very friendly lady, has told us it will be 28 degrees here today - yesterday it was hotter. She said it will not be like that in England, a maximum of 18, if we are lucky: "Oh là là, quel pays, toujours il pleut, il y a du brouillard" - rather a sweeping generalisation, but that is how we are perceived here: "Ce n'est pas comme ici là-bas". We passed the time of day with a Welsh couple returning this morning to Manchester. La patronne said "encore des anglais", so we said that they were Welsh. "Ah, la princesse Diana! Ah, elle était belle, la Diana! Et le rugby, ils sont champions du rugby". That is the perception of Wales. A delightful and amusing breakfast.
As we left the hotel this morning, we thanked the patronne for finding us a bed for the night when she was officially fully booked. We suspect that she kept a couple of rooms undeclared for tax purposes. She certainly kept no record of our stay and didn't really want to give us a receipt, so we said we didn't want one. We shook hands and she said that we should really have reserved rooms in advance near the airport at weekends, but she tried to keep a couple of rooms for independent travellers. The rest of the guests had been a German coach party. She said that if people were nice and she liked them, she would usually find space for them, otherwise hard luck, so I guess we were lucky she liked us.
We drove to La Canonica, just a couple of kilometers from the hotel, near the sea. There we walked first across a dry dusty field of bleached grass, with pretty flowers along the wayside. It was really pleasant to hear birds singing again; they obviously prefer the lower plains to the mountains. We passed a little orchard of orange and lemon trees, and I confess to stealing a lemon, to have with fish and chips back in Exeter to remind us of Corsica. We crossed the field to the beautiful Romanesque chapel of San Parteo, dating from the eleventh century. It was in excellent repair and very simple in style, with large limestone blocks alternating in rows with smaller blocks. It was rectangular with a rounded apse at the east end, the whole covered with green schist tiles. Its setting against the hills in the open space of the plain was idyllic. Nobody else was around except for a distant tractor several fields away and the ubiquitous lizards. There was a chain on the huge door, but it was not locked, so we pushed it open. Inside, birds had nested in the regular spaces in the stonework - why are they there, inside and out at regular intervals, but not traversing the walls? Once our eyes became accustomed to the darkness contrasting with the external glare, we saw that the chapel was built on the ruins of previous sites. According to our Michelin guide they dated from several centuries earlier when it was a pagan burial ground. There mas much excavation work in progress, and a number of tombs had been revealed well below the later floor level. The tombs must have stood on the outskirts of the Roman town of Mariana, on the site of which the cathedral church of la Canonica had been dedicated in the 12th century, just a few hundred meters away from the chapel of San Parteo.
We returned from the little chapel and walked along the dusty road to the nearby cathedral church of La Canonica. The cathedral, although it had three aisles, was modest in size. Like the chapel, it alternated wide and narrow courses of stone and was roofed with green schist slates. It was beautifully proportioned in the simple Romanesque style typical of the period when Corsica was ruled by Pisa. The exterior was almost completely unadorned with some arcading round the semi-circular apse and some geometrical patterns on the south side. On the south side had previously stood two wings of buildings which had housed the canons of the cathedral. These were now demolished except for the foundations, and excavations had shown that the southern of the two wings was built inside a Roman basilica of the fourth century, an impressive building with marble colonnades and a baptistery which survived with fragments of the font and mosaics with Christian themes, probably the earliest evidence of Christianity on the island. The basilica stood amid other Roman buildings prominently aligned along an arcaded street. Strange to think of so many centuries of life and worship in an area that was now nothing but fields.
A coach party of Italian tourists arrived just after us, so we were less at one with the landscape, but it remained extremely impressive, rendered all the more beautiful by the presence of wild vines, flowering bottle-brush plants, and shady pines and olive trees. The doors of he cathedral were locked unfortunately, although we attempted a photograph through a keyhole, but there was much to see externally, both the beautiful simple building with its Celtic style interlaced pattern over the main entrance, and the Roman town to the side, which I found easier to imagine than the city of Aléria where so much was left overgrown and lost amidst the long grass.
La Canonica, San Parteo
La Canonica, San Parteo
La Canonica, chapel of San Parteo
Mariana
Mariana
La Canonica
La Canonica
We went on down to the sandy beach where we paddled in a rough sea, more like England than the Mediterranean. The beach was messy though, much of it natural with washed up driftwood, bamboo canes, reeds, leaves, seed pods and branches. Nonetheless, both here and all around the countryside on the plain surrounding Bastia, there is much abandoned rubbish in the hedges, by the roadsides, strewn across the fields, all round the hotel where we stayed, by the little parade of shops, and all along beaches. Most of it is drinks cans and bottles and cigarette packets. Firms like Coca Cola and Marlborough have much to answer for in contributing to the ruination of the countryside. There seems to be a direct relationship between the poverty and general living standards of a country or region [...] and the regard the inhabitants have for the area in which they live. Here they don't seem to care that they are spoiling so much beauty by dumping anything they no longer need at the nearest convenient spot. Above Bastia we saw rubbish just tipped over the cliff edge. There was anything and everything - old drainpipes, cars, fridges, tyres, gas cookers, builders' rubble, cans, plastic containers and much more, scarring the most beautiful of hillsides. In the towns, the general rubbish around the streets - dog mess, spittle, cigarette butts, paper, packaging, cans etc. can only make living in such confined streets and alleys as Bastia has all the more unpleasant. [...]
Col de Teghine, fly tipping
Having paddled in the sea and philosophized on the above we left the beach and drove back to the main road where we filled up with petrol. Still having time to spare before the car was due to be returned, we drove up for a final visit into the hills, touching the edge of the Castagniccia. Here it was much greener. The leaves of the trees covering the hillside gave welcome shade and a sense of freshness. Once we were away from the main road, the traffic disappeared. We climbed up, rounding hairpin bends until we were high above the plain with views down onto the lagoon and the ridge we had driven along last night.
We reached the village of Borgo, a large, seemingly prosperous place, as they go. It may well be a commuter town for Bastia. There is an impressive war memorial - again all the names are Italian, and a plaque telling the story of the town and its place in French history. It swears its allegiance to France in letters of gold, both literally and metaphorically. It seems too that this little town of 3,400 inhabitants is the birthplace of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry author of the children's story Le petit prince, who disappeared on a mission in his fighter plane during the Second World War. It is also a place for a palindrome: Able was I ere I was Elba. From the church there is a clear view of the island of Elba, showing amid the clouds far out to sea. Poor Napoléon, stuck out there, held captive so near to home and yet so far from it. It actually looks quite large, and Napoléon was allowed to keep his little toy army with him. At least it must have been better than Saint Helena. Certainly Borgo was a pleasant place to spend our last hour at large in Corsica, with an extensive square from which a maze of narrow, shady alleyways radiated in all directions, where dogs slept in the shade. The buildings were all picturesque ruins with huge broken doors and falling plaster. The inhabitants seem to be as unaware of the dilapidated conditions in which they live as they are of the sheer beauty of the countryside where their villages are located. Much of the soil though seems parched and arid, incapable of sustaining anything other than olive trees, the maquis and cactuses. If it is this dry now, what will the countryside be like in August, the time when most of the tourists arrive? I'm glad we came now; it must be the most beautiful time of the year to be here.
We are now at the airport terminal, having returned our loyal vehicle to Europcars. It was a good little Peugeot 206, even if it did beep every time I opened the door and had electric windows. It got us everywhere we wanted to go, and had wonderful air conditioning. In all we have driven 1,352 kilometers around Corsica (840 miles), an island 110 miles long by 50 miles wide, so the twists and turns of the roads must account for much of the distance, particularly when you consider just how few roads there actually are here.
We arrived at the airport in comfortable time but as yet the luggage check-in for our flight has not opened, and it begins to look suspiciously as if our flight will be delayed. In fact we have just been told that there is a two hour delay with our plane taking off from Gatwick as the pilot did not turn up to fly the plane out here, so they had to find another pilot who knew the way. We are supposed to be at Gatwick at 3.30 British time. It's nearly that now, so I think we will definitely be late for my Uncle George's birthday party at which we were expected in Croydon late this afternoon. Then we have to return to Exeter, braving the Spring Bank Holiday traffic on the A303, after two weeks exploring this beautiful island. At work on Tuesday it will all seem like a dream.
Farewell to the mountains of Corsica - from our delayed plane.
1. Bastia to Porto.
2. Porto to Zonza.
3. Zonza to Corte.
4. Corte to Bastia.
