Corsica (and Sardinia) the easy way (Retrospective: September-October 2015)

When Terri and I were ruled out of the GR20, Terri for her sore leg and me for my sciatica and sore hip, the question arose of what to do next.  We decided to rent a car for four days to explore the countryside and the beaches of Corsica.

Pasquale Paoli, Corsica's national hero

 The day after my birthday, September 14^th, we hobbled down to Corte station to pick up our vehicle from the local Europcar dealer.  We should have known to walk away after the first thirty seconds of dealing with the manager, a comic-book stereotype of an excitable over-the-top Italian (although he was a Corsican).  “C’est pas possible!  J’ai pas recu une reservation!”  We insisted and showed him our internet reservation, and he grudgingly allowed that he might be able to find a car for us.  It turned out to be a new black Audi A1 with turbo diesel injection, and we fell in love with it over the next 96 hours.

We loaded it up with our backpacks, bought food supplies and hit the road by 1:00, headed southeast towards the coast.  Traffic was light and we flow along until we reached Aleria, the old Roman capital of the island.  The ruins aren’t much to look at, but the small museum showed lots of Etruscan, Greek and Roman pottery and other finds that fleshed out centuries of occupation. 

After an agreeable hour and a half, we continued south towards Porto Vecchio.  The east coast road is straight but runs through a long series of towns, resulting in more traffic and slow progress.  We turned off eventually to meander around a pretty coastal headland north of Porto Vecchio, through sprawling developments of upmarket holiday homes similar to those found all over the Mediterranean coastline.  We bought a bit more food in a huge Casino supermarket, glad to escape the hugely inflated prices in the GR20 refuges, then turned down a campground that wanted 30 euros for one night’s tenting.  We ended up in a neighbouring place that charged 17 euros, still relatively expensive but less outrageous.  We had a big fry up of lamb chops, potatoes, onions and mushrooms, plagued by persistent hornets, before sleeping soundly.

On the beach at Palombaggia

The next day dawned bright and sunny and we decided that we needed a dip in the ocean.  After a leisurely lie-in and breakfast, we drove out along the peninsula to Palombaggia beach and settled in for a bit of swimming and lazing, which was exactly what the doctor in Corte had ordered.  The shoreline was pretty, backed by red rocks and with water of the postcard perfect shade of aquamarine.  Swimming felt better on my tortured left hip than walking or sitting in a car.  We didn’t manage to drag ourselves away from the beach until 2:00, whereupon, after another grocery run we headed inland a few kilometres to an obscure prehistoric site called Talla.

Corsica abounds in prehistoric ruins, and I wanted to take advantage of our wheels to see a few of them.  Talla proved to be very atmospheric, atop a granite outcrop reached through an ancient overgrown stand of trees, and we contentedly munched our way through a roast chicken, looked out at the high peaks inland and poked around the ruins of a megalithic fortress-dwelling. I loved having it to ourselves, a rare pleasure in overcrowded Europe.

Talla's megalithic gateway

Our next stop was the southernmost town on Corsica, beautiful Bonifacio.  We drove in, around the inner harbour with its bobbing megayachts, and uphill into the old town.  We parked the car and walked into the narrow streets of the Genoan town, revelling in the views over the white limestone cliffs extending east of town, set afire by the setting sun.  Bonifacio was pretty and felt a bit like Santorini, perched high above the azure Mediterranean.  Also, like Santorini, it is a victim of its own fame, with overcrowded streets and overpriced restaurants lining the old streets.  We had a fun wander around, checking out the old church, and then fled to a campground outside town, having failed to find a good spot to watch the sunset over the sea.  We had a dinner of roast chicken, salad and pate washed down by a fine Cotes du Rhone red wine.  I had to admit that two days of driving seemed to have been worse for my hip and back than two weeks of trekking had been, and my hip seemed to be tied into a tight knot of muscles that were only getting tighter.

I summarized the next day in my diary as “three swims and Filitosa”.  We started with a relaxed morning of reading, muesli and a highly successful experiment in using my Outback Oven equipment to bake brownies on my MSR stove.  We gobbled down some of the results, then drove off for a swim in a small cove (Cala Lunga) east of our campground that was pleasant, although not spectacular, with the distraction of trying to keep a hyperactive stray dog from eating or urinating on our stuff.

Lovely aquamarine Roccapina

 By 12:30 we were in the car, headed west along the south coast.  As we turned inland at Roccapina, we stopped to admire the view and spotted an idyllic little beach below.  It was a long, bumpy detour along a narrow track, but the swim was worth it.  Roccapina beach was easily the nicest beach we found in Corsica, a shallow white sand bay much beloved by yachties.  The water was calm, a perfect temperature and a truly exquisite shade of turquoise.  It was almost impossible to get Terri out of the water and back in the car to look at a bunch of prehistoric rocks! 

We reached Filitosa, Corsica’s most well-known prehistoric site, around 4:30 after a winding and scenic drive past the town of Sartene.

Filitosa statue-menhir

 I was reading Dorothy Carrington’s brilliant travel account of Corsica, Granite Island, and she tells the story of the discovery of the ancient ruins on the property of the friends with whom she spent a long vacation.  The countryside has changed immensely since those days in the late 1940s when local travel was by donkey cart, but the site itself has an atmosphere of absolute timelessness.  I loved Filitosa’s setting, its famous statue menhirs and the huge megalithic structures.  For such a famous spot, there weren’t so many tourists around, and the late afternoon light on the enigmatic stone faces caught their subtle features perfectly.  We backtracked slightly towards the Gulf of Valinco to find a campsite near the ocean.  We had a sunset swim on a somewhat rough dissipative beach that made getting in and out a bit tricky, then cooked up pasta and ate more brownies before falling asleep happily in a Filitosa-like granite outcrop in an almost-deserted campground.

Filitosa artwork

The next day, September 17^th, was our last full day with the car, and we were determined to make the most of our mobility by exploring the hill country and mountains of the south, crossing the GR20 so that we could see a bit of what we had missed.  It was cloudy when we awoke, so we decided to skip a morning swim in favour of a bit of a sleep-in.  Terri used a trekking pole to massage my hip and periformis muscles, which were still not really feeling much better after a few days off from trekking.  We gobbled down some muesli and hit the road by 9:50, backtracked further to the slightly forbidding town of Sartene and then up into the mountains to the village of Caldane, where a local hot spring provided a relaxing, therapeutic start to the day.  It was marketed as a “Roman bath”, but it was only developed in the late 1800s, so the marketing wasn’t too accurate historically. 

We were pretty relaxed as we climbed into the car to drive further uphill to the wonderful prehistoric sites of Cuccuruzza and Cupale.  These are more megalithic settlements, rather like Filitosa, but the real appeal is that to reach them involves hiking a couple of kilometres through a beautiful hardwood forest littered with granite outcrops, some of them used as prehistoric rock shelters.  The structure of the Cuccuruzza citadel is even more impressive in its construction than Filitosa, although sadly it has none of the carved statuary that makes Filitosa so memorable.  The windows and internal rooms are still clearly visible in the massively thick walls, and the tower rises up above it in typical Sardinian nuraghi style (the Torrean culture in Corsica has obvious roots across the water in Sardinian Nuraghic culture).  Cupale lay further along our idyllic forest trail and was a medieval citadel built by the Italian lord Bonifacio who reconquered Corsica for the Pope back in the 9^th century. 

Carbini's memorial cross

We made our way back to the car and drove a bit further to the heretic’s village of Carbini, where a barren hill behind the town features a small interpretive trail that tells the sad history of the 14^th century sect of the Giovanalli that arose in the village and died in a bloodbath atop the hill after the Papacy called down the wrath of crusading knights on the heterodox villagers; the entire village was butchered on the hill, a gruesome event that was commemorated by a stark cross on the summit.  The story reminded me a bit of the fate of the Cathars in the Languedoc a century before, although this was apparently more about a wider crackdown by the Church after the Black Death on Franciscan friars who were too keen on poverty and renouncing worldly wealth.  The view from the cross over the surrounding mountains and villages was beautiful and showed how little of this area of Corsica is under cultivation today.

We drove further uphill towards the Col de Bavella, where a series of pointy granite fingers, the Aiguilles de Bavella, raked the sky.  We parked the car and walked a few hundred metres along the GR20, passing a few trekkers on the penultimate leg of the GR20 and wishing wistfully that we were doing the same.  We drove downhill, through a wonderful rocky valley full of swimming holes, until we stopped for the night at a riverside campsite right next to a perfect swimming hole.  We had a clear starlit evening to enjoy a dinner of lamb chops.  As we cleaned up from dinner, a fox appeared and stole some of the bones.

The next morning we knew that we had to bring back our car by 11 am, so we got up, made eggs, had a quick dip in the river (surprisingly un-chilly water) and then loaded our gear into the car and headed back to Corte, arriving by 10:30.  We tanked up the car and headed back to Europcar, where the day’s drama commenced.  The manager wasn’t happy with the fact that the car was dusty, and as he complained about it, he decided that the dust streaks down the side of the car constituted scratches in the paint (leaves had brushed against the car’s door while driving down to Roccapina beach) and that as such that would cost us the 850-euro deductible.  Given that even if the car were repainted, it wouldn’t cost that much, we weren’t willing to agree to any such thing, and then we listened to lots of chest-puffing and shouting.  Terri proved to be a dab hand at dealing with blowhard bullies, and we agreed that if we could arrange the removal of the subtle paint scratches ourselves by the end of the day, we would call it quits. 

Corte's citadel

We first ran the car through the car wash down the street.  If we had done this first, the manager wouldn’t have noticed anything to begin with, but now that he saw the prospect of making some easy cash, he found three vestigial scratches that still showed up in the right light.  He raced off to lunch grumbling and threatening loudly, and I went off to find a garage that could repolish the car professionally.  They were closed for lunch (Corsicans take their siestas seriously), but I was confident that they could do the job.  Terri and I went to the Casino supermarket to buy some lunch and while we were there, we found scratch remover for sale there.  We spent half an hour polishing away, and removed most traces ourselves, but it wasn’t going to pass inspection by Mr. Anger Management.  Once lunch was over, we drove the car up to the garage and the mechanic had a look at it.  He almost laughed at the idea that the car needed any work, but he knew Mr. Europcar by reputation, so he agreed to see what he could do with a high-speed polisher and some wax.  He gave us a lift back into town, where we sat in a café using wi-fi until it was time to collect the car and face the music again.  When we got to the garage, the car looked better than it must have done when it was new.  There was no trace of any scratches or irregularity in the gleaming black surface.  At 90 euros, this was a much cheaper deal than signing over our deposit.

We drove back to Europcar and the manager was forced to admit that the door had never looked better.  A cunning gleam came into his eye, however, as he now declared that we were late in bringing the car back and owed him another day of rental.  He clearly saw the prospect of making some easy cash slipping away from him, and was desperate to get some profit out of the deal.  Given that he had suggested that we go get it fixed ourselves, this was a bit rich, and Terri banished me from the discussion as she marched grim-faced back into the office with Mr. Europcar.  Fifteen minutes later she was back and we were free of any financial responsibilities, as her flinty negotiating style wore down the manager’s bluster and noise. 

Finally liberated, we were off on the 6:30 train to Ajaccio which left only half an hour late, crammed full of university students headed home for the weekend.  We arrived in the island’s capital just as the train station closed for the night, and spent a long while wandering the streets with our full packs searching for a cheap hotel.  The cheapest we found was 140 euros a night, so we decided to hike out to the nearest campground, Les Mimosas, about 5 kilometres from the port.  It was a long, tired trudge for my aching back and hip, and for Terri’s sore leg, but paying 15 euros made it worthwhile.  It was a well-run, if crowded, campground set in one of the eucalyptus plantations established in the 1930s and 1940s to drain the soil in an attempt to eradicate malaria, once a serious health threat on the island.

Porto's main beach

Terri swimming under the Genoan bridge, Ota

The next day, September 19^th, we wandered back into town, slightly less painfully after a long night’s sleep, and caught a bus to Porto, about two hours north of Ajaccio along the coast.  We had picked a location to spend a few days relaxing partly based on the three stars given to the nearby coastline, Les Calanches, on our Michelin map.  The bus ride was pretty at first, but as we approached Porto, it became spectacular.  The road narrowed into a single-land snake coiled through the improbably red spires of rock that make up Les Calanches.  Our bus driver, a loquacious Tunisian-born man named Uthman, was an expert at steering his big bus through the rocks, but the tourists coming the other way had more difficulty with the sharp turns and the rules of engagement when two vehicles meet on a single-lane stretch, and it took forty minutes to drive what should have taken no more than a quarter of an hour. 

Sunset apsara, Porto

We hopped off the bus and trudged to the Porto municipal campground, a sprawling eucalyptus plantation perfect for sheltering from the sun where we would spend the next four nights.

Porto is improbably pretty, a small port tucked into a gulf bordered on one side by the Calanches which we had just driven through, and on the other by a big marine sanctuary, Scandola.  Inbetween, underneath a Genoese watchtower, a small, tidy tourist town sits, gazing west towards the setting sun, its harbour sheltered by a manmade beach.  Over the next three days, we explored the beautiful inland river and swimming holes near Ota, bathing below a steep-sided old Genoese footbridge; took a boat tour out to gaze at the wonderful rockscapes, caves and tiny coves of Scandola and the Calanches; and watched some of the most perfect sunsets imaginable while sitting on the beach.  The beach itself, exposed to the open Mediterranean, was too rough for swimming two of the three days we were there, but it still made the perfect backdrop for sunset viewing.  It was a great place for the two of us to rest our tired and aching bodies after the damage we had done to them.

Marine reserve, Scandola

Finally, on September 23^rd, Terri and I hopped on a bus back to Ajaccio, driven by the affable Uthman, and said goodbye as Terri caught the bus to the airport and her date with the Swiss citizenship ceremony. 

Scandola scenery

I stayed on in Ajaccio, trying to get my sciatica repaired (more pills prescribed, this time stronger painkillers and anti-inflammatories), my cell phone repaired (it wouldn’t charge anymore; the solution was to buy an external battery charger) and my fix of culture at the Fesch Museum (a completely underwhelming gallery of European art which tries to make up in quantity what it lacks in quality).  I stayed another night at Les Mimosas campground, then caught a bus to Bonifacio, having decided to explore Sardinia in the days that I had remaining before my flight to Switzerland.

Corridor tomb near Anzachena

I stayed in a small and crowded campground close to the harbour, and the next morning I awoke early and made it onto the first ferry of the day across to Santa Teresa de Gallura.  The views of the early morning light on the white cliffs of Bonifacio were magical.  I got to the other side in an hour, walked to the bus station and caught a bus to Anzachena, where I wanted to explore some prehistoric ruins.  I found a local bike shop who charged me an extortionate 25 euros to rent a bike for the day and headed off in search of the Sardinian version of the megalithic culture I had explored in Corsica.  It was a good day, with a couple of corridor-style communal tombs, Codda Ecchju and Li Lolghi; a big megalithic village (a nuraghi, in Sardinian Italian) called La Prisgiona; Li Muri, a “cemetery” of four circular tombs near a fifth rectangular tomb; a classic nuraghi, Albucciu, much like Cuccuruzza on Corsica; and finally my favourite, Malchittu, a temple high on a hill after a 45-minute walk across a beautiful countryside littered with granite outcrops.  It was like a very primitive Doric temple, with a small sanctuary enclosed by a wall that once supported a gently sloping roof, and the views over the gentle Sardinian countryside, such a contrast to the harsh vertical world of so much of Corsica, were beautiful.

"Giant's tomb", Codda Ecchju

When I had returned my bicycle in town, I realized that I had been lucky to catch a bus earlier.  The bus company’s drivers were on strike, and there were only a handful of buses running, none of which were headed to Olbia, where I had planned to spend the night.  I jumped on the only bus I could find and headed 6 kilometres out of town to the tourist town of Caniggione, gateway to the beach resorts of the rich and (in)famous on the Costa Smerelda.  I pitched Terri’s tent in the local campground and ended up spending three nights there, as much through inertia as anything.  I didn’t do much for the two full days I was there, wandering into town to the local beaches (pretty, but not spectacular), eating, having sundowner beers in a bar near the marina and working on my Italian by reading the newspapers.

Finally, on September 28^th I roused myself and headed to the southwest of Sardinia in search of more history.  I hiked rapidly towards Anzachena to catch a bus to Olbia, only to see the bus drive right past the stop despite my frantic waving.  I decided to stick out my thumb and soon caught a lift with a young automotive engineer on his way to an English lesson, part of his plan to emigrate to the UK in search of work.  In Olbia I caught a train to Oristano and spent the trip talking to a marine geologist from Sardinia on his way to consult with colleagues.  In Oristano I went to the local tourist office and to the archaeological museum (one of the few things open over the sacred lunch break), where I saw a number of interesting finds from Thallos, a nearby Phoenician and Carthaginian ruin that I wanted to visit.  A local bus carried me out to Torregrande and a huge campground, where I rented a truly miserable bicycle (this time for only 5 euros) and headed to the nearby village of Cabras to see another archaeological museum.  After a number of small rooms of Nuragic and Carthaginian finds, the main event was a room full of the “Giants of Cabras”, a series of life-sized statues of warriors and boxers from three thousand years ago.  Only one of the six was reasonably intact, but it was impressive to come eye to eye with these stylized statues of so long ago.  There are more of these giant statues in other museums, particularly Cagliari, but it would be great to see them all together in one place like a Neolithic Terracotta Army.

"Giant's head", Cabras Museum

The next day I rented the same sad excuse for a bicycle and rode further afield to the ruins of Thallos.  It was a pleasant ride, past a roadside nuraghi and past the rich fishing ground of the inland lagoon that makes Cabras one of the few towns in Sardinia renowned for its fish and seafood.  Thallos is situated near the end of a peninsula, with the ancient city on one shore and some of the nicest beaches in Sardinia on the other.  I went up the Aragonian watchtower (as in Corsica, watchtowers dot the coastline from the days in which pirate raids from North Africa were a constant danger), then walked through the ruins.  They are extensive but not very excavated, with big areas awaiting future generations of archaeologists.  The acropolis was a nuraghic village before the Phoenicians arrived, and they put their Tophet (a place to venerate children who were stillborn or who died young) atop the megalithic ruins.  There were a number of Phoenician temples, a number dating to after the Roman conquest (in the First Punic War), and another very Egyptian-looking temple.  Two Corinthian columns, re-erected by archaeologists, were very photogenic with the backdrop of the bay and the mountains of southern Sardinia behind.  One of my favourite spots was a 9^th-century church rebuilt on a fifth-century Byzantine plan that is still in use. 

Byzantine church, Thallos

After all this culture, it was time for the beach, and it was one of the nicest swims of the entire trip, almost as good as Roccapina.  It was hard for me to drag myself out of the water to ride back to Torregrande; along the way I fell into conversation with an American doctor on an Experience Plus bike tour, reminding me of my long-ago bicycle-guiding days with Butterfield and Robinson. 

Thallos Beach

With my campground closing for the season the next day and my flight back from Corsica only a few days away, it was time to say arrivederci to Sardinia and head back north.  I caught trains and buses north as far as Santa Teresa Gallura, but just missed the last ferry of the day to Bonifacio.  I met Marius, a young German who knew a cheap B&B in town, and we headed there together.  20 euros a night got us wonderful rooms, a decent breakfast and a kindly landlady.  It was just as well that it was a nice place, since overnight a massive storm kicked up and we were stranded in Santa Teresa for an extra day as all ferries were cancelled.  The winds were impressive, and the Strait of Bonifacio was a boiling mass of white water all day. 

Finally on October 2^nd the waves and wind calmed down and Marius and I headed over on the earliest ferry to Bonifacio.  Corsica being Corsica, there were no connecting buses to Porto Vecchio for several hours, so we sat and chatted and sipped overpriced hot drinks until a bus arrived.  On the road north we saw evidence of the previous day’s storm in flooded roads.  Later I would find out that a number of people had lost their homes in flash floods, and when the storm reached the mainland of France another 19 people would lose their lives.  Marius and I said goodbye in Porto Vecchio as he headed off for a week of hiking and I settled into a hotel room.  I went to another doctor (I was running out of painkillers before I ran out of pain in my hip) and got another prescription.  For the first time, this doctor actually did some simple tests to make sure that it was sciatica; the previous two doctors had just written a prescription and been done with me.

Doric columns, Thallos

And then, finally, I was on my way back to Geneva and to Leysin after a whirlwind six weeks in the Pyrenees, Corsica and Sardinia.  It didn’t turn out the way I had planned it, and I was leaving with my body in pain, but I had enjoyed all three destinations.  I think that I would go back to Corsica again only with my own transport (bicycle or motorized vehicle), and I would concentrate on cycling the mountain roads in the northeast and south.  I would love to have seen more of Sardinia, but again having my own wheels would have made a huge difference.  The Pyrenees are what would appeal to me most, both for hiking and for cycling, and I could see myself spending more time there in the future.

Back in Leysin, after a week of packing up, it was time to head to Canada for two weeks and then to South America for the next chapter of my adventures:  Antarctica!