It's Tuesday morning and i'm enjoying a coffee and pain au raisin. All around me people are packing up their tent sites. I have just had the pleasure of watching a first timer try and get her Quechua 1 person self erecting tent folded up and back into its bag. I am pleased to report that it took 3 atempts, support from 1 experienced neighbour and even reference to the instructions before it was all put away.
Another neighbour is sweating packing us his tent, so it's good to see that I'm not the only one that finds this stuff hot work – I guess he's an IT professional as well. :-(
I will come back to you later in the day with more tent erecting exploits of some of our neighbours from last night, but in the meantime, I have a coffee to drink, a pain au raisin to eat and a small town down the coast called Calvi to drive to.
Right, here's what you need to know about Corsica. It's a small island off the coast of Italy, which you can get around in a relatively short period of time, although the windy roads keep speeds down to about 50-70kph. It's French, but that's because they bought it from the Genoese in 1769. Its history is one of constant occupation – everybody's been through here – but the Genoese and French are the most recent two. Between the Genoese (1347-1729) and French (1769-now) , there was a period of 26 years for a War of Independence, followed by 14 years of actual independence. The independence movement was led by Pasquale Paoli and there are references to him everywhere, particularly in Corte, where he established a government and a university. As I mentioned in my blog yesterday there is still a movement calling for Corsican independence, but the general population are keen for some form of limited (rather than full) autonomy. The French Government are also keen to look at ways of giving Corsica some autonomy, while keep ing them as a region of France. Corsicans have a concept of vendetta (which they try and exercise daily on the roads), based on killing anyone who wronged the family honour. It is estimated that in the 30 years from 1683 and 1715 that 30,000 out of the total 120,000 corsicans were killed by vendetta. Corsica is famous for being the birthplace of Napoleon, its cheese, tourism and wild boar. Christopher Columbus is also rumoured to have been born here, but he's rumoured to have been born most places round here – most likely Genoa according to the internet experts I've read..
Today's excursion was a trip around Cap Corse, or the Cape of Corsica. If you think of Corsica as your clenched fist, and were then to extend your middle finger vertically upwards, you would be making a rude gesture in the direction of Italy. The extended middle finger would be Cap Corse.
I'm sure the Corsicans are largely happy with this state of affairs, but would probably like to rotate their island periodically to make a similar rude gesture towards France. We had been advised to drive the route in a clockwise direction, so that you are then on the inside all the way round and aren't looking out over the vertical drop offs. This would be excellent advice but for two things. 1.) The parking areas are always on the wrong side of the road to the way you are driving, so to stop and take a photo you need to veer over to the wrong side of the road in order to get to the parking area. As most of the parking areas are in the middle of blind corners, this tended to negate the advantage somewhat. 2.) It presumes that you want to drive all the way around. Having driven the whole Cap Corse in a day, I would recommend anybody else drive up the west side of the Cap to Port Centuri, have lunch, the turn round and drive back in the direction you've come. We went right around and the East side of the island Cap was much less interesting had much faster and straighter roads and the towns were bigger, more commercial and less interesting that the ones on the way up and the views were much less dramatic, while the drivers were much more erratic.
We got on the road early to avoid the traffic, but we probably needn't have bothered because I don't think there was much traffic on the road. We stopped at various points along the way to take photos and walk around some little towns. It took us the best part of 3 hours to get to the top of the Cape, where we stopped in a little town called Morsiglia for a coffee at a little little cafe and were served by the lovely and charming Mimi. Shortly on from Morsiglia, is the port at the top of the cape called Port Centuri, where we stopped and went for a walk around the village. It really is a beautiful setting with lots of fishing boats, nets, restaurants and shops. It's obviously a favourite for the luxury yachts as well, as there were several in the harbour or moored nearby. The day was once again very hot, so we grabbed our swimming gear and went for a swim at the nearby rocky beach, which was a wonderfully refreshing way to prepare for lunch. The water was luke warm, which was just perfect.
After drying off we headed for a nearby shady restaurant for a couple of seafood salads overlooking the small port. Leaving Centuri, the road immediately turned particularly rough as there was 25ks of road works, with very little actual action being done on them. It was very frustrating as the cars coming towards us were all over the road. Sadly beyond that, as I've mentioned before the road got quite boring and the scenery could never match that of the west coast of the Cape.
After a refreshing swim at the campground swimming pool, we hit the camp shop for our knocked up meal for the evening of Prosciutto, Parma Ham, Cheese, Bread and a bottle of Rose.
Some of the tents in the campground are monsters and it's interesting watching people erecting and packing them up. It is a real procedure compared to our 5 minute job and we're very pleased that we bought the one we did because our original plan was to buy something much more elaborate. We've seen quite a few of them in various campgrounds and they really are a mission to erect. For one, they don't have a ground sheet, so are much more free form that our one. We did watch one family spend over two hours erecting theirs the other night, so all in all I think we've done well with our 'tamed python in a bag'
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