Hiking a course en Corse of course

The hiking in Corsica (Corse in French) was neither as spectacular, nor as difficult as hiking in the Alps. We did a 6 day hike in the south from the east coast to the west coast called the Mare e Mare Sud. There is a 15 day hike from the north west coast to the south east coast, known as the GR 20, which is apparently very challenging. The GR20 seems to have cult status among serious hikers and whenever we mentioned that we would be hiking in Corsica, people wanted to know if we would be hiking the GR 20. We didn’t.

We had a relaxing and enjoyable time although we didn’t meet any talking horses (we came close but more of that later). We stayed in delightful gites along the way and were very very well fed. We ate communally 4 of the 6 evenings although we didn’t get in quite as much French practice as in the Alps. We paid to have our luggage moved from gite to gite and also to have private rooms. All very luxurious after the Alps.

On the first day we walked about 10 kms from Porto Vecchio to a town called Cartalavenu. The day got off to an excellent start when the man transporting our luggage picked us up right on time and drove us 5 kms to the trail head in his lux barge Audi A6. We passed our fellow hikers walking along the road to the trail head, already baking in the heat. When we caught up with some of them later that day over dinner we were accused of being cheaters but we just smiled smugly and thought of our lovely 10 minutes of air conditioning.

Corsica had suffered some devastating bush fires in the week before we arrived. The hiking company had assured us that all was ok to continue with the hike but when we arrived at the trail head there was a sign forbidding hiking due to high fire danger. Meanwhile a family headed straight up the trail ignoring the sign. We hesitated for a second before deciding that we’d prefer to burn rather than fight the hiking company for a refund so off we went – albeit warily - and with eyes peeled for signs of smoke. Needless to say we came across quite a number of others who were also on the trail. Adherence to rules is not a French (or in this case Australian) tribute.

The first day consisted of hiking uphill for 4 hours and ascending about 1,000m. Fortunately we were en forme after the Alps so we coped ok except for the HEAT. The first part of the walk was in direct sunlight and we were soaking wet within a few minutes. Fortunately from then on, and generally along the hike, there was a lot of shade and quite a good breeze.

View back of the East Coast and Porto Vecchio

Dinner on the first evening was communal and we sat with a Dutch couple and an Irish (she) and French (he) couple. We all had to speak French because the French guy said that languages were not his thing and his girlfriend confirmed that he was basically only capable of ordering a guiness in English. She, on the other hand, was fluent in French and German. The Dutch couple made an attempt to get her to agree to speak German – but she resisted. Naturally the Dutch were fluent in English and spoke excellent conversational French. We really are beginning to hate how multi lingual Europeans are.

Now we think that our understanding of spoken French is improving but for much of the conversation we actually thought that the Irish lady was Dutch. This is partly due to the fact that ‘’irlandaise’’ and ‘’hollondaise” sound quite similar in French – stupid silent ‘’h’’ in hollondaise. In addition she had had a discussion with the Dutch couple about how she spends a lot of time working in northern Belgium with Dutch and Dutch speaking people. It was only when I asked her boyfriend whether he spoke English or German, and she interrupted to say that he can only order a guiness, that we started to get suspicious. She then switched to English for a moment – we had worked out that she could speak English but so can everyone – and I actually thought that she had an American accent. There was much amusement for the others as we worked out that she was Irish and not Dutch. I wish I could say that she didn’t look Irish but she had pale skin and red hair so there goes that excuse.

Village of Carbini

From the second day onwards the gites were in small villages. It was at this point that we discovered that the hiking notes said that all the accommodation was well marked in each village. THIS WAS A LIE. On our second day, we arrived in the village of Levie after 5 hours of walking in the heat and we were completely unable to find our accommodation. I ended up approaching a Corsican man in his garden and he was incredibly helpful in giving us directions.
A couple of interesting things about Corsicans. As far as we can tell most prefer to be called Corsican, not French. Of course the majority also want to stay part of France – a very strange relationship. You can also very often tell a genuine Corsican – such as our helpful gardener - because they speak French with a distinctly Italian accent. As someone who has actually spent more time studying Italian than French this can be quite helpful but Dale found it partly amusing and partly disconcerting. History Note: The Pisans and then the Genoese controlled Corsica for about 700 years, before they handed it over to the French in the 18th century (in much the same way that you give away an unwanted pet).

Levie was fairly typical of the villages we stayed in. In some ways they are not as pretty as the mainland French villages because they seem to be constructed of the same grey stone materials and therefore look quite uniform and bland. In addition some of them were quite deserted. On the other hand the buildings that are well maintained look elegant and solid.

In terms of the terrain, the area that we walked through is called the Alta Rocca (sounds Italian doesn’t it?) and I presume that it means ‘’high rocks’’. So – the terrain is quite rocky. We also spent quite a lot of time walking through forests (lots of walking over tree roots) and decaying farm land. In particular, we spent a lot of time walking between very interesting stone walls that appeared to have once separated farming fields. Both the walls and the fields were quite neglected. There were some olive and chestnut groves but nothing seemed well maintained. On the first and last days of the walk we got very good views of the respective coast lines.

Typical path, running between two decaying stone walls

Towns were dotted high along the crest of the mountain tops

Rocky peaks punctuated the hike

On the third day we had a shortish walk to the town of Quenza. The gite we stayed in was a gem. It was a renovated chateau that accommodated about 30 people. Our room was beautifully decorated and scented. In fact everything was beautifully decorated and scented. We presently discovered that madame, le proprietresse was very particular about the smell of her gite. When we first arrived we were greeted by her husband (and the chef), who politely asked us to take off our hiking boots and to leave them, along with our batons, in a small cupboard near the entrance. As we finished doing this madame arrived (probably in her late 30s or early 40s, very trim with long black hair and she spoke exceptionally good English) and we were standing in our socks. She gasped and asked us to take our socks off as well. We enquired whether there was somewhere that we could hang our socks and she responded that we should give her all our dirty clothes and that she would wash them. We thought this sounded fabulous although we had sneaking suspicions that she was actually planning to burn them (not unreasonably).
She then launched into her horror story about a guest who had come off the GR 20, had not washed for 3 days, and whose socks had stunk out the gite and caused numerous complaints. As a result she refuses to have anyone stay who she knows is hiking the GR 20 and she washes all hikers’ clothes. She didn’t stop there however, she made a great song and dance over the fact that the stinky guest was French and that the French don’t know how to travel. We have absolutely no idea what she meant by this and have put it down to the general Corsican – French antipathy. However we had got the message loud and clear and plastered deodorant and splashed aftershave all over ourselves.

Before dinner we sat out in the lovely garden opposite an enclosure with the very vocal family donkey. This insistent braying for food is the closest we got to a talking horse (of course). We were served a complementary aperitif and madame l’hostesse wandered around having a few words with us all. While this was taking place her youngest daughter (5 or 6 years old) approached Dale with a 5 centime piece and insisted that he take it and put it in his pocket. We had a lovely little chat with her until I had to tell her that I didn’t understand what she was saying because she spoke better French than me. She then told us that she doesn’t speak very good French but she does also speak Corsican and some English because her mother speaks English. The lesson was that we can have basic (not complicated) conversations in French with 5 year olds!

Mr Ed’s distant relation chatting with guests

Each town had a war memorial listing those lost in WW1. It was clear most villages lost entire generations of families. The memorials were predictably statues of soldiers accept for this quite moving monument. At the bottom it also says "When we no longer kill, they will be well avenged".

The following day we had a short walk to the little town of Aullene, which was quite run down. There was a small general store in the town where the elderly, bent over proprietresse sold us very expensive lunch provisions for the following days. She had clearly had a life time’s experience in persuading people to buy her expensive (and delicious) saussicons. It was a little intimidating to approach the store because madame and 2 elderly gents were sitting on a bench outside the store watching the world going by, except that not much of the world was actually going by, so we felt that the day’s activity revolved around us walking around town and into the shop. Of course there had probably been a family vengeance killing in the street earlier in the day but that would be normal in a Corsican village, whereas guys hiking around the village are no doubt considered bizarre.

Aullene, which was almost razed by fires – note the blackened hills in the distance

The countryside was dotted with disused churches

The final 2 days were quite long but we finally got to swim in the lovely cool rivers. On the first of these days we reached a delightful spot under a bridge at about 11 am. A Belgian lady was already swimming and eventually her husband was cajoled in as well. A few minutes after arriving we were also joined by a couple of lovely Parisien boys. Note that we discovered all this detail later on over dinner. We slid across some rocks into a deepish part of the river following the example of the Belgian lady. From there we were able to swim about 10 metres to a small waterfall. This was where the Parisien boys preferred to dive into the water despite Dale’s shouted warnings not to dive (vous ne plongez pas). They were mad but fortunately neither of them sustained any injuries and we were all able to splash around happily before donning the hiking gear and heading up a long hill.

Swimming with the Parisiens

Our stop on this day was the village of St Lucie de Tollano and it was out favourite on the hike. It was also the biggest and had 2 cafes as well as an internet cafe.

St Lucie-de-Tollano

Our “character-filled" gite in St Lucie-de-Tollano

Dinner for this evening had been organised at the Refuge up the road. We were running a little late because we were getting another blog entry ready at the local internet cafe. When we arrived it turned out that they were waiting for us, so we immediately sat down at our table of 10-12 people and lo and behold I had our Belgian swimming companions sitting next to me and Dale had our lovely Parisien swimming boys sitting next to him. I felt like I was ordered by the Belgian guy to converse in English. This was the second time this had happened in the space of a few days with guys who were Flemish. I think they get offended if you don’t converse with them in English in recognition of how good their English is (Ed – I think it is a protest against their Walloon countrymen). Nevertheless, they were nice people and they told us about a secret spot they’d heard about for swimming the following day.

We also discovered that one of the Parisien boys had just done the reverse of us and spent 6 months travelling around Australia. Dale was complemented on his French and told that he speaks much better French than an Australian friend of theirs who is actually living in Paris. The other boy worked for Christian Dior (naturellement) and we heard a little gossip about one of the wives of a dead Australian motoring personality. Australia boy works for the Parisien river and water authorities and Dale very quickly asked him what he thought about the hydroelectricity plant that we’d seen being built close to St Lucie de Tollano. He told us that he was surprised to see the plant being built and that in Paris they are thinking about ways to replace hydroelectricity plants with energy from other sources.

On our final day we had a pretty long walk to the final refuge at Burgo, just outside Propriano. It was another gloriously sunny day and we stopped twice to swim. We had our first swim at about 11am by another beautiful bridge.

Bridge over the River

Floating in the cool calm waters

Perhaps the French could spend some stimulus money on bridge repairs...

The next swim was 6 hrs later at a swimming hole just before we reached Burgo. We were lucky to run into the Belgian couple who had just located the secret swimming spot. We dutifully walked on another 5 minutes and discovered this incredibly deep round swimming hole with quite a decent waterfall feeding in on one side. It wasn’t very secret however as a large group of people had just arrived and the guys were proving their masculinity by jumping in from rocks and swinging in from trees. Fortunately it was very very deep and no one was maimed but we were gobsmacked and wanted to ask if they’d ever heard of people being maimed from jumping into rivers. A few nights later I actually saw a report on the TV news about the serious injuries that had occurred to people somewhere else in France from jumping into rivers and the difficulties that the authorities are having in changing behaviour. Despite all the Tarzan and George of the Jungle antics we had a terrifically refreshing swim after a long day in the heat.

Idyllic Swimming Hole

For an hour or so before reaching the swimming hole we had been seeing fabulous views of the Corsican west coast around Propriano. The beaches are truly beautiful. However, from the swimming hole to the refuge we had to walk through terrain that had been burnt out by the recent bush fires. This was eerie and it was interesting to see how close the fire had got to some buildings including the refuge.

View of Propriano on the West coast from the refuge at Burgo: note the heat scorched trees from the bushfires the week before in the foreground

The following morning we needed to be down at Propriano by 10 in order to catch a bus to Bonifacio on the southernmost tip of Corsica. The hiking company had a taxi booked for 9 and Propriano is only about 10 minutes away so everything seemed dandy. At 9.10 no taxi had arrived so I called the taxi company and ascertained that they didn’t have any booking and wouldn’t be able to pick us up at all that day – tres desole blah bah blah. Dale then called the hiking company who said to leave it with them and that they would call us back – although they hung up before getting a phone number. In the meantime we mentioned our problem to the refuge owner who said that there were a number of other taxi companies and that Propriano is only a few minutes away; but we’d tried one of these companies and they also couldn’t send any one. At 9.30 we still didn’t have a taxi and the problem was that if we missed the bus we’d have to spend the rest of the day sitting around Propriano with our luggage until the next bus left at 5pm. We called the hiking company again who insisted that they were working on it and that they would call us back but again hung up before we could give them our phone number. At this point we decided that it was the hiking company’s problem to move us and that if we missed the bus – que sera sera. The next thing we heard was the Refuge owner having an incredibly heated argument on the phone and then he appeared all of a sudden, shouting ‘’monsieurs’’ at us as he got into his beat up 2 seater short wheel base land cruiser 70s series. We assume that the argument had been with the hiking company so we threw our luggage in – and Dale also threw himself in the back with the luggage – and we went racing down the hill like a bat out of hell. This short trip was about as close to hell as you will ever get in a vehicle and Dale was white when we arrived having been thrown around the back without a seat belt. I put my seat belt on immediately but naturally Mr refuge owner only put his on as we got into Propriano. We arrived right on 10 and fortunately the bus was running a few minutes late, which also gave us a few minutes to reflect on the fact that we’d survived 6 days of walking and a 10 minute horror ride in the land cruiser. We didn’t bother to be particularly thankful to Mr refuge owner.

Next time: What sane people do with their time in Corsica