Corsica!

After coming back from Thailand and knowing Corsica was shortly to follow I pretty much just washed the clothes in my suitcase and then repacked them. I thought maybe a pair of shorts were looking less than stellar so decided to see if I could find another pair to replace them, maybe in a different colour (i.e. not white for a change). So I nipped into a local clothes store and saw a nice pair of green shorts and matching top which I thought were okay. Well that is until I put them on at home. Oh man, I've got to lose some weight - I looked like a green pepper on legs - so needless to say out came the trusty old white pair which are veterans of a few trips!

Then to add to my angst didn't I finally get a letter from the immigration and naturalisation people after five years, fixing my appointment with them in Grenoble for Thursday, 2 May - smack bang in the middle of my trip to Corsica!!! Damn, you wait five years and it gets scheduled at the worst possible time! The letter stated that the appointment was impérative, i.e. changes could be made only under exceptional circumstances, but what could I do? I was leaving the next day!!! So I wrote back to them immediately with a copy of my travel booking and crossed my fingers - and lo and behold they pushed it back to next Monday. Phew! So I've just spent the last hour getting together some additional paperwork that they requested (although why they couldn't request this the first time round I have no idea) and hopefully (again fingers crossed) I'm good to go!

Anyhoo, we set off for Corsica at 6 a.m. on the Friday morning, stopping around 9.30 a.m. for a picnic en route provided by the bus company. After that it was full speed ahead direction Toulon with another stop at a restaurant for lunch, again included in the price of the holiday (all meals and drinks were provided, actually - my kind of holiday)! The driver warned us ahead of time that there would be a film crew in the restaurant as they were making a documentary about the owner but the crew would respect anyone's wishes not to be filmed if they let it be known. I didn't particularly want to be filmed but a few of our group spoke to the crew, complimenting the food and so on, and then last night I saw the documentary on TF1 (a national TV channel) and caught a glimpse of my friend and myself but only from a distance, thank goodness. It was actually quite interesting because the owner had been an engineer who chucked everything in to open an all-you-can-eat restaurant, got it all set up - and then covid hit. But ever resourceful he went into providing take-out food (not particularly prevalent here pre-covid) and then on to fine tune his set up down to the last centime by having the food for his now two restaurants cooked in one central kitchen, from scratch and wasting absolutely nothing. He may not have trained as a chef but he was obviously a helluv'an entrepreneur!

After that we were to head on to the port of Toulon to catch the ferry, but as we were way ahead of schedule, the driver volunteered to drive us up over the route des Crêts to take in the scenery - and that was when our bus stalled half way up a mountain!!! Talk about nail-biting when you're on a bus at 45° on a narrow winding road! It may have seemed like ages to us, but in reality it was probably more like 10 minutes that we were stuck there. Turns out the bus's automatic gears didn't like the sudden climb and blocked the driver from switching it into manual and first gear. It got sorted in the end but what a great way to start your holiday!

The port of Toulon - a google picture,
mine was crap!

When we finally got to the
top of the route des Crêts!

We eventually boarded our ferry where we had dinner in a rather nice restaurant and then headed to our cabins for the overnight journey. Next morning my friend and I ended up sitting next to an older Swiss couple (he was 86 and she was 82) and found out what an interesting life they'd lead! The lady had been a ballerina back in the '60s and '70s and had travelled all over the world with her dance company, including to Iran (where they had been invited to a dinner with the Shah), Somalia, Afghanistan, Sudan and so on - all places that would probably be off limits today. At the time though she said they had no hesitation in getting into a taxi and taking off to visit the sites. The people were wonderful and they felt completely safe, which goes to show what a sad world we have become! Anyway next morning we sat with them for breakfast and they started bitching at each other - "have you taken your tablets?", "those aren't your heart tablets", "yes they are" and so on but I found it amusing to think that such an interesting couple could be bitching about their tablets. I like people watching and generally like most people, and this holiday more than fulfilled my "people watching" quota! As we were about to get up I thought my friend was kicking my foot under the table regarding their shenanigans but when I looked down I saw that my bloody tennis shoe had finally given up the ghost and the sole had come off!!!!! Now I have plenty of hiking boots and tennis shoes but I only took this one pair, and to make matters worse, the flipflops that I had packed were in my suitcase on the coach - and we weren't allowed to go down to the car deck of course! So my friend was doubled up laughing as I limped along like Hopalong Cassidy with one leg now shorter than the other and making farting sounds to boot - but what else could I do?

At least the inner part hung on
for a bit longer!

When we arrived in Bastia we picked up our guide (who turned out to be wonderful) and had a wander round the old town before heading on to our first hotel. There was quite a bit of "go home you French bast@@@rds" graffiti as there is a fairly strong separatist movement in Corsica, but then if the French really do stay away how will the Corsicans make their money? Certainly not from agriculture! I get it, to a certain extent, and can see why many feel the "mainlanders" are pricing the locals out of their own homes, but to my mind isn't it better to stop second home owners (as they are trying to do) rather than discourage tourism from the mainland altogether?

As we were walking round one of the ladies said to me "oh you're English, I have a friend who is English. Her name is Wendy, do you know her"? I laughed because I didn't like to point out that the population of England is around 56 million, but bugger me if I didn't actually know her friend!!! Yep, we had met years ago when our kids took skiing lessons together so I guess the joke was on me!

After that we drove up through the tiny villages of Pinu and Nonza, and then along the Golfe de Saint Florent to arrive at the first hotel in the north of the island. It had been a tiring journey but guess what - things were about to get worse!

(A few of the scenic pictures below are google images because you really can't get much of a shot from a moving bus on a winding goat track!)

Nonza!

Pinu (thank you Mr. Google)!

Golfe de Saint Laurent