We’re now at the extreme southern tip of Corsica, just a few
miles from Sardinia across the Bouches de Bonifacio.
This stretch of water has a fearsome
reputation.
For much of the year strong
westerlies blow here, whipping up a short, steep, sea and sending a three-mile
an hour or more current through the narrow straights between the two great
islands, like water going through a plughole.
Around the straights are small rocky archipelagos with sharp teeth ready
to rip the bottom out of unsuspecting boats.
As we approached Bonifacio going down the West coast of Corsica the wind
increased in strength and the seas got noticeably bigger and for the first time
we could see the faint low lying mass of Sardinia through the heat haze.
Bonifacio itself is a perfect natural harbour
just where one is needed, a bit like the White Cliffs of Dover with a sheltered
inlet behind them about three quarters of a mile long.
Approaching from the West one sees nothing of
the town, perched high on the cliffs and it’s hard to spot the entrance to the
harbour.
Then as we got nearer we saw
small boats coming and going through a gap in the cliffs, then a large ferry
disappeared, seemingly into solid rock.
Shooting through the narrow gap you are suddenly in a different world,
full of boats coming and going in calm waters, overlooked by the looming mass
of the Citadel.
We had intended to find
an anchorage near the top of the inlet, but stunned by the spectacle of the
harbour and with the insistent Westerly wind up our back, we got pushed into
the yacht harbour at the end of the inlet, where ushered into a berth, we have
been for the last four days.
On our second day we walked up the inlet side of the cliffs
to the City walls and on into the old town of Bonifacio, a maze of tall
medieval tenements almost entirely devoted to shops selling junk nobody needs
and restaurants with “typical” Corsican set menus.
As we reached the furthest line of houses, Russell,
with whom we have been travelling for the last couple of weeks, spotted a cafe
whose farthest window was filled with pure blue skylight.
We walked through the interior darkness and
onto a tiny enclosed balcony which hung out over the outer cliff edge
overlooking the Straights and Sardinia.
We sat and drank beers and from this vantage point saw the outer line of
tall medieval houses either side of us literally teetering on the edge of the
chalk cliffs.
Seagulls wheeled around in
front of us almost close enough to touch, their webbed feet tucked right into
their bodies as they made full use of the up draught from the cliffs.
From time to time a Hooded Crow would tumble
across our vision, an amateurish bag of black and grey feathers by comparison
to the swoop of the gulls in the powerful winds.
Leaning out of the balcony window we saw a
man snorkelling, tadpole like, in the rocks a couple of hundred feet below us.
The last five weeks have been packed with a bewildering
variety of experiences and impressions.
Visually our cruise has been dominated by the granite mass of Corsica,
its mountains rising up to two and half thousand metres above sea level.
The rock is very craggy, producing wildly
serrated ridges, often layer upon layer across the middle and far
distance.
In places the granite has been
strangely eroded to produce hollow caves and sculpture like shapes, so it is
difficult to tell what is natural and what is man made.
Much of the island is covered in dense scrub
known as macchi, very like the Scottish highlands, except that it gives off a
rich sweet scent as the Sun bakes it.
In
places there are green valleys with vineyards and other cultivation and overall
the island has a rich, fertile and unexploited feel.
In some places along the coast well fed
cattle graze by the largely deserted beaches and Corsica is the first place
where I have sunbathed next to five or six cows flaked out on the sand taking
an afternoon siesta.
Our constant travelling companion on this part of the
journey has been Dorothy Carrington’s “Granite Island”, a description of an
extended trip around the island in the late 1940s, after which she became a
permanent and much respected resident.
The island she describes is a magical place full of passion and
vendettas, lost archaeological treasures, sooth-sayers and women who go out
hunting the living in their dreams. This
world has now largely disappeared, although the Corsicans still seem an elusive
and mysterious people, dark, craggy and hook-nosed, a bit like their
island. Sometimes one hears a snatch of
conversation in Corsican, but then you listen harder and it just seems to be
French. At times I find Dorothy Carrington
a little too romantic and fanciful. For
example, she says that maybe the English are attracted to the island because
they recognise in it the visual world of Shakespeare. And yet travelling along the coast I kept
thinking of “The Tempest”, Corsica is the perfect setting for Prospero’s
island, dark and mysterious and full of strange sounds and confusing byways in
which parties of shipwrecked passengers could easily become lost and
confused... Maybe she has a point after
all.
The weather has been mostly hot, sunny and settled, so we
have spent much of our time at anchor in quiet bays and coves with good
swimming waters and fine beaches. We
drop into ports and villages in our tender to get food and water and the
occasional meal. Being tied to the land
by a slim anchor chain one’s connection to the life on shore often seems
tenuous. One arrives in new places with
a different context to the vast majority of tourists who travel by road and
one’s priorities are quite different too – water, rubbish bins and food shops,
rather than “places of interest”, souvenir shops and restaurants.
As to the questions we are partly making this trip to
answer, I’m afraid we have made little progress. Still I’m starting to find things that I
don’t want to do. For one thing I think
I will find it difficult ever to have only a two-week holiday again. As longer term tourists I think we are
starting to see the average holidaymaker more like the locals do – strangely
white people in new clothes who rush around a lot, often look very stressed and
who sometimes turn scarily pink. By the
same token I don’t think I want to be a long-term cruiser. We have met quite a few now and most are good
people, but I think it is a life which increasingly divorces one from, I
hesitate to call it the “real world”, but it’s something like that. Lying at anchor and swimming off deserted
beaches is great, but the world on shore begins to pass one by and you and it
start to become less and less relevant to one another. Sometimes the world of the shore and making a
contribution to something and earning some money begins to beckon. Talking of which I seem to be getting few and
fewer emails from the shore, perhaps as my relevance to other peoples lives
starts to fade, like my T-shirts in the Sun.
We spent five days with John and Chris in the Porto Cervo
anchorage, going for walks, swimming in the clear waters of the harbour and
dining on each other’s boats. I feel a
special affinity for what I think of as the “class of 2002” – those folks we
met last year who headed off down the French canals in search of something real
or imagined or both. As well as John and
Chris, who now plan to head for Spain, the class comprises Bernie and Sarah,
now somewhere on the Canal du Midi, Russell, racing round Sardinia before
heading back to the UK to sell his little boat and Thomas, Nicole and my Godson
Joshi, now back sailing in Holland following a passage from Spain to Northern
Europe by low loader.
