Bonifacio

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.