Bastia, Corsica

October 11th – 15th, 2007


Thursday, October 11, 2007

So I planned out a trip to Corsica this weekend. I wanted to take my bright orange and yellow bike (who from here on in will be referred to as “Pumpkin”), and go on my own to explore for a few days. The cheapest way to get there was to head to Toulon, a city just over an hour away from here, and then take a 10-hour boat ride to the island. Looking up my options I discovered that taking the train to Toulon, although it would take about two hours, was cheaper than taking the bus. So I packed a backpack for the weekend and I strapped my sleeping bag to the back of Pumpkin and I hopped on the train to Toulon. I got there with plenty of time to bike around a little and then find the ferry terminal on the water. When I went to go buy my ticket for the boat, the woman told me it would cost me about 50€ for one way! I couldn’t believe it, on the internet when I had looked it up, it had been 15€ (or 19€ with my bike). She told me that I should have booked it on the internet and that now it was at the last minute, so that’s why it was so expensive. So instead, I bought a ticket for the next night and the return ticket for Sunday night (19€ each way), and decided to go explore Toulon a bit and find a place to stay there for the night.

As it was already 9pm, it was dark, and most of the city was dead. I looked around for a hostel or for anyone who knew of a cheap place to stay. The cheapest was a hotel at 25€ a night. Good grief—it would be cheaper to go back to Aix for the night and sleep in my own bed! So that’s what I did. And somehow even, I managed to not pay to get back to Aix (a mix of confusion with the broken ticket machine and a really nice bus driver). I got back to Aix at midnight, ate some delicious pasta that Ben had put aside for me when I texted him the situation, and went to bed. (On a side note, texting is the only thing anyone ever does here. No one calls each other, it seems. And some people are incredibly fast at sending messages. I couldn’t text quickly to save my life—yet!)

Friday, October 12, 2007

Friday morning was spent getting an “urgent” email asking me if I had gotten my birth certificate translated (bloody Anglophone province of mine), and me phoning the translator to see if it was ready. It was ready, so I went to pick it up (after paying the post-bargaining price of 32€), and delivered it to my school which FINALLY completed my dossier to send to the police station to apply for the other half of my visa which will enable me to stay in France for a year and re-enter the country if I leave it. Hooray, it’s been a month, and I’m finally done putting up with all of that stuff! The rest of the day was relaxing enough. I caught a bus at 5pm to Toulon, and explored the city a bit, bought some dinner, and sat on the waterfront eating, watching the sunset, and talking with random people walking by.




I left Pumpkin on the car deck, and then boarded the boat around 9:30pm. It was more than I was expecting. It was really elaborate, and much fancier than I thought it would be.


They had rooms that you could rent for the night, and they had Pullman chairs that you could also pay an extra amount for. I didn’t pay more than cheapest price possible, and yet, I had a whole couch to myself for the entire night!





Saturday, October 13, 2007

We arrived at 7am on Saturday in the city of Bastia, and while waiting for the tourist office to open, I took my bike and rode around the city and the seawall just taking in all the great colours that the sunrise was creating.


Coming back to the tourist office, I talked to a Polish guy that had just hitch-hiked from Poland all the way to Bastia and was going to further hitch-hike across the island to get to his girlfriend’s place. I got a map from the tourist office and then took my bike, and just “gave’er” heading south.

Some of the pictures I took along the way:










On the beach above, about 12 km from the city, I stopped to rest and eat a little of the food I had left over from last night. Even though it was a hot 22 degrees, the beach was completely dead, other than the occasional jogger, horseback-rider, dog-walker, and one old topless woman. I was sitting on a part of the beach in front of a campsite that I guess would be just packed full of people and kids in the summer, but it was deserted at the moment. I had the beach to myself, and I was even able to use the little cobweb-ridden changing cabins on the beach that belonged to the campsite. It was pretty quiet until this group of seven men and one woman showed up with a ukulele. They were all around their thirties and they looked like they were quite the fun bunch. The second they showed up, some of them started stripping off their clothes as they were running to the water and taking a running jump into the ocean. I heard them talking about forgetting to bring a ball, and when they started throwing pinecones to each other, I decided to get up and walk over there with disc in hand. We ended up tossing around the frisbee in the water for a good portion of time and they told me they were a Franco-Belgian band that had been performing in town a couple nights before. Sure enough, they gave me their site http://www.myspace.com/mysaintandre (they should be paying me for this advertising), and then we played volleyball (turns out they had remembered a ball) for a while longer before going our separate ways. I biked for another hour and a half or so through what seemed like the middle of nowhere. Fields, sheep, cows, horses, and a forest fire—I was really in the boonies.


I ended up in a tiny town called Crocetta where I found a grocery store, ate lunch, and took a different route back to Bastia. This so-called “different route” included 15 km of driving on the highway. At times there was an entire lane just for bikes, but then sometimes, without warning, it ended, and I’d find myself being passed much too-close-for-comfort by cars and trucks going at 110km/hr. It was a little nerve-wracking.

Now, as if being alone… on an island… with a bike… in high-speed traffic… wasn’t sketchy enough, I decided I would sleep outside near the water, so I could see the stars when I slept and the sunrise when I woke up. I found a ‘nice’ place on the balcony of what appeared to be a shutdown diving school.


I locked up Pumpkin, put my backpack at the bottom of my sleeping bag, cocooned myself into it, and slept until I woke at 7:20 am to watch the sunrise.

It was a bit of a cold night because the wind had really picked up, but the morning was gorgeous and peaceful. I stood leaning against the balcony, wrapped in my sleeping bag, watching the water and the sun. Then some guy who was doing his morning walk along the beach saw me and came to talk to me. We got to talking for a while, and then went to go grab a “café” and a “pain au chocolat” at a little café on the waterfront. This guy was originally from Morocco, but had been living on the island for over fourteen years. Now, I consider myself to be a good judge of character, but even being a good judge of character, I knew that what I did next was pretty risky. To argue anyone who says I was stupid for doing what I did next, well, just realize that it’s taking risks that makes travelling more worthwhile and I wouldn’t have all these crazy stories if I didn’t take a chance every now and again.

Since it was his day off, he offered to take me driving along the coast for a tour of “Cap Corse”—the northern most peninsula of the island. Originally, I had wanted to cross the peninsula (as it is only about 12km wide) and get to the other side. However, upon arriving in Bastia, I could see that there was an enormous mountain range blocking my way. That’s why I decided to go south on the first day, and north on the second. In the car, I went much more north than I was planning on going. We did the whole tour of the peninsula, and it wasn’t hard to take amazing pictures like the following:













A picture of south of Bastia. On Saturday, I took my bike all around the lake you see here.



After the five-hour drive, we got back to Bastia at around 2 in the afternoon, exchanged numbers, and explored the churches for a while. As it was a Sunday, churches are the only things in all of France that are open. (Corsica is still a part of France, but they have a little bit of QSS going on--Quebec Separatist Syndrome. They even have their own language, which sounds like a mix of Italian, Spanish, French, but is unlike any of those.) So I explored the churches a bit, and then wandered into the old part of Bastia: la Citadelle.





Oratoire de la confrérie de l’Immaculée Conception et l’église Saint Jean Baptiste

In the Citadel, some old man stopped me at the entrance and told me that if I was touring around, there wasn’t much interesting to see around there. When I told him it didn’t matter, that I just like exploring, he laughed and opened up a little. I started asking him questions, and he invited me to sit down at a café next door and drink hot chocolate. We talked for a while, and I discovered he had once been a tour guide for the little train that takes tourists around the city in the summer. He knew a lot about the place. He even took me on my very own personal tour of the Citadel. Now, since he had to have been over sixty, and he was using crutches to walk, it was the absolute slowest tour of my life! At times, it felt like we were walking backwards!






Palais des Gouverneurs (the town jail cells were right underneathe!)

Whether we were going forwards or backwards, it didn’t matter, he was a really interesting man, and seemed to know everyone that walked by. He even got a friend of his to open up this mini-museum even though it was past closing time. I say “mini-museum” because it was just that: mini. This man had spent his life constructing a mini city out of rocks, plaster, little figurines, and anything else he could get his hands on. He even turned it on for me, so there were lights, movements, trains, and music. It was pretty impressive.


After the tour, we sat down, and ate croissants and drank more hot chocolate while talking with another of his friends who was from Toulon. The guy who took me for the drive in the morning called me on my cell, and asked me what I was doing. I told him I was with someone, and that I could call him back after if he wanted me to. After thanking the old man for the tour and leaving back down to the downtown area, I phoned the guy from the morning back. It was around 6pm, and I didn’t have to be back at the ferry terminal until 8, so when he asked to meet up, I said sure. He picked me up and took me driving around the city for a bit. This time with him, I was getting a much different vibe from that morning. It was creeping me out a little. He told me that he didn’t like when I told him that I was “with someone” earlier, and that he was reassured after having gone out and, from a distance, seen me sitting at the café with the old man that afternoon. He told me he had a present for me and gave me a ring. Whoa. You spend a few hours with someone and you’re giving them a ring?! That doesn’t seem weird at all?! I refused it and he said that he would throw it out if I gave it back to him. Um, buddy? You’re a little intense. So I wore the ring as he drove me to the terminal. I didn’t want to be in the car any longer, and then before boarding, he lectured me on travelling alone, and to be careful about meeting the wrong kind of people, and to not be so nice to everyone. I then gave him back the ring saying, “this isn’t an insult. I appreciate the thought. Please, don’t throw it out. Save it for next time.” I don’t want the guy to waste a perfectly good ring by throwing it out.

I boarded the boat, quickly claimed a couch for myself again, and was so tired that I fell asleep even despite the cheering that was going on behind me for the rugby semi-finals.

Before falling asleep, I thought to myself, “man, you didn’t get yourself a single little souvenir. You should have taken the ring!” I’m joking. I was leaving Corsica with:
a.) A hundred amazing photos, some really interesting stories;
b.) A scraped knuckle, elbow, and shoulder from when a chunk of the sidewalk was missing and instead of falling with my bike into oncoming traffic, I forced myself to fall into the side of the wall;
c.) And a perfectly symmetrical ring of nine or ten mosquito bites around my eyes and eyebrows from sleeping outside with my sleeping bag covering everything but my eyes. It wasn’t pretty.