Gold in the dirt
13 - 16 June, Ian
For the first time since we left home we've had a
run of days that you would have to call unhappy. I described the start of this
episode last time, and I'll tell you about the rest below. Even amongst all of
this, though, we are still in one of my favourite places and you'll notice more
good superlatives than bad ones.
On Monday Paula and I caught the bus from Calvi to Porto on the west coast. As we headed out we couldn't understand why a drive of only around 70 km should be scheduled to take 2.5 hours. We soon found out. The road wends up and over the Corsican hills, keeping to even contours - and hence winding around a lot - as best it can. For long stretches the road isn't sealed, there is usually a severe drop to the side and it is only rarely wide enough for a coach and a car to pass. At one point another coach came towards us, which, considering that we were on a scheduled daily service, caused more commotion than you might expect, with our driver having to get out and insist that the other coach backed down the road several hundred yards. The views out to sea were fantastic, although the approaches to each bend, when the coach necessarily had to drive straight up to the edge of the road before turning sharply at the last minute, were heart stopping. This was another of those times when Paula was unexpectedly more worried by the height thing than I was.
As well as shouting volubly to the driver of the oncoming coach, our driver hooted and shouted hellos to pretty much every workman that we passed en route. His Corsican was interesting, and I didn't recognise any French in it. It had the intonations of Italian but seemingly a different vocabulary.
At around the half way point the road surface improved, and despite there being improvements in neither road width nor straightness our driver took this as a cue to speed up and cut out the warning hoots that he'd been giving on the approaches to the blind bends. On the long run into Porto the drop seawards became a sheer vertical fall of several hundred feet. As I was looking out of the window wondering why we'd stopped the hooting thing and thinking what a bad place it would be for an accident a Renault 5 flew round the next blind bend and smashed into the front of the coach. Fortunately it was head-on - a glancing contact would have risked flipping the Renault into the sea. No-one was hurt and after the drivers exchanged details we carried on to Porto. Since we arrived on time I have to assume that one crash is factored into the schedule.
From Porto we had a minibus connection up to our first stop at Ota. This is a beautiful little hill village and we stayed in a rare double room at one of the two gites d'etapes. Dinner in the evening, taken on the terrace looking over the valley, was excellent. I always hesitate to say that anything is the best thing ever but I'm unable to recall a soup that any better than our starter (my apologies if you made me one). It had an excellent dark meat stock supplemented with kidney beans, pasta, courgettes, carrots and garlic. After that we had what I believe was spinach, brocciu and mint cannelloni. All excellent, and such a contrast to the plain rice or pasta that you can get in the GR20 refuge. Incidentally, if you ever do a long distance walk to lose weight you want to be careful which one you do. The GR20 will work for sure - even if you take decent food with you, carrying it will offset the calorie intake. On the other hand, when we did the English Coast to Coast walk we stayed weight-neutral because the dozen or so miles of hill walking each day was matched by the big breakfasts, the hearty dinners and the beer. I suspect that most of the trails in Corsica are more like the latter than the former, especially if you take the trouble, as you should, to arrange to stay places where you can eat well.
After dinner about 20 locals came out into the street to have a laugh at the eastern European coach that had mistakenly driven up the Ota road and which was trying to weave through the bends and parked cars in the hope of finding somewhere to turn. One guy moving one of the cars gave a top-notch display of high-speed downhill-and-round-a-couple-of-bends reversing. You get the sense that life here is cheap, or fatalistically given up to the gods. There may be a relationship between the driving and the large number of roadside family shrines. The names on the shrines and monuments echo the Italianate sound of the language: a typical list of engraved names that I noted began Antonini, Bacci, Bellomini, Benedetti, Bertozzi...
During the night there was a huge electrical storm overhead and torrential rain but by morning it was clear. Possibly sensing that I'd like some extra walking, Paula had left her hat and fleece on the Calvi bus so before breakfast on Tuesday I took the minibus back to Porto, retrieved them and walked the 5 km back up the valley (there's no alternative). In some of the fields along the roadside the olive nets were already laid out, which seems like an appealingly lazy way to harvest a paying crop but is supposedly hard work. Dogs, apparently kennelled in sheds in the scrub and I'm guessing kept for the popular pastime of flushing out boar for shooting (the verge was littered with shotgun cases), barked angrily to each other along and across the valley.
Given the state of Paula's bruises, I'd planned our route to give us a couple of days recovery time after the GR20 followed by a very short day (Ota to Evisa) from the Tra Mare e Monte route, then two long days from the Mare e Mare Nord, setting us in Corte on Wednesday night. The haul up along the Spelunca gorge from Ota is a lovely walk. The trail passes over a couple of very elegant, implausibly slender Genoese bridges, and is shaded all the way by Chestnut woodland. One of the reasons that I love walking in Corsica so much is the ubiquitous aroma of the maquis - even at home I would choose (if I could) to have, say, honeysuckle trailing over a wall in preference to a plant with more vivid flowers. On the walk up from Ota there were an exceptional number of fig trees. Even though the fruits are not yet ripe enough to pick and eat (which is a shame), they add another lovely scent to the walk. There are, apparently, also salamanders in this part of the island but I've never seen one.
The climb through and up the gorge involves 620 m of sharp ascent but we'd finished it by lunchtime. This was just as well. We were walking up into cloud and as we arrived in Evisa the rain started to fall heavily. The hotel where we'd made a reservation was perfect but unfortunately they'd double booked us. Realising that her husband had got his days confused, the American wife of the owner apologetically ran us round to another place instead, which was fine. We kicked around in our room and our sheltered terrace reading and watching wild pigs scrabble around in the field opposite; later, when the rain stopped, we had a walk through Evisa, reminiscing about our last trip several years ago and checking out the start point for the next day's walk.
For dinner, which turned out to be significant, I had a charcuterie plate and wild boar over tagliatelle, while Paula had a salad and an entrecote steak. After dinner they served us with an eau de vie flavoured with a branch of myrtle.
On Wednesday morning, after another dramatic lightning storm in the night, Paula was feeling ill from the heavy meal but we set off anyway on what was planned to be a very long day's walking through the Niolu. The initial part of the walk heads up through pretty chestnut woods that lead to natural river pools - it's prime day-tripper territory. As we walked Paula's cramping stomach aches got worse until she had to stop and to throw up repeatedly. It was another of those What do you do? moments. Eight or nine hours further trekking was out of the question so we returned to Evisa to take stock. With public transport options very limited (the only bus out of Evisa goes to Ajaccio), three rooms booked in Vizzavone tonight and Paula still throwing up an hour later we stopped in at the hotel where the nice American lady worked, bought some water and ordered a taxi back to Calvi. The owners were really kind (the guy came and chatted with me and brought me an espresso while Paula lay on the couch) and, with it being such a pleasant place too, you should stay there if you're passing through the town.
So here we are.
One advantage of being here so long is that I get a third bite at the cherry. I'm determined to take the opportunity that we have from Paula's parents being here to do some more walking and I came up with three alternatives. Paula is still sick and she has to hang up her boots for now. My options are:
1) Hope to intercept the French couple at Vizzavona and join them for the GR20 sud.
2) Do the return walk alone from Vizzavona to Porto on the Mare e Mare nord variant.
3) Do the Mare e Mare sud with Zoe.
These choices leaked out to the other family members and (although it's the alternative with the highest chance of being aborted) I'm delighted that Zoe has strongly lobbied for option 3. So last night I got the (new) map and the guide book out again and this morning I made a bunch of calls to reserve us beds at gites en route. Paula is recuperating here with her father and this afternoon her mother (Vera) will join me and the girls taking the train for a couple of days at Vizzavona. On Saturday Vera and Heidi will return to Calvi while Zoe and I will head out to Ajaccio, Propriano and then the walk, insha 'llah.
We were totally miserable when we returned home yesterday and I was very cheered by the nice messages some of you sent me - thank you! Mike raised a question in an email that I can answer here, viz: given that aptitude in one physical discipline (say swimming) transfers much more poorly than you'd expect to aptitude in another (say running), how do you prepare for walking up a pile of hills except by doing it? Well I, of course, have now prepared for my third attempt by my two previous ones. This aside, I'd cite three types of important prep - maybe others can add more:
First, to get fit you should run. The factors that determine running aptitude such as aerobic fitness, leg strength, weight, pain tolerance and so forth are pretty much the same as hill walking. I'd say as a rule that if you can run the distance you're going to walk up and down hill with a pack then you'll be fine. Conversely, I have in the past walked 20 miles with a rucsac when I couldn't have even run five but it was hard work.
Second, you have to pack well, and in particular have just what you need and no more in your rucsac. If you ever plan to do a long walk let me come round to your place first and throw stuff out of your bag for you.
Third, there's the mental side. Every long walk is a sequence of Go/Stop decisions and you reach the end only if they all come up Go. Sometimes, as in both of our cases, you have to Stop and pressing ahead is just dumb; but there's also a margin where your choices come down to how determined you are. I'd strongly advise anyone doing a long walk to (a) look at the route map lots and lots of times and try to visualise where you'll be and what it's going to be like hour by hour, and (b) think through the things that will present you with decision points, such as fatigue, bad weather, muscle aches, unexpected time loss through getting lost, accommodation screw ups etc and try to prepare yourself for how you'll make such decisions when they arise and what your contingencies are; this may help you make more confident decisions in real time.
I started this entry by writing about flecks of gold in the mud of misery. Now let me tell you about the biggest nugget, the bullion bar...
After I'd planned our last trip I'd discovered that there was a concert of Corsican polyphonic (choral) music here last night and I'd been very disappointed that I couldn't go. Well I did and it was one of the high points of our three months away so far. It was a sell-out with around 100 people packed into Calvi's tiny cathedral. Five guys sang 15 songs and then an encore of about five further songs unaccompanied and with no mikes or anything. They all sang together on only a minority of the songs; more typically three of four sang together and in a few songs one guy sang alone.
You wouldn't believe how much volume these guys generate; it surrounds you. It's as if the sound rips out of the fabric of space itself rather than coming from the singer. The uncredited sixth artist is the cathedral, whose acoustics must lend themself to some trick of physics with resonant standing waves. Although it's the layering of voices that creates the most profound effect, when a solitary singer sang alone you get the clearest indication of this: whenever he stopped the last note (and some of those preceding it) seemed to hang in the air. I'm tempted to say that it was like Monteverdi on steroids, but much as I love Monteverdi it was better than that. I'd have been very interested to have had someone musical with me. My impression was that they didn't have the clinical note precision that you get with classical English choral music and that it was an effort for them to keep the music under control. At the end of the final piece of the main set and at several times in the penultimate song they did this cool thing where they seemed to modulate up in a way that's unfamiliar, at least to me. It was also incredibly bassy.
Visually, it was stunning too. The cathedral was backlit in red from the back of the sanctuary. Other than this their music book was lit throwing white light back onto their faces and making a stark chiaroscuro tableau. Totally Caravaggio. I couldn't get a good photo (nor did I try too hard) but here's an atmospheric snap that shows the light as much more even than it was:
As you can see, as they sang they each cupped a hand over one of their ears.
The songs were all in Corse, and they announced the last one as a song of liberation in the mountains, a national hymn (for Corsica, not France! - referendum posters all over the island declare for Non - Un autre Europe est possible - and I haven't seen a single Oui poster).
I don't know if they've cut a CD; I'll be doing a search later. They're called Meridianu.
Hope to be on line next on around the 25th.
On Monday Paula and I caught the bus from Calvi to Porto on the west coast. As we headed out we couldn't understand why a drive of only around 70 km should be scheduled to take 2.5 hours. We soon found out. The road wends up and over the Corsican hills, keeping to even contours - and hence winding around a lot - as best it can. For long stretches the road isn't sealed, there is usually a severe drop to the side and it is only rarely wide enough for a coach and a car to pass. At one point another coach came towards us, which, considering that we were on a scheduled daily service, caused more commotion than you might expect, with our driver having to get out and insist that the other coach backed down the road several hundred yards. The views out to sea were fantastic, although the approaches to each bend, when the coach necessarily had to drive straight up to the edge of the road before turning sharply at the last minute, were heart stopping. This was another of those times when Paula was unexpectedly more worried by the height thing than I was.
As well as shouting volubly to the driver of the oncoming coach, our driver hooted and shouted hellos to pretty much every workman that we passed en route. His Corsican was interesting, and I didn't recognise any French in it. It had the intonations of Italian but seemingly a different vocabulary.
At around the half way point the road surface improved, and despite there being improvements in neither road width nor straightness our driver took this as a cue to speed up and cut out the warning hoots that he'd been giving on the approaches to the blind bends. On the long run into Porto the drop seawards became a sheer vertical fall of several hundred feet. As I was looking out of the window wondering why we'd stopped the hooting thing and thinking what a bad place it would be for an accident a Renault 5 flew round the next blind bend and smashed into the front of the coach. Fortunately it was head-on - a glancing contact would have risked flipping the Renault into the sea. No-one was hurt and after the drivers exchanged details we carried on to Porto. Since we arrived on time I have to assume that one crash is factored into the schedule.
From Porto we had a minibus connection up to our first stop at Ota. This is a beautiful little hill village and we stayed in a rare double room at one of the two gites d'etapes. Dinner in the evening, taken on the terrace looking over the valley, was excellent. I always hesitate to say that anything is the best thing ever but I'm unable to recall a soup that any better than our starter (my apologies if you made me one). It had an excellent dark meat stock supplemented with kidney beans, pasta, courgettes, carrots and garlic. After that we had what I believe was spinach, brocciu and mint cannelloni. All excellent, and such a contrast to the plain rice or pasta that you can get in the GR20 refuge. Incidentally, if you ever do a long distance walk to lose weight you want to be careful which one you do. The GR20 will work for sure - even if you take decent food with you, carrying it will offset the calorie intake. On the other hand, when we did the English Coast to Coast walk we stayed weight-neutral because the dozen or so miles of hill walking each day was matched by the big breakfasts, the hearty dinners and the beer. I suspect that most of the trails in Corsica are more like the latter than the former, especially if you take the trouble, as you should, to arrange to stay places where you can eat well.
After dinner about 20 locals came out into the street to have a laugh at the eastern European coach that had mistakenly driven up the Ota road and which was trying to weave through the bends and parked cars in the hope of finding somewhere to turn. One guy moving one of the cars gave a top-notch display of high-speed downhill-and-round-a-couple-of-bends reversing. You get the sense that life here is cheap, or fatalistically given up to the gods. There may be a relationship between the driving and the large number of roadside family shrines. The names on the shrines and monuments echo the Italianate sound of the language: a typical list of engraved names that I noted began Antonini, Bacci, Bellomini, Benedetti, Bertozzi...
During the night there was a huge electrical storm overhead and torrential rain but by morning it was clear. Possibly sensing that I'd like some extra walking, Paula had left her hat and fleece on the Calvi bus so before breakfast on Tuesday I took the minibus back to Porto, retrieved them and walked the 5 km back up the valley (there's no alternative). In some of the fields along the roadside the olive nets were already laid out, which seems like an appealingly lazy way to harvest a paying crop but is supposedly hard work. Dogs, apparently kennelled in sheds in the scrub and I'm guessing kept for the popular pastime of flushing out boar for shooting (the verge was littered with shotgun cases), barked angrily to each other along and across the valley.
Given the state of Paula's bruises, I'd planned our route to give us a couple of days recovery time after the GR20 followed by a very short day (Ota to Evisa) from the Tra Mare e Monte route, then two long days from the Mare e Mare Nord, setting us in Corte on Wednesday night. The haul up along the Spelunca gorge from Ota is a lovely walk. The trail passes over a couple of very elegant, implausibly slender Genoese bridges, and is shaded all the way by Chestnut woodland. One of the reasons that I love walking in Corsica so much is the ubiquitous aroma of the maquis - even at home I would choose (if I could) to have, say, honeysuckle trailing over a wall in preference to a plant with more vivid flowers. On the walk up from Ota there were an exceptional number of fig trees. Even though the fruits are not yet ripe enough to pick and eat (which is a shame), they add another lovely scent to the walk. There are, apparently, also salamanders in this part of the island but I've never seen one.
The climb through and up the gorge involves 620 m of sharp ascent but we'd finished it by lunchtime. This was just as well. We were walking up into cloud and as we arrived in Evisa the rain started to fall heavily. The hotel where we'd made a reservation was perfect but unfortunately they'd double booked us. Realising that her husband had got his days confused, the American wife of the owner apologetically ran us round to another place instead, which was fine. We kicked around in our room and our sheltered terrace reading and watching wild pigs scrabble around in the field opposite; later, when the rain stopped, we had a walk through Evisa, reminiscing about our last trip several years ago and checking out the start point for the next day's walk.
For dinner, which turned out to be significant, I had a charcuterie plate and wild boar over tagliatelle, while Paula had a salad and an entrecote steak. After dinner they served us with an eau de vie flavoured with a branch of myrtle.
On Wednesday morning, after another dramatic lightning storm in the night, Paula was feeling ill from the heavy meal but we set off anyway on what was planned to be a very long day's walking through the Niolu. The initial part of the walk heads up through pretty chestnut woods that lead to natural river pools - it's prime day-tripper territory. As we walked Paula's cramping stomach aches got worse until she had to stop and to throw up repeatedly. It was another of those What do you do? moments. Eight or nine hours further trekking was out of the question so we returned to Evisa to take stock. With public transport options very limited (the only bus out of Evisa goes to Ajaccio), three rooms booked in Vizzavone tonight and Paula still throwing up an hour later we stopped in at the hotel where the nice American lady worked, bought some water and ordered a taxi back to Calvi. The owners were really kind (the guy came and chatted with me and brought me an espresso while Paula lay on the couch) and, with it being such a pleasant place too, you should stay there if you're passing through the town.
So here we are.
One advantage of being here so long is that I get a third bite at the cherry. I'm determined to take the opportunity that we have from Paula's parents being here to do some more walking and I came up with three alternatives. Paula is still sick and she has to hang up her boots for now. My options are:
1) Hope to intercept the French couple at Vizzavona and join them for the GR20 sud.
2) Do the return walk alone from Vizzavona to Porto on the Mare e Mare nord variant.
3) Do the Mare e Mare sud with Zoe.
These choices leaked out to the other family members and (although it's the alternative with the highest chance of being aborted) I'm delighted that Zoe has strongly lobbied for option 3. So last night I got the (new) map and the guide book out again and this morning I made a bunch of calls to reserve us beds at gites en route. Paula is recuperating here with her father and this afternoon her mother (Vera) will join me and the girls taking the train for a couple of days at Vizzavona. On Saturday Vera and Heidi will return to Calvi while Zoe and I will head out to Ajaccio, Propriano and then the walk, insha 'llah.
We were totally miserable when we returned home yesterday and I was very cheered by the nice messages some of you sent me - thank you! Mike raised a question in an email that I can answer here, viz: given that aptitude in one physical discipline (say swimming) transfers much more poorly than you'd expect to aptitude in another (say running), how do you prepare for walking up a pile of hills except by doing it? Well I, of course, have now prepared for my third attempt by my two previous ones. This aside, I'd cite three types of important prep - maybe others can add more:
First, to get fit you should run. The factors that determine running aptitude such as aerobic fitness, leg strength, weight, pain tolerance and so forth are pretty much the same as hill walking. I'd say as a rule that if you can run the distance you're going to walk up and down hill with a pack then you'll be fine. Conversely, I have in the past walked 20 miles with a rucsac when I couldn't have even run five but it was hard work.
Second, you have to pack well, and in particular have just what you need and no more in your rucsac. If you ever plan to do a long walk let me come round to your place first and throw stuff out of your bag for you.
Third, there's the mental side. Every long walk is a sequence of Go/Stop decisions and you reach the end only if they all come up Go. Sometimes, as in both of our cases, you have to Stop and pressing ahead is just dumb; but there's also a margin where your choices come down to how determined you are. I'd strongly advise anyone doing a long walk to (a) look at the route map lots and lots of times and try to visualise where you'll be and what it's going to be like hour by hour, and (b) think through the things that will present you with decision points, such as fatigue, bad weather, muscle aches, unexpected time loss through getting lost, accommodation screw ups etc and try to prepare yourself for how you'll make such decisions when they arise and what your contingencies are; this may help you make more confident decisions in real time.
I started this entry by writing about flecks of gold in the mud of misery. Now let me tell you about the biggest nugget, the bullion bar...
After I'd planned our last trip I'd discovered that there was a concert of Corsican polyphonic (choral) music here last night and I'd been very disappointed that I couldn't go. Well I did and it was one of the high points of our three months away so far. It was a sell-out with around 100 people packed into Calvi's tiny cathedral. Five guys sang 15 songs and then an encore of about five further songs unaccompanied and with no mikes or anything. They all sang together on only a minority of the songs; more typically three of four sang together and in a few songs one guy sang alone.
You wouldn't believe how much volume these guys generate; it surrounds you. It's as if the sound rips out of the fabric of space itself rather than coming from the singer. The uncredited sixth artist is the cathedral, whose acoustics must lend themself to some trick of physics with resonant standing waves. Although it's the layering of voices that creates the most profound effect, when a solitary singer sang alone you get the clearest indication of this: whenever he stopped the last note (and some of those preceding it) seemed to hang in the air. I'm tempted to say that it was like Monteverdi on steroids, but much as I love Monteverdi it was better than that. I'd have been very interested to have had someone musical with me. My impression was that they didn't have the clinical note precision that you get with classical English choral music and that it was an effort for them to keep the music under control. At the end of the final piece of the main set and at several times in the penultimate song they did this cool thing where they seemed to modulate up in a way that's unfamiliar, at least to me. It was also incredibly bassy.
Visually, it was stunning too. The cathedral was backlit in red from the back of the sanctuary. Other than this their music book was lit throwing white light back onto their faces and making a stark chiaroscuro tableau. Totally Caravaggio. I couldn't get a good photo (nor did I try too hard) but here's an atmospheric snap that shows the light as much more even than it was:
As you can see, as they sang they each cupped a hand over one of their ears.
The songs were all in Corse, and they announced the last one as a song of liberation in the mountains, a national hymn (for Corsica, not France! - referendum posters all over the island declare for Non - Un autre Europe est possible - and I haven't seen a single Oui poster).
I don't know if they've cut a CD; I'll be doing a search later. They're called Meridianu.
Hope to be on line next on around the 25th.
Posted: Thu - June 16, 2005 at 05:08 PM
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Published On: Feb 08, 2006 06:20 PM
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Published On: Feb 08, 2006 06:20 PM