Walking and Talking Euro-Corse
16 - 23 June, Ian
Well this time Zoe and I completed our walk and
had a great time with no mishaps. Paula has also totally recovered, though her
gastro bug took a few days longer to shake off than
expected.
Before our walk, on Thursday and Friday last week, we had a very pleasant time in Vizzavona. I'll leave the girls to write about this, either in a blog or in their newsletters at the end of the month. At just under 1000m, Vizzavona is the lowest point between the start and the end of the GR20, while still being higher than anywhere in England. If you're ever here in Calvi or Ile Rousse it's worth an excursion for the train journey alone: it's astonishingly beautiful, sweeping along the picture-book coastline of the Balagne before heading up into the mountains, with both open vistas of maquis hills and then the close cover of holm oak and Laricio pine forest. The final ascent is particularly dramatic, as you emerge from the forest to see a river - in full spate as we passed - cutting through a deep granite gorge way below you and Monte d'Oro (at 2,390m) towering above.
The trains have been upgraded since I first went on them but still run on the old narrow-gauge line that seems to carry the landscape nostalgically back half a century. You should stay a day or two in Vizzavona than rushing there and back if you can, though I should warn you that there's "nothing" there.
While we were there we didn't see any of the GR20 crowd that we'd met up with previously; if you're very astute and following closely you'll realise that this is surprising. We seem to have somehow landed amongst a different GR20 set, although, probably because we were in a hotel rather than a refuge or gite, there was a notable lack of esprit de corps: one evening there were three single guys dining close together, two of whom were even sharing a table, who didn't speak a word to each other all night! This is odd in normal circumstances, let alone in a pack of walkers.
On Saturday Heidi and Vera returned to Calvi and Zoe and I took the rail line in the other direction to Ajaccio. While the yachterati and well-heeled beach tourists can be found all around Corsica's coastal towns bringing them signs of conspicuous wealth that you don't see in the interior, it's only in Ajaccio that you could conceivably believe you were in a chichi Riviera resort. After kicking around here for a few hours (taking lunch, shopping for notebooks , eating ice-cream and taking a tour on a quaint little road train) we caught a bus to Propriano, where we got dropped off on the outskirts of town and then picked up and taken to the gite at the start of the walk.
The trail that Zoe and I followed was the Mare e Mare Sud. This starts from just above Propriano, a coastal town in the South West, and ends just above Porto Vecchio, which is a coastal town in the South East - hence the name. At least this is the direction in which we walked it: most of the walkers we met were using the excellent French topoguide, which plots it out the other way. East to West would have been logistically impractical for us, and in any case the book that I used - Trekking in Corsica - has it West to East. Our book became a true feature of our walk. This was partly because the author (who also wrote the Rough Guide to Corsica) has clearly spent a lot of time walking here and has interesting things to say but equally because the book is aggressively user-hostile and flagrantly dense with inaccuracies. In fact, I have a list of ten or twenty gross errors that I'm going to email to the address given, although selfishly there is one small piece of info that I'm keeping to myself and my friends, so tell me if you ever do this!
The walk divides into five or six nicely manageable days with a gite d'etape at the start and end of each one. When I called through and booked all of our beds in advance, I took the precaution of booking a night in the middle in a guest house so that we could be more sure of getting a decent night's sleep and a satisfactory shower. Accommodation in the gites is in shared dorms, typically with three bunk beds per room and shared facilities. We stayed, as everyone does, on demi-pension, eating a communal meal with the other guests, virtually all of whom are walkers, or occasionally cyclists. Dinner, bed and breakfast costs about £25/head/night. As it turned out, with the exception of the last one (at Cartalavonu) the gites were all excellent and if you do this yourself you should stay at them for the camaraderie.
The route heads up to the altitude of the mountain towns - bobbling around 1000m - and you get five days of unspoilt beauty. The generic landscape that stays with me after the walk (there should be a word afterscape) is of hills rolling out in every direction covered in lush green forest, with every vista punctuated with around three ochre villages. Each such village features a church and Genoese-style campanile and it's all set out under a postcard-blue sky. At the horizon severe rock-faces connect you to the granite of the paths that you walk along. Among the most distinctive of these rockscapes are the Bavella needles, which you can see frequently along the walk:
On the GR20 you get to scramble right over them; on the Mare e Mare Sud they adorn your view.
Of course, as I've written before, walking in Corsica also features a fantastic range of great flowers and scents, and these varied from day to day. One day, for instance, we seemed to encounter French lavender everywhere, while another day was marked more frequently with mint.
On our first day we ran into the heat and this was one of the few times that Zoe found the going hard. I don't know how hot it was exactly on the walk - the only actual temperature I have is from the afternoon of the last day (yesterday) when we drove past a roadside neon info board on our way to Figari - this recorded 36 deg C, which is about 97 in the old money. This is quite a heat in which to be hauling up hills, no matter how fine the scenery. Even when we set off early the day was already hot. Fortunately, after the first day virtually all of the walk was under the cover of the lovely forests, which are variously composed of chestnut, holm oak, beech and pine. (There is, by the way, a neat essay in the book Why Big Fierce Animals are Rare on why you typically only get two such woodland species at a time.)
So on this first day - the hot one - we took eight hours for a walk that is signed as requiring six. Piqued by this, Zoe decided to move faster on the remaining days, and subsequently we walked every stage for which a time was indicated in a lower one, usually significantly lower. Compared to an adult (well, me) Zoe's pace was remarkably sensitive to the degree of incline. On ascents like an underpowered car she would slow down considerably before I'd even noticed the slope, moving at a generally steady pace. Then on the level she would speed up and on the downhill I had trouble keeping up with her. By the fourth day, though, where we had to make 800m of ascent, Zoe had evidently adjusted and was storming the uphill, too.
I shouldn't give you the impression, though, that we progressed with blind military determination. At our first chance we took an hour off to swim in one of the mountain streams. And on the third day we traded a couple of hours walking in the open sun for an alternative route (not in the book but easy to find and follow) that gave us another hour or two to bathe in a river and a further hour or two to tour round the Pianu di Levie. This is a site that was inhabited from the bronze age, when people lived in dwellings shaped around huge granite boulders, to medieval times. You can rent a vintage Sony Walkman with a tape, synchronised to 17 stopping points around the site, narrated by a woman sounding like a female Stephen Hawkins. It was actually very interesting, and the site is also worthwhile for the tremendous panoramic views (if you go there the best is from the top of the Castellu). I do, though, have a question: when these guides tell you that communing with ancestors was so important to people living before written records were kept, how do they know? Sure, they can probably tell that in the distant past the dead were buried next to the fireplace and then in later times they were buried in locations distant from the house, but much of this stuff about what people believed seems very speculative to me. I have a hard enough time determining what "people" in, say, Fes feel about things today when I'm right amongst them.
In fact, the same applies to the people of Corsica. For example, on Wednesday Zoe and I were having a drink at a cafe in a village, Carbini, en route from Levie. The description of Carbini in my book (which expressly states that the village had no cafe or bar) is all about the blood feuds famously fought between two families there. Well that may be true. One of the old guys came and chatted to us as we drank, telling us, inter alia, with apparent sincerity how much he liked the English. He certainly seemed very friendly. Should I be wondering how distant he is from the Corsicans who coined the word vendetta? According to my book, in one small village 36 people died in a dispute over a chestnut tree, and this isn't all ancient history: like some of you, I can recall the chief French guy on the island getting assassinated in 1998. Anyhow, our guy wandered off and came over again later when Reynald and Stephanie (see below) had caught up with us and joined us for our second drink. Then the guy was telling us how the ironwork on the house opposite had been brought over from Vietnam, where he's served (as well as in North Africa) in a parachute regiment. He then started going on, approvingly and at length, to Reynald about (Field Marshall) Montgomery, though by this time I was tuning out.
It seem to me that neither the Corsicans nor the French regard Corsica as a true department of France. The Corsican view (if the assassination didn't spell it out quite clearly) can be read from the road signs, which are given in both French and Corse: if you're in any doubt it's easy to pick out which names are the French ones as they usually have bullet holes in them. We got indication of the French view when we were talking about our travels to the nice French guy I mentioned on the GR20: after hearing our itinerary he questioned whether we weren't going to visit France. When I replied that we're doing that right now his attitude was very much, "Yes, but really when are you going to France".
While I've have chatted to a few Corsicans this week (starting with the lady who ran the first gite and concluding with the taxi driver who ran us from Porto Vecchio to Figari), most of the people Zoe and I have met have been European (don't get literal and tell me that Corsica's in Europe!) and most of these have been French (and don't bother reminding me that Corsica's in France!). As I said previously, most of the walkers on our trail were doing it the other way from us so we didn't get chance to hang out with the same group from day to day. On only one evening did we have a full English language night. This was at Serra di Scapomena, where the day's residents broke out into a French table and an English language table. The latter comprised a really nice German couple and a Dutch couple (does seem to be a couples thing); while I suspect that they all, notwithstanding some of their denials, spoke excellent French, they preferred to use their flawless English.
If I haven't mentioned this before, I'm really angry with my French teachers from school: somehow they contrived to make French the only subject I took to O level in which I had no interest. How could I have cared more about chemistry? In the years immediately following the cessation of my formal French language education I came to realise that loads of the most interesting books were by French writers. Sure, I know how to form the conditional tense and I know the French word for fortnight, but I left school with little operative ability in the language. Instead of sending me to sleep my French teachers could have been spicing up lessons with, for example, any of the novels of Alain Robbe-Grillet, Triptych or The Georgics by Claude Simon, anything by Michel Foucault (three of whose books are amongst the most interesting I've ever read), the novels of Sartre, Tristes Tropiques (the autobiography) or Structural Anthropology by Claude Levi-Strausse (though his other books I've tried are killingly dull), The Phenomenology of Perception by Marcel Merleau-Ponty, anything by Jaques Lacan or his followers, any of the essays (rather than whole books) by the line of feminist writers starting with Simone de Beauvoir or any book on the Revolution and The Terror (what could be better for grammar school kids?).
I'm not saying we'd have to read even a whole book in French, but what could provide better motivation? And if our lousy teachers had wanted to cover a whole book, Robbe-Grillet wrote a novel (Djinn) for students of French in which the first chapter is all simple present tense stuff and more complexity and tenses are introduced chapter by chapter.
Failing that, they could have screened any of dozens of great French films (Diva, say) for us to extract vocab and grammar from each week, and if they'd wanted to show us that French culture had something to contribute to the Anglo-American diet they could have cruelly screened, as BBC2 once did, Godard's A Bout de Souffle alongside Breathless, the pathetic US re-write starring (or, more precisely, featuring) Richard Gere.
But we didn't do that and my French is lame and I blame school! I can get by in transactional situations and even when I have one or two sympathetic co-locuters. What I find really hard is to be thrown alongside a party of people all speaking French as their first language, which happened a few times this week. Even when I can understand what they're saying it's kinda hard to join in when you don't have the language processing speed. One evening this went on all through the meal. Everyone else on the table (they were French and seemed to know each other from the walk) babbled on, smilingly passing bowls and jugs to us when appropriate, while Zoe and I were left to ourselves not having the ability to participate. In a previous entry I asked what it is to be European: perhaps one defining characteristic is the capacity we share to be perfectly polite without being genuinely friendly. There is nowhere we went in Africa (south or north) where we wouldn't have been sympathetically roped in to the flow, nor in my experience is this polite unfriendliness ever found in North America. In the US, being a plastic and mobile society, there are small islands at extremes of the social ecology where behaviour has reverted to the feral and the ability to communicate with the human "mainland" has been adapted out - but this is not masked with politeness, which requires a residual degree of care regarding the mental states of others. If Americans seem as though they're being friendly they probably are being.
Anyway, we had a nice meal and after dinner, one of the French guys did come over and chat to us and he was soon joined by his wife, who (perhaps tellingly) was from Laos.
Zoe, by the way, really likes meeting people, even if she can initially sometimes seem quiet.
Our only cohorts starting the walk at the same time at us in the same direction and passing through the same stages were those mentioned above: a lovely couple from Nice called Reynald (who I think looks like Berger from Sex & The City - you can form your opinion when I post photos at the end of the month) and Stephanie. We spent more time with them as the week passed, and by the last couple of days we were pretty much walking together. On Wednesday we stopped for lunch together and got a sense of our different packing priorities. My rucsac, which was essentially untouched from when I'd packed for the GR20, contained a sleeping bag that I'd left in to ensure that Zoe had a reasonable sleeping scheme (the beds in the gites typically offer no cover sheet). Neither Reynald nor Stephanie had bothered with this, preferring instead a large loaf of bread, a salami, a jar of terrine (can anyone tell me what bird sansonnet is?), cheese, tomatoes and peaches. They were amused to see that we were still packing our energy bars, which are more appropriate to the GR20 than to a walk where you pass an epicerie most days and are never going to get stranded at high altitude. Unsurprisingly they also spoke excellent English, although I did get some chance to practise my French. For your interest, perhaps, I can list some of the vocab that I've learned over the past couple of weeks. If you know most of these words you're much better than I am:
la grêle - hail
la fougère - fern
(payer) comptant - (to pay) cash
le duvet - the sleeping bag
la couette - the duvet
l'étoile de mer - the starfish
(my favourite!) la méduse - the jellyfish.
A number of French people have said to me recently that it's increasingly important for them to be able to speak English. This includes some who are already fluent in English and some who know barely a word. Apart from the imperial strength of the US and our poor language teachers, the main reason why French is not so widely known outside of France and its former colonies is - of course - that French achievements in literature and cinema are not matched in rock and pop: that's how you really get kids to learn. Nor will this change anytime soon. Stephanie and Reynald seemed appalled to discover that after Les Negresses Vertes the next French pop act that I could bring to mind was Plastique Bertrand (and we all know he's Belgian).
So Zoe and I finished yesterday and after a disappointing beer in Porto Vecchio (it wasn't the excellent Pietra or it's blonde equivalent Columba) we got a taxi to Figari airport, picked up a hire car and drove all round the island back to Calvi. As I think said at the top, we had a great time on the walk and Zoe did extremely well to finish it so strongly. It was the longest that Zoe and Heidi have been apart in Heidi's seven years and we were both looking forward to getting back. The transition from the hills to the coast, though, was as I've found it in the past - as culturally stark as any of our country moves on this trip, each one of which is like exiting Mr Benn's wardrobe (you remember that?).
After the sublime walk our last stage was marked by the absurdity of our hire car. We had been promised a Megane, which, though now re-styled to be unnecessarily quirky, is still a good car. I guess part of me hoped to land something as chic as one of the new Peugeot 607's. Instead, we got this:
Of course, we were both deeply embarrassed ("le style, c'est l'homme"). While it may be ok for shuttling croissants or bananas to the cafes along the harbour in the morning I don't know how anyone could think that this is suitable for travel. I guess it goes to remind us that the nation that brought us the excellence of Foucault (and the 607) is yet capable of crossing over the line to ridiculousness with Derrida (and this). When we got to Calvi Zoe ducked below the window as we drove past the boulangerie where she gets breakfast every day.
Finally, I have sussed out how to do the GR20, if ever of you ever want to. The first step, and probably the most difficult, is to secure four weeks or so of vacation time - I previously gave you my three month sabbatical plan and now this is the one month option. The key insight here is that the railway line from Calvi to Ajaccio supplemented by the bus service to Propriano provides the hypotenuse to the triangle whose other sides are represented by the GR20 and the Mare e Mare Sud. So what you do is get to any one of Porto Vecchio, Calvi or Ajaccio (or Propriano), then do the Mare e Mare Sud, then take a week off on the beach and then do the GR20. Since you can do both walks in either direction and travel in/out of any of the vertices you can beach wherever you like (I'd choose Calvi). Whatever you may think, doing the MeM first would make the GR20 easier: you could sharpen up your aerobic and muscle fitness and fine-tune the configuration of your pack; plus it reveals the island to you in a different way. Let me know if you think about it!
In the meantime, here's a happy thought from me to you:
Before our walk, on Thursday and Friday last week, we had a very pleasant time in Vizzavona. I'll leave the girls to write about this, either in a blog or in their newsletters at the end of the month. At just under 1000m, Vizzavona is the lowest point between the start and the end of the GR20, while still being higher than anywhere in England. If you're ever here in Calvi or Ile Rousse it's worth an excursion for the train journey alone: it's astonishingly beautiful, sweeping along the picture-book coastline of the Balagne before heading up into the mountains, with both open vistas of maquis hills and then the close cover of holm oak and Laricio pine forest. The final ascent is particularly dramatic, as you emerge from the forest to see a river - in full spate as we passed - cutting through a deep granite gorge way below you and Monte d'Oro (at 2,390m) towering above.
The trains have been upgraded since I first went on them but still run on the old narrow-gauge line that seems to carry the landscape nostalgically back half a century. You should stay a day or two in Vizzavona than rushing there and back if you can, though I should warn you that there's "nothing" there.
While we were there we didn't see any of the GR20 crowd that we'd met up with previously; if you're very astute and following closely you'll realise that this is surprising. We seem to have somehow landed amongst a different GR20 set, although, probably because we were in a hotel rather than a refuge or gite, there was a notable lack of esprit de corps: one evening there were three single guys dining close together, two of whom were even sharing a table, who didn't speak a word to each other all night! This is odd in normal circumstances, let alone in a pack of walkers.
On Saturday Heidi and Vera returned to Calvi and Zoe and I took the rail line in the other direction to Ajaccio. While the yachterati and well-heeled beach tourists can be found all around Corsica's coastal towns bringing them signs of conspicuous wealth that you don't see in the interior, it's only in Ajaccio that you could conceivably believe you were in a chichi Riviera resort. After kicking around here for a few hours (taking lunch, shopping for notebooks , eating ice-cream and taking a tour on a quaint little road train) we caught a bus to Propriano, where we got dropped off on the outskirts of town and then picked up and taken to the gite at the start of the walk.
The trail that Zoe and I followed was the Mare e Mare Sud. This starts from just above Propriano, a coastal town in the South West, and ends just above Porto Vecchio, which is a coastal town in the South East - hence the name. At least this is the direction in which we walked it: most of the walkers we met were using the excellent French topoguide, which plots it out the other way. East to West would have been logistically impractical for us, and in any case the book that I used - Trekking in Corsica - has it West to East. Our book became a true feature of our walk. This was partly because the author (who also wrote the Rough Guide to Corsica) has clearly spent a lot of time walking here and has interesting things to say but equally because the book is aggressively user-hostile and flagrantly dense with inaccuracies. In fact, I have a list of ten or twenty gross errors that I'm going to email to the address given, although selfishly there is one small piece of info that I'm keeping to myself and my friends, so tell me if you ever do this!
The walk divides into five or six nicely manageable days with a gite d'etape at the start and end of each one. When I called through and booked all of our beds in advance, I took the precaution of booking a night in the middle in a guest house so that we could be more sure of getting a decent night's sleep and a satisfactory shower. Accommodation in the gites is in shared dorms, typically with three bunk beds per room and shared facilities. We stayed, as everyone does, on demi-pension, eating a communal meal with the other guests, virtually all of whom are walkers, or occasionally cyclists. Dinner, bed and breakfast costs about £25/head/night. As it turned out, with the exception of the last one (at Cartalavonu) the gites were all excellent and if you do this yourself you should stay at them for the camaraderie.
The route heads up to the altitude of the mountain towns - bobbling around 1000m - and you get five days of unspoilt beauty. The generic landscape that stays with me after the walk (there should be a word afterscape) is of hills rolling out in every direction covered in lush green forest, with every vista punctuated with around three ochre villages. Each such village features a church and Genoese-style campanile and it's all set out under a postcard-blue sky. At the horizon severe rock-faces connect you to the granite of the paths that you walk along. Among the most distinctive of these rockscapes are the Bavella needles, which you can see frequently along the walk:
On the GR20 you get to scramble right over them; on the Mare e Mare Sud they adorn your view.
Of course, as I've written before, walking in Corsica also features a fantastic range of great flowers and scents, and these varied from day to day. One day, for instance, we seemed to encounter French lavender everywhere, while another day was marked more frequently with mint.
On our first day we ran into the heat and this was one of the few times that Zoe found the going hard. I don't know how hot it was exactly on the walk - the only actual temperature I have is from the afternoon of the last day (yesterday) when we drove past a roadside neon info board on our way to Figari - this recorded 36 deg C, which is about 97 in the old money. This is quite a heat in which to be hauling up hills, no matter how fine the scenery. Even when we set off early the day was already hot. Fortunately, after the first day virtually all of the walk was under the cover of the lovely forests, which are variously composed of chestnut, holm oak, beech and pine. (There is, by the way, a neat essay in the book Why Big Fierce Animals are Rare on why you typically only get two such woodland species at a time.)
So on this first day - the hot one - we took eight hours for a walk that is signed as requiring six. Piqued by this, Zoe decided to move faster on the remaining days, and subsequently we walked every stage for which a time was indicated in a lower one, usually significantly lower. Compared to an adult (well, me) Zoe's pace was remarkably sensitive to the degree of incline. On ascents like an underpowered car she would slow down considerably before I'd even noticed the slope, moving at a generally steady pace. Then on the level she would speed up and on the downhill I had trouble keeping up with her. By the fourth day, though, where we had to make 800m of ascent, Zoe had evidently adjusted and was storming the uphill, too.
I shouldn't give you the impression, though, that we progressed with blind military determination. At our first chance we took an hour off to swim in one of the mountain streams. And on the third day we traded a couple of hours walking in the open sun for an alternative route (not in the book but easy to find and follow) that gave us another hour or two to bathe in a river and a further hour or two to tour round the Pianu di Levie. This is a site that was inhabited from the bronze age, when people lived in dwellings shaped around huge granite boulders, to medieval times. You can rent a vintage Sony Walkman with a tape, synchronised to 17 stopping points around the site, narrated by a woman sounding like a female Stephen Hawkins. It was actually very interesting, and the site is also worthwhile for the tremendous panoramic views (if you go there the best is from the top of the Castellu). I do, though, have a question: when these guides tell you that communing with ancestors was so important to people living before written records were kept, how do they know? Sure, they can probably tell that in the distant past the dead were buried next to the fireplace and then in later times they were buried in locations distant from the house, but much of this stuff about what people believed seems very speculative to me. I have a hard enough time determining what "people" in, say, Fes feel about things today when I'm right amongst them.
In fact, the same applies to the people of Corsica. For example, on Wednesday Zoe and I were having a drink at a cafe in a village, Carbini, en route from Levie. The description of Carbini in my book (which expressly states that the village had no cafe or bar) is all about the blood feuds famously fought between two families there. Well that may be true. One of the old guys came and chatted to us as we drank, telling us, inter alia, with apparent sincerity how much he liked the English. He certainly seemed very friendly. Should I be wondering how distant he is from the Corsicans who coined the word vendetta? According to my book, in one small village 36 people died in a dispute over a chestnut tree, and this isn't all ancient history: like some of you, I can recall the chief French guy on the island getting assassinated in 1998. Anyhow, our guy wandered off and came over again later when Reynald and Stephanie (see below) had caught up with us and joined us for our second drink. Then the guy was telling us how the ironwork on the house opposite had been brought over from Vietnam, where he's served (as well as in North Africa) in a parachute regiment. He then started going on, approvingly and at length, to Reynald about (Field Marshall) Montgomery, though by this time I was tuning out.
It seem to me that neither the Corsicans nor the French regard Corsica as a true department of France. The Corsican view (if the assassination didn't spell it out quite clearly) can be read from the road signs, which are given in both French and Corse: if you're in any doubt it's easy to pick out which names are the French ones as they usually have bullet holes in them. We got indication of the French view when we were talking about our travels to the nice French guy I mentioned on the GR20: after hearing our itinerary he questioned whether we weren't going to visit France. When I replied that we're doing that right now his attitude was very much, "Yes, but really when are you going to France".
While I've have chatted to a few Corsicans this week (starting with the lady who ran the first gite and concluding with the taxi driver who ran us from Porto Vecchio to Figari), most of the people Zoe and I have met have been European (don't get literal and tell me that Corsica's in Europe!) and most of these have been French (and don't bother reminding me that Corsica's in France!). As I said previously, most of the walkers on our trail were doing it the other way from us so we didn't get chance to hang out with the same group from day to day. On only one evening did we have a full English language night. This was at Serra di Scapomena, where the day's residents broke out into a French table and an English language table. The latter comprised a really nice German couple and a Dutch couple (does seem to be a couples thing); while I suspect that they all, notwithstanding some of their denials, spoke excellent French, they preferred to use their flawless English.
If I haven't mentioned this before, I'm really angry with my French teachers from school: somehow they contrived to make French the only subject I took to O level in which I had no interest. How could I have cared more about chemistry? In the years immediately following the cessation of my formal French language education I came to realise that loads of the most interesting books were by French writers. Sure, I know how to form the conditional tense and I know the French word for fortnight, but I left school with little operative ability in the language. Instead of sending me to sleep my French teachers could have been spicing up lessons with, for example, any of the novels of Alain Robbe-Grillet, Triptych or The Georgics by Claude Simon, anything by Michel Foucault (three of whose books are amongst the most interesting I've ever read), the novels of Sartre, Tristes Tropiques (the autobiography) or Structural Anthropology by Claude Levi-Strausse (though his other books I've tried are killingly dull), The Phenomenology of Perception by Marcel Merleau-Ponty, anything by Jaques Lacan or his followers, any of the essays (rather than whole books) by the line of feminist writers starting with Simone de Beauvoir or any book on the Revolution and The Terror (what could be better for grammar school kids?).
I'm not saying we'd have to read even a whole book in French, but what could provide better motivation? And if our lousy teachers had wanted to cover a whole book, Robbe-Grillet wrote a novel (Djinn) for students of French in which the first chapter is all simple present tense stuff and more complexity and tenses are introduced chapter by chapter.
Failing that, they could have screened any of dozens of great French films (Diva, say) for us to extract vocab and grammar from each week, and if they'd wanted to show us that French culture had something to contribute to the Anglo-American diet they could have cruelly screened, as BBC2 once did, Godard's A Bout de Souffle alongside Breathless, the pathetic US re-write starring (or, more precisely, featuring) Richard Gere.
But we didn't do that and my French is lame and I blame school! I can get by in transactional situations and even when I have one or two sympathetic co-locuters. What I find really hard is to be thrown alongside a party of people all speaking French as their first language, which happened a few times this week. Even when I can understand what they're saying it's kinda hard to join in when you don't have the language processing speed. One evening this went on all through the meal. Everyone else on the table (they were French and seemed to know each other from the walk) babbled on, smilingly passing bowls and jugs to us when appropriate, while Zoe and I were left to ourselves not having the ability to participate. In a previous entry I asked what it is to be European: perhaps one defining characteristic is the capacity we share to be perfectly polite without being genuinely friendly. There is nowhere we went in Africa (south or north) where we wouldn't have been sympathetically roped in to the flow, nor in my experience is this polite unfriendliness ever found in North America. In the US, being a plastic and mobile society, there are small islands at extremes of the social ecology where behaviour has reverted to the feral and the ability to communicate with the human "mainland" has been adapted out - but this is not masked with politeness, which requires a residual degree of care regarding the mental states of others. If Americans seem as though they're being friendly they probably are being.
Anyway, we had a nice meal and after dinner, one of the French guys did come over and chat to us and he was soon joined by his wife, who (perhaps tellingly) was from Laos.
Zoe, by the way, really likes meeting people, even if she can initially sometimes seem quiet.
Our only cohorts starting the walk at the same time at us in the same direction and passing through the same stages were those mentioned above: a lovely couple from Nice called Reynald (who I think looks like Berger from Sex & The City - you can form your opinion when I post photos at the end of the month) and Stephanie. We spent more time with them as the week passed, and by the last couple of days we were pretty much walking together. On Wednesday we stopped for lunch together and got a sense of our different packing priorities. My rucsac, which was essentially untouched from when I'd packed for the GR20, contained a sleeping bag that I'd left in to ensure that Zoe had a reasonable sleeping scheme (the beds in the gites typically offer no cover sheet). Neither Reynald nor Stephanie had bothered with this, preferring instead a large loaf of bread, a salami, a jar of terrine (can anyone tell me what bird sansonnet is?), cheese, tomatoes and peaches. They were amused to see that we were still packing our energy bars, which are more appropriate to the GR20 than to a walk where you pass an epicerie most days and are never going to get stranded at high altitude. Unsurprisingly they also spoke excellent English, although I did get some chance to practise my French. For your interest, perhaps, I can list some of the vocab that I've learned over the past couple of weeks. If you know most of these words you're much better than I am:
la grêle - hail
la fougère - fern
(payer) comptant - (to pay) cash
le duvet - the sleeping bag
la couette - the duvet
l'étoile de mer - the starfish
(my favourite!) la méduse - the jellyfish.
A number of French people have said to me recently that it's increasingly important for them to be able to speak English. This includes some who are already fluent in English and some who know barely a word. Apart from the imperial strength of the US and our poor language teachers, the main reason why French is not so widely known outside of France and its former colonies is - of course - that French achievements in literature and cinema are not matched in rock and pop: that's how you really get kids to learn. Nor will this change anytime soon. Stephanie and Reynald seemed appalled to discover that after Les Negresses Vertes the next French pop act that I could bring to mind was Plastique Bertrand (and we all know he's Belgian).
So Zoe and I finished yesterday and after a disappointing beer in Porto Vecchio (it wasn't the excellent Pietra or it's blonde equivalent Columba) we got a taxi to Figari airport, picked up a hire car and drove all round the island back to Calvi. As I think said at the top, we had a great time on the walk and Zoe did extremely well to finish it so strongly. It was the longest that Zoe and Heidi have been apart in Heidi's seven years and we were both looking forward to getting back. The transition from the hills to the coast, though, was as I've found it in the past - as culturally stark as any of our country moves on this trip, each one of which is like exiting Mr Benn's wardrobe (you remember that?).
After the sublime walk our last stage was marked by the absurdity of our hire car. We had been promised a Megane, which, though now re-styled to be unnecessarily quirky, is still a good car. I guess part of me hoped to land something as chic as one of the new Peugeot 607's. Instead, we got this:
Of course, we were both deeply embarrassed ("le style, c'est l'homme"). While it may be ok for shuttling croissants or bananas to the cafes along the harbour in the morning I don't know how anyone could think that this is suitable for travel. I guess it goes to remind us that the nation that brought us the excellence of Foucault (and the 607) is yet capable of crossing over the line to ridiculousness with Derrida (and this). When we got to Calvi Zoe ducked below the window as we drove past the boulangerie where she gets breakfast every day.
Finally, I have sussed out how to do the GR20, if ever of you ever want to. The first step, and probably the most difficult, is to secure four weeks or so of vacation time - I previously gave you my three month sabbatical plan and now this is the one month option. The key insight here is that the railway line from Calvi to Ajaccio supplemented by the bus service to Propriano provides the hypotenuse to the triangle whose other sides are represented by the GR20 and the Mare e Mare Sud. So what you do is get to any one of Porto Vecchio, Calvi or Ajaccio (or Propriano), then do the Mare e Mare Sud, then take a week off on the beach and then do the GR20. Since you can do both walks in either direction and travel in/out of any of the vertices you can beach wherever you like (I'd choose Calvi). Whatever you may think, doing the MeM first would make the GR20 easier: you could sharpen up your aerobic and muscle fitness and fine-tune the configuration of your pack; plus it reveals the island to you in a different way. Let me know if you think about it!
In the meantime, here's a happy thought from me to you:
Posted: Fri - June 24, 2005 at 04:23 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