Corsica by Boot Leather

God must have made Corsica right after the American midwest. He started forming the coastlines, stepped back and put his hands on his hips, and said, “You know what, I’m tired of flat.” This has been one of my favorite places so far, and the spectacular scenery is one of the reasons I haven’t written a post in six days. So, I think you’ll agree, a bit of explanation is in order.

After writing the last post, I caught a train to Calvi, across the island on the western side. On the train I met two German girls, Kati and Deborah, who were planning to hike the entire GR20. Why not, I thought to myself, and on the morning of the 6th we set off from the first campground to the start of the trail in a small village called Calenzana, a few kilometers from Calvi. Our first day was a bear of a climb, over 1200 meters–that’s about 4000 feet to us Yanks–winding out of the green hills near the coast into the higher granite crags of Corsica’s mountainous interior. When I’d first looked at the GR20, I’d noticed that the individual stages were only 7-10km, hardly more than two or three hours of walking on flat ground. It’d be easy enough to do three or four in a day, I thought … but flat walking Corsica isn’t. I was entirely ready to stop by the time we got to the first hut, around five miles and 4000 feet higher than when we’d started.

The Corsican mountain huts along the GR20 are staffed by seasonal managers and generally offer hot food (for elevated prices, naturally), tent spaces, water, showers, and genuinely beautiful scenery. As Kati and Deborah and I were relaxing after dinner at one of the tables in the cooking area, four horses trotted in from the nearby slopes. They belonged, it seems, to the current manager of the hut, and had free range of the surrounding terrain. In the evening light they were truly impressive animals.

One of the great things about a trail like this is the sense of camaraderie. Aside from the girls, I also met two English guys, Alex and Alistaire, and a Scotsman named Paul, all hiking the whole trail. Most of the hikers were French, and we were to see some of them on and off through our hike as well.

After the first day of hiking, I was committed–it was a good two days hike to the next stage. The girls left earlier than I did, and by the time I finally got up I discovered that I was the last person still in the camp. I packed and started hiking, congratulating myself on getting some extra sleep. It wasn’t hot, and there was a light breeze–perfect, I thought, no downside. This day was supposed to be easier, but it was still another long haul of a climb, almost 1000 meters, before I finally came out on top of a narrow rocky ridge that curved around to the descent to the next camp around a kilometer away.

Something you have to understand about Corsican trails is that if there are rocks in the way, they simply paint trail blazes on them. That means that this ridge had no “trail,” per se, but rather a route to follow scrambling over the rocks, up and down through crevasses and scree slopes. Nothing particularly dangerous, but very slow going. It was here that my self-congratulation began to fade. Dark, looming clouds were billowing in from the sea, and they didn’t look too friendly. As I neared the center of the ridge traverse, it started to rain, and thick clouds billowed in, blanketing the entire ridge in a whiteout of fog. I worried I’d have to stop, as I didn’t want to lose my way, but the clouds moved in and out, thirty seconds of fog, forty seconds of visibility, and I made my way, slowly, along the route, rain running in streams off my poncho.

Just as I finally reached the long downhill hike to the next hut, the rain stopped and, as quickly as it had gone, the sun came out. By the time I’d reached the bottom (about 700 vertical meters and a few kilometers later) I was completely dry and in relatively high spirits. That night the girls kindly fed me dinner, as I only had a few power bars, and we spent the evening playing cards and talking with Paul, Alex and Alistaire.

The next day was to bring us to Haut Asco, an old ski resort where I planned to catch the daily bus down to a nearby city and then on to Sardinia. After another long, hard climb, a spectacular pass, and another long, hard descent (northern Corsica seems to have little else besides ascents and descents and spectacular passes), we reached the cluster of buildings at Haut Asco. I’d forgotten to get cash before leaving, so up til now the girls had been both giving me food and, the second night, paying for my tent site. At Haut Asco I tried to give a little back by buying some groceries (“Visa accepted here!”) and making them dinner: pasta alfredo, using the local Corsican cheese, which has a very strong and distinct flavor. I also bought some Corsican sausage, a sort of salami made from cured wild boar (or “wild porks” as Deborah so fetchingly put it). An older man from Luxembourg I’d spoken to said that, after a week or so in Corsica, you could taste the island in the sausage. I fancied I could taste it a it myself–Corsica does have a very unique sort of smell, like summer and sage and pine, and local spices are used to make the sausage.

I had planned to leave the trail the next day and catch the bus from here, but I met a group of English hikers who told me that there was a second exit from the next station–and that the next stage, the infamous (to GR20 hikers, at least) Cirque du Solitude, was quite possibly the most memorable of the entire trail.

All right, I thought, I’ll do it. The next morning, we said goodbye to Alex, who planned to meet back up with Alistaire a few stages down, and headed up. It was a steady 800 meter climb, and it says something about the nature of Corsican hiking to say that it seemed like a welcome break, as it was possible to simply walk up, without any scrambling. The last hundred meters or so were across deep snow fields against a backdrop of gray sky. We could see the hikers ahead of us ascending in files of black figures against the white, giving the feeling of a mountainous ascent.

The memorable bit, though, is the Cirque itself. From the top of the climb, we could see the trail a mere few hundred meters away … across a yawning chasm over two hundred meters deep. To get to the other side we had a steep scramble down a long, craggy cliffside set with steel chains and, once we reached the other side, an old iron ladder. A few hours later, and after climbing a series of deep and melting snow fields with the occasionaly icy crevasse dropping several meters to the rocks beneath, we were looking back at the other side. Unlike some American chain-assisted hikes, I’d actually needed the chains on this one–pulling myself hand over hand up steep rock faces in places I would have had a lot of difficultly climbing without them. All together an exhilarating and tiring experience.

The next morning it was finally time to say goodbye to the good friends I’d made on the trail. Paul, Alistair, Alex, Kati, Deborah: you guys were great. As Deborah lives near Frankfurt, I may see her again before I fly back from there in August.

I left the GR20 and walked down a “trail,” or a series of occasional cairns through the Corsican scrub brush, across a stream to an old dirt road that wound down out of the mountains. Cows lounged in the shade, and pigs rooted here and there along the roadside, and the sun shone hot and steady. I reemerged into civilization at Calisima, a tiny little mountain village more or less motionless in the heat of the early afternoon, save for a donkey lazily swatting its tail at flies, laundry waving on the clotheslines, and the sound of French television coming from open second floor windows.

It was a long walk down to what I hoped would be a main road, and passed through a slightly larger village around six kilometers later, on the shores of a long lake. Beside the statue in the town center four or five cattle rested on the shady cobblestones. I walked until I hit what looked like a main road, but couldn’t see signs for anywhere I actually wanted to go–namely, a big town, or anywhere south toward Bonifacio and a ferry to Sardinia. Finally, I asked the driver of a German tour bus for directions.

“There are no north or south roads from here,” he said, in perfect English. “Only east and west.” I asked him, with what I hoped was a hopeful smile, if I could ride in his bus to the nearest big town. He hesitated, then nodded sharply and grinned. “Yes, of course.” It turned out he had hiked the GR20 himself–eight times, once in four days, quite a feat indeed, as the same time had taken me (a not unexperienced hiker) only about a fourth of the way. He had also been an agent of the French foreign legion, a fact he did not elaborate on.

So I rode down out of the mountains with a group of older German tourists, listening to the scenery described in German, and watching the mountains roll past. We descended down the narrow roads, the bus blaring its horn before turning each tight corner, and were only temporarily slowed once when a herd of a hundred or so goats filled the road ahead. In the European Union, one of the tourists told me, farmers get a stipend of around six euro per year for each goat they raise, so some keep large herds just for the money, especially in country like this where living is hard.

The bus ended at the coastal town of Portu, where I shook the driver’s hand and set out to find a way to get to Bonifacio. I asked around a bit until I found someone who spoke English, who told me that a bus left the next morning to Ajaccio. I found a campground, had a blessedly hot shower, and this morning boarded a bus that drove down Corsica’s rocky coastline to Ajaccio where, for the first time in six days, I found an internet connection. I have a bus to Bonifacio at 4 (it’s 1:30 now), so I should be in Sardinia by tomorrow. Corsica has been wonderful, and I hope to return again one day, both to hike the whole GR20 trail, and to just relax in one of the world’s prettier places.