To the Is. Lavezzi...

Nervously looking out the window at clouds, willing the patches of blue sky to widen, to colonize the clouds, burn them off, because today we’ve decided to go out on a boat (we’re on a boat!) to the neighboring Is. Lavezzi and around the coast. A mad scramble and an attack on some quiches and aubergine pizza and we’ve got our groceries for a nice picnic lunch and are running to the mooring point, blue sky emerging more and more by the minute.



Standing on top of the boat, balancing and shifting our weight like trapeze artists, the smooth and weathered stones of the scrubby island rise like ancient fingers from the turquoise bays. We moor up and climb onto the land. The spotted lizards scatter at our arrival and we weave along the serpentine paths, first onto a bay full of yachts and sailboats moored, by a pointy almost oriental monument to the ship Semillante, which, in the mid 17^th century, shipwrecked, its gunpowder exploding the ship and dragging its 600 men into the sea where now we don snorkel masks, veer away from pinky purple jellyfish, ominously and lazily floating and, by turns, propelling themselves, and dive down for shells like I’ve never seen outside of a beach town tourist shop.





We climb out onto a tiny cluster of looming white rocks and grassy patches and the seagulls bark at us, diving at our heads, warning us that we’ve ventured where we don’t belong.



Swimming back to our beach camp, James isn’t so lucky in avoiding the jellyfish. We scramble out onto the sand, I grab my snorkel mask, dip behind a rock, pee and pour it onto his stinging arm, in a barely controlled panic. Two doses on urine later and the sting is going down. We hightail it back to the boat, thinking another beach awaits, but realize too late that we’ve misunderstood and we’re on our way back to Bonifacio.


(spot the houses?)

But first we tour an island where luxury villas peek out from private rock faces, where mooring is not allowed, Organic extensions of the stone, some almost like Gaudi structures. Back to the coastline and we veer into a tight grotto cave with a natural window onto the ground far above. The water is deep, unnaturally turquoise and begs for a bandito's treasure, a la Monte Cristo, to be tucked away under the lapping water line.

(Merci Carlos)

After an impromptu picnic lunch on a dock in the harbor watching sailboats come and go, the woman perched by a harness on her mast, we head back for a lazy bit of shut eye.









We emerge onto the streets of Bonifacio just as the sun has reached its peak of golden twilight. We drink Corsican beer and watch young men play balls on a pitch over looking the sheer white cliffs.





We wander, half drunk, down to U Castille for a special dinner, one of the few gifts that remains unchanged from our registry. Pork charcuterie, chevre salad, Corsican aperitifs, going light on the bread for once, our charming waiter with the Italian mother – so he supports Italy in the World Cup – and a French father – so he loves Corsica, we have spiny lobster and the most beautiful mushroom beef filet, Corsican wine, and we are in need of extra stomachs. We stumble home, the air fragrant with myrtle and pine, the redder than red poppies bordering our steps and we collapse into bed and look ahead to uncharted Corsican roads.


(Merci Goekjians)