On the road...

The roads out of Bonifacio are gold and green and the wind washes through them, each gust a reminder of how light the plastic of our scooters is – we wind up up up the narrow roads overlooking each turquoise bay a succession of pretty.







Italian banditos rule the road, until the lines of Germans in their leathers take over.









Seeing a dirt road meandering down to a glimmering white beach, we turn off, carefully negotiating each hidden pot hole, each tiny gorge where rainfall has pooled, until we arrive onto a stretch of sand the color of weathered bones in the desert and a vast expanse of water so clear and still it is like a magnifying glass, exposing the ripples of gray tonality beneath. The water fades out to green and then azure, broken only by random rock formations, sail boat, and the occasional snorkeler.



We are unsure about leaving. This is a place you stay and then stay some more until the ocean has absorbed you into its swaths of sea grass.

We pull ourselves away – the wrong choice, the sea reminds us, because within a few kilometers a car comes at me too close and I swerve – and dive – the scooter exploding out from under me, like a meteorite hitting the atmosphere – it breaks apart into countless shiny plastic shards. My scrape along the road has left my skin formed into several island chains of bright red and fuchsia patches. The adrenaline kicks in and I feel nothing – only dismay at the approaching ambulances and profound embarrassment, regret – wishing I was still wading in the clear water – relief as I see James talking to everyone, letting me sit in the shade and be anointed by the paramedics and their iodine.

James has seen the contents of my scooter, including the grey and pink of his Air Force Ones, strewn in the road behind him and he drops the scooter to come rushing down. I can’t even begin to imagine the thoughts in his head.





Language barriers, disputes, and the horror of insurance and the lack of it to cover the accident…we collapse at a cheap hotel in a fake resort town with a bottle of beautiful wine – the same we had the night before, drunk in happier times, we watch football next to giggly girls with iphones and fall into deep sleep.







(Merci Jo Oli, Ariel & Maria, Sean & Kristin, Steve & Tracey, Ady & Eric, and James -- it worked out fine in the end!)

To Propicio...

A car to go up the winding mountain roads so dangerous for scooters – we take every curve with careful trepidation, with respect for what might await us on the other side.















We stop at a mountain village for lunch – salad with honeyed chestnuts, figgy toasts, pancetta and cheese…Corsican pizza.


(Merci, Phil & Marion)

But it's all too much.

We’re reborn in the sea at Ruggione. It cleanses my wounds and restores James’s sense of play and adventure.

It is a release.



Now we are outside Porticio at a little hotel village perched in the hills. We sip Corsican wine (“Of course it’ll be good, it’s Corsican!”) and look at the hillsides with sloping vineyards. The air is fragrant. It is good.

To Corte...

When we leave in the car this morning, my body aching and stinging – no pain relief – James aching and metaphorically stinging from so much research into insurance and so many dead ends – we work our way into Ajaccio – the birthplace of Napoleon – The sides of the roads are dotted with road signs that have seen the French blotted out, crudely, with some spray paint, leaving only the Corsican name on display. Sometimes there is an extra tag that looks like it might read “French pigs!” but the Corsicans value their pork too much, I’d imagine, to use it as an insult. What we see, in the overcast morning, is a town ravaged by cheaply wrought stucco utilitarian building and we are lost, in dismay, trying to find the street that houses the one pharmacy in the whole city that is open on a Sunday.

Relief from flash ibuprofen and we’re off into the mountains – yet tense and uneasy with dark moods that are mirrored by the ominous mist clinging to the cliffs.

It’s impossible to resist the sublime – truly Shelley-esque sublime – craggy cliffs that jut up into the clouds cut roughly with snaky waterfalls – the lines of eerie light green and pink echoing the flying buttresses of a Gothic cathedral. The power of them, the sheer majesty, screams the religion of a darkly wild and primeval past, before Corsica was divided up amongst greedy Europeans, before perfectly manicured lines of grape vines punctuated the hillsides like hyphens bleeding together. The peaks don’t even bother to dare the explorer to challenge them because nothing can dominate this landscape for long – it can only exist in tentative harmony, in the shadows of these daunting titans. Every so often, one sees a clearly man made conglomeration of stones which seems to have sprouted by magic on to the sheer granite, but whoever ventured to make their home in so inhospitable of an environment has long since bled into the cliffs, the gorges, their bones and flesh feeding the life of the landscape.

Driving through the occasional mountain village on the road to Corte, people gathering in the squares – Their harsh accents and bright laughter seem like overcompensation, like they’re aware that at any moment, they’ll be swallowed alive by the gorges and the rocks and the fast running mountain streams.





A path leads to the top of a grassy hill nestled uneasily in these mountains. It meanders up to a large ruined stone structure, which looks like an offering, a sacrificial site to appease, crumbling and frequented now only by the hikers, mostly Germans, who don their fluorescent and poles.

Restonica & the Citadel

Corte is a bright beacon in a rare valley with houses painted too bright – again, like the laughter of the visitors and residents of each mountain village.





The ornate buildings with cerulean shutters are a challenge – but the other inhabitants of the land – the boar, the birds, the spotted lizards – know it is only a matter of time before reclamation.





We drive to the place where we’ve placed all our hopes for the night – Les Jardins de Glacier – and it’s so much more than three lines in a guidebook could possibly describe. At the end of a too-narrow road – the Restonica – where hikers convene at makeshift campsites, it is a testament to water cults of previous times, perched on a river that was inexplicably plucked out of a dream I had two years ago. From the water, sheer like transparent silk, rippling over white boulders and pooling into impossibly light green holes, it rises up, rosy red with turquoise shutters – the very hotel from my dream – All that’s missing, I say to James – is the Egyptian Sphinx at the fork further along the river. He nods to the fat German man floating in the pool, “What about him?” and we laugh and make bad German jokes. I cannot imagine not being allowed to stay here, like I couldn’t stay at the red hotel in my dream, and we wait 15 excruciating minutes for the verdict.

(Merci Mikey J. & Pens)

I can’t help but dance around when the sweet little Frenchwoman comes to the door of the garden and tells us we may stay – for a pittance! I’d happily pay thousands to rest my head here, to bath in the stream plucked directly from my dream, to eat and be utterly stuffed with Corsican wild boar and thank the cathedrals of this astounding display of nature for letting us relax.


(Merci Lydia)

On our last day, we venture to the citadel at the heart and height of Corte. It is more or less preserved in its 15th century state. I hobble up the cobble stone streets, because Le Petite Train is nowhere in sight.

Corte has always been the core of the Corsican independence movement. French is obliterated from all the signs. Che Guevara's image has been embraced and bannered across the town in graffiti, on t-shirts, in bars.

"This is where all our bandits have taken refuge?"

-- The Corsican Bandit Guy de Maupassant

To Porto Vecchio...and beaches

We take the easier road out of Corte but still find we are forever winding down the road, finally to what our map refers to as the less scenic highway. All I know is that it is straight, and I'm starting to suspect that the map's idea of a scenic drive is any road that is barely wide enough for one car, firmly serpentine, and has concrete mixers racing down it at 120 km/hour.



The goal is the beach. To be on flat ground again and float in clear water.



It's more difficult to find places to stay around here, because, of course, everyone flocks to the beach. Not so many people flock to the places in Corsica that require three hours of highly focused driving. The guide book has mentioned the "Ranch Campo," a working horse ranch only a kilometer from Palombaggio beach. After other phone calls in which I've utilized my spotty French and barely escaped intact ('est-ce que vous une chambre pour c'est soir?' -- 'je ne comprende pas! oui o no? oui o no?') this one was and easy 'oui'...





Beach days have a tendency to roll into one another. That is a good thing right now.
The next night we venture out to Le Belvedere, a Michelin star restaurant situated right on the Porto Vecchio harbor, overlooking the old town across the bay.

The food is art work. The waiters are tense. I suspect that they suspect that we're not really the sort to be dining here. The conversation of all those around us barely breaks an audible level. I find myself wondering if, when you become rich enough to eat here as though it was a nothing experience, your vocal chords start to deteriorate. No one is laughing. But the food sings.

To St. Giula's to melt beneath our frenchified blue and white striped umbrella and -- when we get too hot -- jump in the ocean, swim to the little island of rocks, and proclaim ourselves king and queen of our newly colonized land.



Unable to find a proper spa anywhere in Corsica (you'd think they'd need them to unwind from the suicidally insane driving), we venture in the opposite direction and decide to go out on jet skis (like I haven't had enough dangerous activity for one honeymoon).

We prepare for this important decision with mussels and white wine. Just when we think we're starting to run out of ideas for our 'thank you' messages, James decides to ferret away his empty mussel shells in a beach towel. We're starting to suspect that word of our mercis is spreading around the island. Will we appear on the evening news? The Merci Banditos?



We never seem to be able to hold it all together for an entire day...although our low points are balanced out by extreme highs. Tonight, things are overwhelming with worry about tomorrow -- how we will ever manage to get from Porto Vecchio to Cagliari considering the maze of public transportation and the languages we don't speak -- and, as we wander into Porto Vecchio to find 'Chez Anna' -- our choice for Andrew & Anna's dinner -- we are so completely out of our heads that we wander into the restaurant next door by accident...completely different branding, feel, look...we notice it doesn't have the gnocchi that the guidebook recommended...we convince ourselves, anyway, that we're in the right place.

We aren't.

After we realize this and dissolve into laughter, we treat ourselves to some fruity cocktails at the candy store with 500 beers. Our waiter seems to be a jockey in the disguise of a Corsican waiter. He is a man in miniature. He watches us, bemused, and we laugh at the club down the way playing Nirvana. Nirvana in Corsica.