The Sanctuary
Hitchhiking and near-death in Corsica
Not everyone has heard of Corsica, or at least not everyone would necessarily think of it as a summer destination. I certainly don’t know many people who’ve been (although my friends may feel like they have, the amount I’ve gone on about it)! I won’t hold it against you if you’ve never heard of this little jewel of an island - just off the coast of France and Italy - as I was in the same boat until I went to Paris. I arrived in France in summer, when the French take their six week holiday and when the majority of my colleagues returned, they insisted that I absolutely had to go to Corsica.
You can see where this story’s going…
Accommodation on the island ranges but as we were staying for a month and were poor students, we decided to camp. The ‘we’ refers to the boyfriend who I’d dragged along for help in the ‘tent putting up’ department. The crucial advice I can give is to invest in a blow-up mattress. It saved sleeping on the ground and probably our relationship. On a serious note, the campsites were surprisingly nice; pools, washing machines, clean bathrooms and I went from virgin camper to seasoned tent erector in the space of a month.
There’s very little public transport however. The minibus we used to get to our first destination was lacking in seatbelts, full of dogs and driven by a maniac who accelerated at every bend. Safe to say it was enough to make us hitchhike, which, contrary to the title, actually went quite successfully.
I’m not particularly shy or retiring but the initial thought of standing at the roadside with thumbs up, a smile and a sign made me a little nervous. After about thirty seconds all such thoughts disappear. They are generally followed by ones of ‘my arm is aching’ or ‘you tight bastard, stop and pick us up.’ Once you’ve committed, who knows what you’ll find out when sat in the back of someone else’s car. For instance that the man driving is a Catholic priest and his 18 year-old Vietnamese passenger is his ‘friend.’ They are not a gay couple as you initially thought (and nearly said) and you may have to go to mass at their house. But when that house is a beach-side villa, you can cope for one night. We turned down the offer to stay another night. One 8am mass was enough for us. You win some, you lose some.
The island itself is breathtaking. You’ll be swimming in the sea but be surrounded by mountains. There’s sailing, horse riding, hiking and the sunsets are beautiful. I’ll concede that the trains that travel with the doors open are perhaps a little scary but surprisingly the near-death experiences had nothing to do with open-doored trains, crazy priests or lunatic minibus drivers. A bite from a yellow spider (it turned out not to be poisonous but I cried nonetheless) was the first incident and my boyfriend capsizing the catamaran we had rented, twice… in half an hour… was the second. The moral of the story is go to Corsica but avoid spiders and men who tell you they’ve ‘got an idea’ how to do something when they clearly don’t.