Antoine Martin-Cocher, our mustachioed climbing information, is unmissable in a neon T-shirt and mirrored sun shades exterior the arrivals space at the Figari airport in southern Corsica. When we get to his pickup truck, he has us decant necessities, together with heat garments, from our suitcases into smaller backpacks. “The September sunshine is balmy, but where we’re headed, you can see your breath at night,” he cautions. We’re about to embark on a couple of days of trekking alongside the Mare à Mare, one of the island’s many very good climbing trails. My purpose is to faucet into the uncooked and rugged Corsica of my youth on a bit journey with my childhood good friend Meredith. Our plan is first to hike, then to reunite with our husbands (and our baggage) for some downtime in a grand rental villa close to the city of Bonifacio.
That traditionally much-fought-over clifftop settlement is in the present day the island’s most photographed (and crowded) vacation spot. It has, like the relaxation of Corsica, endured many epochs, having been handed amongst the Greeks, the Byzantines, the Saracens, varied Germanic tribes, the Genoese, and at last the French, who annexed the island in 1769. Corsica has been attempting to shake off the yoke of occupation ever since. In the identical fierce spirit of protest, it is held on to, and certainly honed, its personal sense of tradition, delicacies, and language.
Also driving. “You Corsicans seem to have a way behind the wheel,” I comment to Antoine as he hightails it out of the airport, blithely overtaking a policeman. We go a street signal pockmarked with bullet holes, a reminder of Corsica’s long-standing wrestle for independence. As Antoine factors out, the incontrovertible fact that we’re even right here as hikers and vacationers is due partially to a political truce that was struck in 2014 between the National Liberation Front of Corsica and the French authorities, one which pressed pause on a long time of battle and unrest. This armistice helped pave the approach for an explosion of villa developments and drew a wave of adventurers and pleasure-seekers to this much-contested knuckle of rock punching out from the deep waters between Italy and France.
I am unable to assist questioning whether or not I’ll even acknowledge, on this new, vacationer-friendly Corsica, the tough and rugged backwater I fell in love with half a lifetime in the past. That was my first ever strolling vacation; Meredith and I had been amongst a bunch that adopted the GR20, a path billed as the hardest in Europe. Across the empty wildlands we trekked—me, inappropriately attired in canvas sneakers and a skort. Despite the bloodied toes and sunstroke, the expertise triggered in me an obsession with survey maps and a need to return. How thrilling, then, to be again all these years later, with Meredith no much less, to not point out the educated Antoine. We’ll decide up a path, he tells us, above Porto Vecchio on the east coast and comply with it for some of its 53 diverse miles towards the western shoreline, alongside historical shepherd paths and thru forests of holm oak, chestnut, beech, and Corsican pine, earlier than reaching the mountain village of Santa-Maria-Figaniella. There we’ll spend a couple of nights at Casa Fortificata, a personal retreat owned by The Thinking Traveller, a high-end villa-rental firm. Finally, amid the herb-scented headlands, sybaritic seashore golf equipment, and vigorous marinas of the southern coast, we’ll rejoin the males, who will stick with us at a second Thinking Traveller villa by the seashore. But earlier than any of that, we have now the white-knuckle drive into the rocky hinterland to cope with.
Quenza is the final village earlier than the street offers option to mountain wilderness. The slim approach unwinds in steady switchbacks towards the Aiguilles de Bavella, the iconic “needles” that look extra like an underbite set in opposition to the open jaw of the horizon. A dozen hairpin bends later, and we gratefully tumble out of the automobile and into the stays of the afternoon gentle. We bounce throughout the Plateau du Coscione on padded pastures of moss and thick turf that open onto swimming pools of water referred to as pozzines. Pine needles and lemon and mint thyme crushed by our toes fragrance the path by way of the maquis, the dense scrubby vegetation discovered all through the Mediterranean. Semi-wild pigs snuffle beneath the large granite boulders, strong and immutable as Henry Moore sculptures, that outline this otherworldly panorama. Centuries of wind and rain have scooped and hollowed the granite, leaving cavities referred to as taffoni that can probably present shelter for the wandering swine tonight. When I used to be final in Corsica, solely a era in the past, the taffoni would generally home total households who had moved with their livestock to the highlands for the summer season.