The hitchhiker's guide to Corsican trains

Don’t assume that when you go to the train station and buy a ticket, you’ll actually be getting on a train. Don’t assume that even if you have done a journey many times, you know which legs of it will be on trains, and which on buses. Don’t assume that there will be any screens or announcements to help you find the right train or bus. Don’t expect station staff to tell you that the train is delayed by an hour. Don’t expect even a hint of apology when it is. Don’t expect timetables to be correct: they change every few months, but not on the dates specified on the timetables, because digging up the tracks takes longer than expected, every time.

I quite like Corsican trains. This year, one thing I’m not short of is time, so it’s nice to relax and not worry when your scheduled one hour wait at a tiny station turns into 2 and a half hours. I sit and read and wander down to a café for a chausson aux blettes to satisfy my new passion for chard, while the couple who need to catch their flight finally find out that the train is late and forlornly wander down the road with their cases to hitch a lift.



That said, on Easter Saturday we had an unusually farcical train experience. Me, Lija, Emily, Dan and James went to Vizzavona to walk to the cascade des anglais, a series of waterfalls in the forest about 30 km south of Corte. It was empty and idyllic. There was a ruined nineteenth century hotel watching over the hamlet of Vizzavona, once frequented by Victorian English tourists, and we only saw six other people on the trail all day. Snow-topped mountains peeked through the silver trunks of the beech trees and the few leaves which had clung on all winter were bleached to a pale gold, backlit by low spring sun. There were wooden bridges, moss-covered rocks and lizards. We sat on a boulder in the middle of the waterfall to eat our lunch, and I fell asleep on the rock dreaming of applause because of the splashing water.









The train was due to leave at 6 and we got back to the station with 45 minutes to spare. There was also an Italian man with his son and puppy and we all waited on the platform, in full view of the station-master in his office. Once the train was about ten minutes late, the station-master came out and told the Italian, in Italian, that there was no train: it had been a bus, up on the main road five minutes walk away through the forest, and we had missed it. He then went back into his office without bothering to say anything to us in French, English, or any other language. When I knocked on the door to ask him what he advised, he laughed, shrugged, and said we’d have to hitch. I can understand resenting tourists, and taking pleasure in their clueless failures. But at the very start of the season there isn’t much excuse to be jaded, so I suppose he was just a bastard.

We wandered up to the road which winds through steep pine forest, hugging the curves of the hill. In the end we split up and, after receiving an assortment of obscene hand gestures, the Italians and me, Lija and James got lifts. We were with two Italian men who talked to us in a mixture of Italian, French and English, and said that they had picked us up because of the solidarity of hikers, and the solidarity of foreigners. Poor Dan and Emily were stuck in the dark of the forest until they conceded failure and Stella drove out to pick them up. It was fun, since we knew that Stella would come eventually, even if she had to make two trips to fit us all in. But there was nowhere with a hotel within feasible walking distance, it was dark with fog rolling in, and it would have been hard not to panic if we hadn’t had her to rely on.