Hallucinant

The two days we spent with Stephane were ‘hallucinant’. Used to travelling by foot and living in a little space - my flat, a few streets that I walk up and down each day, the beach – I was whisked off in his car and saw more in two days than I have seen in weeks, and almost all of it terribly beautiful.

First we went to Bonifacio and walked along clifftops carpeted with wildflowers. Blue sea and sky, towering white clouds and towers of white stones, buffeting wind and the scent of the maquis.







Flower centres the same saffron as lichen - almost too perfect.







Then Bonifacio town: winding streets and the cemetery, a little village of white tombs, at the end of the promontory on the edge of a cliff so that it feels like the edge of the world.



Then a long drive through green hills to a rock shaped like a lion, looking out to sea.

Then Sartène, a dour, vertical town of tall grey houses with closed shutters, ‘peopled by demons’ according to a nineteenth-century German writer.

Then Cuccuruzzu. We walked through the woods, holm oaks with spiralling trunks wrapped in moss, streams snaking down the path and weaving past granite boulders as big as houses. The sun was getting low and slanting through the trees, casting ribbons of shadow onto the rocks and lighting up the wild cyclamen that grew everywhere like little violet flames. The three colours were so improbable: the emerald of the moss, the lurid violet flowers and bright orange rings and ovals of cut branches, and the slightly duller orange of the grazing cows. It was magical, and we were all alone there.









In the end we came to the bronze-age white granite tower, ruined and crouching in the forest. It looked out over the valley to the Bavella needles, a row of red granite teeth on the horizon.

The next day we went to the sea, to Tamaricciu beach, named after the tamarisk trees there. You walk to the shore down a winding sandy path through maquis thick with flowers and emerge to see white sand, a long curve of pale blue sea, rocky islets, tamarisks and parasol pines. We lay there, Stephane and Helen swam, and then we went home for courgette cream sauce with rice. I don’t want to leave Corsica – I feel like I’ve not scratched the surface and I only have a few days left.