Corsica by Daniel Scott

"The train is never late," jokes the beady-eyed black-bearded station master as we wait in the middle of the Corsican mountains for it to arrive, "but the timetable is often a little wrong."

With that the little box-set electric train rattles around the corner toward Vizzavona station, looking like something out of a 1950s theme park. I clamber aboard and as the train hiccoughs away find a space among smelly fellow hikers sitting on rucksacks and French and German tourists readying their videos for the remainder of one of the world’s most picturesque train journeys.

All around us are thick green forests which intermittently form a natural tunnel over the train line. Above us, soaring 2000 metres into the blue summer sky are snow-topped granite peaks. Later, as we emerge from the cocoon of the forest, we look straight out of the train window into a series of deep rocky ravines, running silver with rivers full of melted snow.

We are in the middle of the Mediterranean’s most ruggedly beautiful island, chugging our way through and around its central spine of mean, meaty mountains toward the north coast. The journey is slow -- the train tootles along at less than 50 kilometres per hour and sometimes stops for herds of cows or goats crossing the line, but we don’t mind. It would be indecent to hurry through scenery like this.

As the train stutters across a viaduct, high above the valley floor, I watch the driver at the front of the carriage anxiously. He has one hand on the controls, one eye on the track ahead and is sharing a laugh over his shoulder with an overenthusiastic train buff. Opposite me, a group of leather-skinned country folk chomp on crusty bread and runny cheese and a young woman, round-rimmed spectacles on the edge of her nose, loses herself in a book of Baudelaire’s poetry.

A Gaulloises-created smog slips around the entire carriage, leaking out of the open windows. It emanates from the mouths of several twenty-something Corsican women, their cascades of black curls bouncing on bronzed shoulders with the rhythm of the train, their lips draped around their cigarettes, sucking the life out of them. Normally, the mere sight of a smouldering fag end would send me scurrying to the non-smoking compartment, but today I am somehow entranced by the lingering smoke.

In any case I know I am safer here than on the pot-holed Corsican roads, which curl and snarl around the island’s mountains. Actually it’s not so much the roads themselves that are dangerous as the way that the Corsicans drive on them, melding French impatience with Italian speed and adding an indigenous sang-froid. One day’s heart failure, as vehicle after vehicle headed straight toward my hire car on the wrong side of the road -- only pulling over at the last moment -- was all it took to convince me to let the train take the strain.

In the carriage, my attention turns once more to the rugged foothills outside the window. We are approaching Corte, the hilltop town which was once the island’s capital and remains one of the centres of Corsican nationalism.

Corsican nationalism? While the French like to call the island one of their own, the Corsicans are none too happy with the idea, despite the fact that the acme of French imperialism, Napoleon Bonaparte - was born on the island, in Ajaccio. No, they see themselves as very different from their Gallic "masters", speak their own heavily inflected dialect and seem closer to the Italians just across the gulf of Genoa than they do to the French.

I also detect in them something of the Moorish and the Spanish, which is not too ridiculous an observation. After all, in its time, Corsica has been invaded by the Phoenicians, Greeks, Etruscans, Phoceans, Carthaginians and Romans, and has been ruled over by the Papacy, the Tuscans, the Aragonese, the Genoese, the Germans and even the English.

But as we meander northwards to the coastal resort of Calvi, it is the Italian influence which is the most striking. Nearly all the names of the more-or-less deserted mountain stations we pass through -- from Francardo through Ponte Leccia, where we change onto an even smaller train, to Novella and Palasca -- are quintessentially Italian.

Then, almost without warning, the train rounds a hillside and we are heading straight for the sparkling Mediterranean sea, toward the town of Ile Rousse. Finally we follow a craggy coastline to Calvi, the train line wedged between the foot of the mountains on one side and the gently lapping ocean, metres below, on the other.

Calvi is both where my visit to Corsica began and where it will shortly end. Ten days earlier, I had arrived in the town to rendezvous with some adventurous British friends. Our plan was to tackle the Grande Route 20, the walking trail which begins at the nearby hilltown of Calenzana and traverses the mountains which dominate the island.

The GR20 is billed as "Europe’s most difficult walking trail" and I soon find out why. As soon as we start walking uphill out of Calenzana, I wish I had done some training -- walking to the mailbox, jumping on the spot, anything -- because, what with carrying everything on our backs, including a job lot of dehydrated foods with names like"Curri Inna Hurry" and "Barbie’s Dhal", I am quickly breathless.

Things do not improve as I grunt and sweat my way up around 1600 metres of ascents that morning. The sublime views are definitely worth the climb but sadly, the further up we go the more my vision is blurring. When, eight hours later, we reach our camping spot -- overlooking a steeply sided valley turned golden by the sunset -- my body is in shock. That night, as I lie in my sleeping bag, I attempt the last of around three thousand stretches and propel my entire lower half into a jarring stiffening cramp from which I can barely escape.

The following day I drag my limbs through another ten hours of ascents, 800 metre descents and tricky traverses as we trek nearer and nearer the snow line. Behind us, the Mediterranean continues to glisten in Calvi’s horseshoe bay. Beneath us the plunge toward untouched valleys becomes more and more sheer. Ahead of us the greys, cool greens and off whites of the Corsican mountains spread out toward the horizon, reminding me that it will take another thirteen days to get to the end of this trail.

Then, nearing the end of the second day, I fall. Nothing too dramatic, just a potentially life-threatening trip over my own walking pole, which snaps like a wishbone. Landing in the safety of some scrub at the side of the trail, my mind is made up. My dream of ever climbing Everest, or indeed of simply completing the GR20, is over. I am simply too incompetent, too inexperienced and too unfit to be let anywhere near anything you can fall off.

It is disappointing of course but the following day I bid my adventurous friends adieu and set out to find some rather safer parts of Corsica. Actually, leaving the GR20, while sad, is also liberating. My only way out is to walk down to the nearest road and hitch-hike and though this is my very first attempt at it, I manage to pick up three lifts in less than an hour. By lunchtime, I am in the square in Corte, supping a cold beer and digging into a mushroom pizza.

Later, after visiting the fascinating Museum of Corsica, with its insights into the anthropological, cultural roots and 8000 year-old history of this proud island, I sit in a restaurant above the town and eat dinner. Nearby, small twittering birds are flying in mists from rooftop to rooftop. Through the mists I gaze at the powerful mountains, turned blood red by the sunset. I am glad to be down here in the safety of Corte but pleased too that I have experienced something of the might and majesty of the Corsican hills.

For the next week, I head for the island’s northern coast, stopping first in the port of Bastia, the gateway to Corsica from the French mainland. Here an ancient citadel coils around an old port and bijou restaurants crowd around a modern marina. Each evening, in the waning summer sunshine, the waters of the marina light up with the reflections of the white hulls of very shiny, very expensive motor yachts.

At the expansive Grand Place de St Nicholas, adjacent to the new port, meanwhile, young couples stroll hand in hand in Italianate fashion. Elsewhere, little old ladies, dressed in black, cross themselves as they enter the cool interiors of the town’s impressive baroque churches, and the cobbled market place is cleared of detritus, ready for the next day. On each of the four nights I am in Bastia, I head to the restaurants by the marina to eat sumptuous seafood, accompanied by delicious Corsican wine.

I travel next to the seaside village of St Florent, hurtling over the hills which lie between it and Bastia by small public bus. Once I recover, I meet a young Corsican who has lived and worked in Western Australia for a year and bizarrely, speaks perfect "strine", peppering his speech with expressions like "no wackas, mate".

At his suggestion we go diving in the blue grottoes offshore. In remarkably clear Mediterranean waters, we discover several seventeenth century cannons and an undersea world which mirrors the Corsica above the water, in being craggy and rocky and surrounded by oceans of blue. Later we pay a visit to the vineyards in the foothills behind the town where Corsicans are now producing wines which are giving those on the mainland a real run for their money.

After a couple more days roaming the scraggy beaches around St Florent, it is time to meet up with my walking friends again, at the half-way point of the GR20 in the popular mountain retreat of Vizzavona.

It feels good to be among the hills once more, especially when we hike the short distance from the village up to the succession of tumbling falls known as the Cascades des Anglais. Here, amid huge boulders and fragrant woods, torrents of newly melted snow roar and rumble as they rush down from the peaks. Yet in between these gushes sit tranquil pools which brim with icy, sweet-tasting mountain water.

As I leave my friends to complete the Grande Route 20, I continue my own Corsican adventure by stepping aboard that smoke-filled little train, a journey taking me out of the indomitable mountains which are the island’s essence toward the Mediterranean sea which defines it. After a few unscheduled delays due to goats on the line, the train finally draws into Calvi at 8.30pm on a still warm summer night. But it’s not that we’re late, it’s just that the damn timetable’s out by an hour or so again.