Corsican specialties- a favorite being the fig jam with goat cheese
Bastia at night
Piana church painting
Looking out of the church
Piana church interior
Mountain swimming hole near Evisa.
Ferry back to Nice.
Farewell dinner of chestnut polenta. Yum!
Third animal safety lesson from Corsica: don’t feed the pigs. We’ve got a little scratch on the car to prove it. Thank goodness for no-fault insurance. I’m not sure pig attacks would be covered under State Farm. After convincing Sven that it would be a good idea to feed some old figs to the pigs, he ended up covered in pig slobber and with pigs chasing our car down the road.
Our drive from Porto back across the island and over the mountains was a slow one (except for pig chase) and sometimes seemingly vertical. As we drove through Piana before heading across we encountered a lovely church with gorgeous faux- marble painting. (After getting back to Bastia we would find out that Cecile worked on this large painting job for about a year when Agathe was a baby!) Driving west, we passed a town which is apparently well-known for its roof tiles formed on the women’s thighs (“They must have been skinny!” said Eilidh)
We stopped for lunch in the little town of Evisa (a homebase for hikers) and decided to do a little more driving before finding a hotel. Along the way Sven saw a little turnout and a trail entrance so we forced the kids out of the car for a bit and down the trail to explore. We found a friendly pig to pet and ran into someone who told us there was a natural swimming pool a bit down the path. After grabbing our swimming suits we headed back down the path into the tall pines and realized it was only 10 minutes walking to the river, which was lined with huge boulders and flat stone outcroppings made for sunbathing. While the girls looked for tadpoles, the adults went swimming in the gentle green pools of the river, gasping for breath at the cold. Beautiful!
Eilidh started feeling bad as we drove on so we looked for a hotel instead of camping. We checked out the cost of a motel dive and it was 100 euros for a little room with one bed and bunkbeds, so we drove on and found a glamorous-looking hotel just a couple minutes down the road for 15 euros less. The rooms were amazing and filled with gorgeous oil paintings of Corsica scenes….Two connected rooms with a hot shower! The large comfortable rooms definitely made up for the lack of heat.
Early the next morning we loaded up the car again and continued the drive over the mountains. Back in Bastia, we had a wonderful lunch in the citadel, did laundry, visited the Bastia museum, got photographed for a DK travel guide (because we were the only family to be found and they needed a family shot). Balika gave the girls double backrubs on the couch, where both girls conked out for a couple of hours. Meanwhile, the adults were able to run errands and catch up on writing about the trip. From the vantage point between two sleeping girls the most wonderful view presented itself: a massive, soft yellow baroque catholic church next to rambling apartment buildings topped with mossy slate roofs. The sounds were lovely: swallows, an occasional child crying or laughing, the buzz of scooters, the hum of the harbor business. Bastia, a bit like Kodiak, is a working town and as such shuns the ‘prettification’ of life. The exterior of the city’s apartments are crumbling and often show two or three layers of plaster and brick. Laundry dries on balconies next to pots of rosemary. Freshly-painted bright blue shutters adorn the front of an unpainted façade, and in between two concrete- colored buildings is squeezed a bright yellow little apartment with stark white shutters.
Michelle and Cecile prepared a traditional Corsican winter meal: Corsican polenta (made from their famous chestnut meal) which, to cook, involved a display of real muscle and a wooden stirring implement bigger than Bella. The polenta slices were topped with fresh cheese and a veal stew that made Sven and I go back for seconds. Michelle also prepared roasted red peppers and an eggplant-garlic puree. After a dessert of passionfruit and mango sorbet we were definitely ready for bed. We dozed off with a definite feeling of satisfaction and contentment after a wonderful visit to the friendly island of La Corse. Michelle, Cecile and Agathe made the trip such an easy and comfortable journey.
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