April 20 - Bonifacio, Corsica

I've written what follows and have just discovered that I'm unable to upload photos so for now this will just be picture less.  How boring!  Hopefully at some time I'll be able to insert some.

I have a lot of catching up to do so I’d better get cracking.  Yesterday, the day before Easter, we docked in Cagliari, Sardinia.  It was a windy day and we docked in the industrial port where there were lots of ferries loading up trucks taking cargo to various ports around the western Mediterranean.  Seabourn had a shuttle bus to take passengers to a central point in town.  Years ago we had been here and I didn’t remember anything I wanted to revisit so my plan was to ride into town and maybe shop a little and then find a café to have a coffee or a glass of wine.  As we approached the main square I could see it was very crowded with locals on holiday and the cafés looked full. The shops were all name brands like I can find in big malls in the US that carry things I’d never buy or wear.  So I turned around and went back to the ship.  I intended to do something constructive but instead I met some friends and we spent the afternoon chatting.

Cagliari downtown

Today we anchored off the town of Bonifacio, Corsica. We went from Italy to France overnight. Corsica is the fourth largest island in the Mediterranean and it lies north of Sardinia just west of the Italian mainland.  As with most of the places around this sea it has been occupied and inhabited by many different civilizations and countries.  Bones and artifacts dating back to the 6th millennium BC have been found.  For several hundred years it belonged to the Republic of Genoa.  We forget that Italy as we know it didn’t become a unified country until the 19th century. Prior to that it was a collection of city-states and provinces of larger kingdoms and empires.  One of those was Genoa. The Genoese ruled with a heavy hand and imposed large taxes on the population. In the 18th century a Corsican Revolution began which eventually ended with Corsica, through a series of many events, becoming a region of France.  Perhaps the most famous person to come from Corsica is Napoleon Bonaparte who was born here in 1769. I find it interesting that he is not particularly well-thought of here.  His father didn’t support the Corsican revolutionaries and was declared a traitor.  While the island is part of France there is a strong independence movement still and as we traveled around I saw lots of graffiti with the letters FLNC which stand for the independence party here.  During WWII after France surrendered to the Germans, Corsica became part of Vichy France which was supposedly not under German rule.  However, after the Allies invaded North Africa, nearly 90,000 Italian and German troops were stationed on the island. Free French forces arrived in September 1943 and Corsica became the first department of France to be liberated.

I decided to take an island tour today and it was the same one I took years ago with Al so it was a little trip down memory lane.  Because of the position of the island it was a frequent target of pirates who roamed the Mediterranean including Barbary pirates from North Africa. As in many other places around here the inhabitants built their villages a little inland where they weren’t so easily accessible to brigands.  My tour took me to the interior including to the mountains in the middle. Truthfully this part of Corsica has mainly just natural things to see.  There are lots of forests and interesting rock formations.  Corsica is basically made of granite with some limestone, the latter especially around the shoreline cliffs.  Because of this the houses are made of blocks of granite so they are all either gray or a slight reddish color if the granite contained more iron.  It was Easter Sunday and every place looked asleep as we passed through.

That diagonal line on the cliff is a staircase going up at a really steep angle. We didn't have to go that way.

  

The day had started as overcast and it began to rain.  As we traveled into the mountains fog rolled in which made the scenery look a little mysterious.  Our guide was a German (what is it was these Germans?  Over the years I’ve had so many Germany guides in faraway places.) and she talked  about the flora and fauna.  They have a problem with wild boar which are very destructive and they have an overpopulation of red deer (that sounds familiar only ours are white deer).  The island's principal business is tourism.  Up in the mountains at a place called Alta Roca we stopped for a lunch break at a restaurant that was absolutely packed with people on an Easter outing.  We had a lunch of cold cuts, some of which were sausage made with wild boar, a stew made with boar and served with polenta, and dessert consisting of a chestnut tart and a local cheese.  It was tasty but I can’t say as much about the wine.  I took one sip of the rosé and my mouth puckered instantly; it was like taking a sip of the sourest vinegar imaginable.  The red was tolerable but nothing to write home about.

After lunch we made our way back to Bonifacio where we caught the last tender back to the ship.  I managed to make it to the last few minutes of trivia and our team won the first cumulative set of games.  This is the first cruise I can remember being on where we play trivia every day even in port.  In the evening instead of a show we had “The Liars’ Club” which I know I’ve written about before.  As usual it is great fun and we have lots of laughs.  I don’t know how the “liars” can keep straight faces as they give the most outrageous definitions of words nobody has ever heard before.

I should mention that the ship had Easter displays everywhere and in each of our cabins we found a chocolate bunny and chocolate eggs nestled in some colored grass.  They do things very nicely here on Seabourn.  And that was my (not so) exciting day in Corsica.