Hiking on Corsica, 2007

Dwight Peck's personal Web site

Corsica in the Off Season, 2007

Corsica, the grudgingly-French island off the coast of Italy. We're catching the off-season rates, late November and early December 2007.

You may not find this tangibly rewarding unless you're included here, so this is a good time for casual and random browsers to turn back before they get too caught up in the sweep and majesty of the proceedings and can't let go.

Porto Vecchio and the ferry home

A last morning walk around the streets of Bastia, 1 December 2007, trying to remember where we left the Kangoo.

And after a short drive south, we're in Porto Vecchio in the southeast.

From the Porto Vecchio old town on the hill, we're gazing down upon the port and, especially, Our Ferry, no doubt loading on fuel and lots of safety equipment and dinnertime goodies.

Porto Vecchio, up in the old town, is a charming place
(the surrounding areas, with traffic and automobile lots and gardening centres and centres commerciales, could as well be in Omaha or Little Rock. But without all the gun shops).

A venerable salt industry out on those nearby salt pans

In the remaining parts of the citadel and ramparts, here's a Christmas artisan fair.

Kristin has got a Christmas question for Santa, but he's taking an important call on his cell phone at the moment.

By the time Jolly Old Santa has got off the phone, Kristin has taken her question to someone else. It's an herbal question, so Santa may not have been much help anyway.

Europeans try to put their fortifications to better uses, these days.

Porto Vecchio citadel. Now we need to return our good old Kangoo to his real owners.

The Europcar dropoff is conveniently located in the tourist information complex at the centre of the yachting port. In summer. In the off season, Europcar retreats to its auxiliary lot out on the highway. But it's a nice day, so we've made a misty-eyed farewell to Old Kangoo out near the bypass and we're trudging back into the port area, with plenty of time before sailing.

In fact, there's our boat across the bay, still loading up on dinnertime goodies. Like Pietra, the chestnut beer!

Our ferry this time is the Mont d'Oro, named after one of Corsica's highest mountains, looming over Vizzavona. Not a high mountain (mere inches higher than Leysin's Tour d'Aï), but Corsica's fourth highest, and very beautiful.

Colorful boats in the afternoon

The upper town of Porto Vecchio from the port

Our hike up Mont d'Oro will soon begin.

Fine lakes just behind the coast line

The view adjacent to the port area.
Just south of here, between Porto Vecchio and Bonifacio, lies a complex of temporary pools called the Mares temporaires de Tre Padule de Suartone, designated by France for protection under the Ramsar Convention just earlier this year.

This ferry was pointed out to us as very much cheaper than the Mont d'Oro, but there was no one around to talk to about changing our tickets. So they lost our business.

So it's All Aboard! for the Mont d'Oro.

In the cabin, first things first: check out the menu.

Leaving Porto Vecchio at nightfall, and heading for Marseille. Where the 10-euros-a-day carpark near the port was still developing a new business plan and, at 8 a.m. on a Sunday, they just opened the gates for us for free and wrote off the lost income as part of the present global financial crisis.
And so now we're bound for . . .
ORANGE. In the Roman theatre, this is Europe's only standing Roman theatre stage wall, with Emperor Somebodius in the niche. More on all that later.