It’s like the most exciting train set ever devised for a child. I never knew of its existence until reading about a journey across the northern half of the island on the BBC homepage. Ever since, the Good Wife and I have resolved to return to Corsica and this time to explore the northern rather than the southern part of the island. And this time by train. Le petit train to be precise, which rattles all the way from Ajaccio on the west coast through the mountainous interior and thence to the north and/or north-east coast. A week’s rover ticket costs a mere €50 per person and allows you to hop on and jump off according to whim. With a few provisos…
Not because I’m bone-idle, you understand, but because my ‘better half’ relishes this kind of thing, I left all the arrangements in her capable hands. And verily, it all went more or less like clockwork. We left on the first day of this glorious October from Souillac station, where you can park the car for free for an unspecified time. Our train to Montauban was on time, we had a decent cup of coffee in the station Relay, and the Bordeaux train to Marseille was on time. We arrived at the appointed hour, giving us three hours to cross the city to the new port, where cruise ships dock, the size of apartment blocks. The journey there (no thanks to Deborah’s App) by bus through a dodgy part of town was fraught, but we found a salad bar still just about open, they let us onto the ferry early and Security didn’t confiscate my Swiss army knife.
We were two of the last foot passengers off the boat early the next morning in Ajaccio, despite being hideously woken at six by an announcement that spared no decibels. Perhaps we were too transfixed by the view from our cabin window. But anyway, we arrived at the train station, only to find the on-screen information ‘momentarily unavailable’, a kind of leitmotif for the trip.
As casual as a pair of loafers, the man at the desk printed
our week-long tickets on paper as flimsy as a supermarket receipt. Err, what if we lost them? Debs had the
brainwave of scanning the QR code onto her phone, but this merely takes you to
the company’s homepage. Oh well, we
shrugged as we wandered onto a platform where confusion reigned. A little train
came in and a lot of people got off, but there was no one around to ask where
it was going. We figured that it had to be going to Corte, the university town
in the mountainous interior, and since it’s a single track and the next train
wasn’t due for three hours…
After an underwhelming start to the journey past the scruffy environs by the bay, the train heads inland and soon starts to climb at a speed resembling a rickshaw. You soon begin to appreciate why the train has been nicknamed le tremblotant – or bone-shaker. It’s not a comfortable experience, but hey… the scenery is simply to shake for. You amble through cuttings so narrow you could reach out and touch the dense vegetation, through tunnels and over perilous viaducts to be granted the kind of vistas that confirm why Corsica is one of the most beautiful islands on this earth.
Although unwilling to take my eyes off the moving pictures for a second, there comes a time in any old man’s life when you must arise and go now and go to the lavatory. Le petit train, u trinichellu in the Corsican tongue, must be one of the few in western Europe where a locking door is momentarily unavailable. I had to hold the sliding door shut with one hand while aiming the appendage at the stainless steel with the other. I guess you could bracket it with the lack of on-board announcements and digital display as part of the train’s charm.
The lack of uniforms, too, perhaps. There’s something I find both relaxing yet disquieting about plain-clothes staff. Yes, it creates a laid-back ambience, but there’s also a nagging doubt that the company could organise a piss-up in a brewery. On checking their ticket, the on-board conductor asks each passenger where they’re going, but doesn’t appear either to note the information or to convey it to the driver. So you need to keep your wits about you. A close eye on station names and timetable is essential to avoid getting off where you shouldn’t. Our gay idea of hopping on and off at whim is a non-starter. Fail to flag down the only other train to pass that day, and you could be left in some primordial mountain valley with only nuts and berries to eat.
No such worries at Corte. The station is clearly marked even if the on-screen display was momentarily unavailable. Hikers exploring the valleys of the two principal rivers flowing through Corte bring tourism to the town. We opted for the Tavignanu rather than the Restonica on the guidance of the Office de Tourisme, since it offered the widest panorama in the shortest time. It was indeed magnificent, reminding me of super-sized Glens of Antrim in Norn Iron, but in our attempt to make it a round walk, we wandered off piste and got hopelessly lost, thus adding at least an hour more to our trek. Dinner that night in a local restaurant and breakfast the next morning in our charmingly old-fashioned hotel made up for the misadventure. My wife’s rather more infallible app clocked us at over 20,000 steps for the day, but failed to calculate the degree of difficulty.
The next morning, we got up early to catch the bone-shaker to Calvi, changing at Ponte Lecchia, a junction in the middle of nowhere. The journey was yet more breathtaking than the day before’s. It wasn’t that the scenery was any more spectacular, it was just that you could see more of it. As the two carriages serpentine through more cuttings and more tunnels, you rattle along one side of an incised valley and then back along the other, so you can see where you’re going and then where you’ve just been.
For the kid still inside me, still secretly yearning for that papier-mâché landscape that Santa never built for my Blue Pullman train set, this was thrilling. This time I tempered my intake of water. To add to the spectacle, after Novella there are glimpses of the distant Ligurian Sea twinkling among the folds of the hills. At a hidden halt where the road abuts the railway briefly with no barrier between them, a bewildered elderly couple disembarked, as if without the first idea where they were. To allay my empathetic wife’s fears, I suggested that they were staying with friends in the village down below. She wasn’t entirely convinced.
When you think the journey can’t possibly get any better, the train positively gallops down to the coast to clickety-clack alongside a sea that’s improbably blue between L’Ile Rousse and our destination. Around a rocky headland it totters and lo! Suddenly, a great sweeping vista reveals Calvi across the bay, nestling under the mountains. Curiously, though: when we dismounted at the station, the screen display was still momentarily unavailable. Wittgenstein might have questioned the duration of a moment.
We stayed in a fairly basic apartment in the fortified citadel that crowns the harbour. This involved a lot of cobbled steps but granted 360-degree views over a landscape fit for a septuagenarian with a birthday to celebrate. The weather was even more than you could ask for from the month of October and every evening we joined the spectators at the little bar beneath our billet to watch the sun sink down over the town’s western edge. We loved Calvi, but agreed that four days of sun, sea and sand are probably our limit.
Nothing else for it but to boldly go by early morning train to Bastia. So early in fact that we could watch dawn break over the bay even as the previous night’s moon still shone above the town. Even though we’d already done the leg from Calvi to Ponte Lecchia, I opted once more for the scenery rather than Thomas Mann’s interminable Buddenbrooks. The final stage, from Ponte Lecchia to Bastia, was less interesting perhaps, but we enjoyed studying how the young conductress managed to marry her official duties with intermittent vaping and constant peeks at her phone.
Arriving at Bastia, not only was the screen display (surely permanently) unavailable, but the station WC was out of order. Moreover, when the Good Wife queried how to claim our free left-luggage facility, the Supercilious Assistant at the desk argued that black was white. Clearly, another case of Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown. It sent my customarily well-tempered wife into a tizzy. There are times when she hates injustice and officious men even more than she hates text messages from her sociopathic sister. Her mood wasn’t helped by that fallible phone app sending us on another wild-goose chase in search of our hilltop hotel. Reader, I didn’t at this juncture suggest that we’d be far better off following our noses.
The next day, our last on the island, we met up with a Dutch couple who had travelled by train from Holland to Toulon and then seemingly duplicated our ow trip. They were there at the hotel and the station the next morning in Corte. They stayed in Calvi and left the day before us, arrived at our hotel in Bastia late in the evening because le premier petit train departed half an hour before the timetable suggested to accommodate school children. The same fallible phone app even sent them on the same wild-goose chase. Spooky!
We saw them again while exploring Bastia’s old harbour and endearingly dilapidated citadel, and once more at the museum, learning about the son of Louis Napoleon and his empress Eugénie, who might have been Napoleon IV had it not been for an inexplicable need to prove himself a man in the field of battle. He was despatched prematurely in South Africa by a Zulu warrior’s assegai.
And they ended up sharing our cab to the port late that afternoon. But… they didn’t discover at Raugi’s the cream of hazelnut glace, which was possibly the best ice cream that I have tasted in my life. EVER! One other reason why we ended up liking Bastia more than we initially thought possible. It exudes an honest, no-frills, habitable quality and mirrors the beating heart of industrial cities like Bilbao, Clermont-Ferrand and Sheffield. We watched it diminish from the picture window in our cabin as our Corsica ferry skirted the Cap de Corse before veering off in a general Marseillaise direction.
That’s twice now we’ve visited Corsica, once by car and now by train. That’s arguably enough in one lifetime. If we need to cross the Ligurian Sea again, we’ll head for Sardinia. As for the train trip… the Settle to Appleby leg of the line from Leeds to Carlisle was pretty special, and the Alpine scenery of the Briançon to Grenoble line is perhaps more grandiose, particularly in winter, but the petit train, for all its quirky faults and unavailable displays, was a boy’s own adventure of a lifetime. Next time: up the west coast of Norway to the Arctic Circle and back down through Finland. Maybe. Unless the Red Army renders it momentanément indisponible.
