Southern France In Low Gear

By Marie Madigan

During a cycle tour in France in 2012, Marie's legs started talking to her.  A year later, pedalling up the first long hill in Corsica, The Legs piped up again. 

'And how long is it for this time? Two months? And we're going where? Oh, just to the Atlantic. Fine. No problem.'

With the same sturdy old bikes, the same stoic Legs and the same measure of stubbornness and stamina, Marie and Adi chug around Corsica, pedal through Provence, skirt the Cévennes and plod through the Pyrenees. With encounters with booted eagles, friendly farmers, cycle tourers of all description and a thrilling glimpse of the Yellow Jersey, the hilly regions of France charm them once again.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Marie Madigan
• Release date: Aug 20, 2016
• ISBN: 9781533708458

Book preview

CHAPTER ONE

The Corsican Leg

As the huge ferry approached Bastia, a tiny boat drew alongside. The pilot stood on the deck and leapt, James-Bond-style, onto a rope-ladder hanging down the ferry’s side, against a backdrop of hills darkened by the swirling rain clouds and crowds of screaming swifts. It was a dramatic arrival in Corsica, where we’d be cycle-touring for the next two weeks, the first leg of a two-month tour of southern France.

We hoped the weather wouldn’t insist on being quite so dramatic for the next couple of weeks.

Adi and I had left Wales a couple of days ago at 6 a.m. on a chilly May morning and arrived in Avignon three trains later that evening. A day of exploring and assembling our bikes, a slow TGV to Nice and an overnight stop there. The plan: a two-month tour in France, starting with a fortnight on Corsica. We’d cycled from Avignon to Saint-Malo the previous year, coinciding with the worst summer in western Europe for years. This time, we’d decided to start far south enough to make sure of sunshine.

The sun did not seem inclined to co-operate. We’d left blazing sunshine in Nice, which made up for the careless and charmless Corsica Ferries staff. On the six-hour crossing to Bastia, skies had grown purple and dramatic, clearly wanting to put on a show for us. It’s fine, we’re grand, we’d waved at it, as one waves away the ninth cup of tea being pressed upon one by the grand-aunt, but it didn’t listen. The clouds agains the mountains towered ochre, pearl and gunmetal, gilded with backlight as the ferry docked, an hour behind schedule.

We cycled out into almost-darkness at nine in the evening. Adi’s research had been accurate, and the sign for Camping Lestranger loomed on our left after a couple of lonely miles. We went entered, found something that looked like a small shower block, leaned the bikes against it and tried to find someone in charge.

The campsite appeared to be constructed on a cliff. High above were the distant lights of a house, a path to it eluded us. We stumbled around and found a tiny steep path up to some terraced pitches apparently hacked into the rock, as far as we could tell by torch light. We’d never get our pannier-laden bikes up there in the dark.

More stumbling around in the dark ensued, along with tired, giddy giggles. Close to the tiny shower block at the bottom we found some unoccupied caravans.

‘We’ll stick it here,’ Adi said, pointing at the patch of grass between two of them.

‘We’ll apologise in the morning,’ I agreed.

A figure loomed out of the dark as we were throwing the bedding in. Not the owner, but a young man on his way to his night time ablutions. He was a cycle tourer himself, just about to take the ferry back home to the mainland. He enthused about Corsica, but had some cautions. ‘Not many campsites in the middle of the island,’ he said. ‘Long rides over lots of peaks.’

We’d been doing lots of cycling for the last couple of years. Since returning from our two months in France the previous year, we both had made sure we kept our fitness levels up. We were strong and healthy and eager for cycling. But those hills we’d seen from the ferry had looked big. We put worries aside as we ate a last square of chocolate and settled down.

I slept well and woke up starving. Hunger makes for early, efficient starts. We’d collapsed the tent and were ready to search for breakfast long before nine o’clock. Just as we were about to hang a little envelope with payment on the reception hut’s closed door, a startled-looking woman appeared from out of the woods. Surprised, but kind, she offered to open the ladies’ showers for me, but I had already managed my ablutions.

Back down the road, Bastia glowed pink and orange in the morning sunlight. There was an ominous fullness to the clouds that we chose to ignore. We bought half a ton of fruit and vegetables in the vibrant market and sat at a café on the corner, downloading the weather forecast.

‘Dire,’ Adi said, putting his phone away. ‘You don’t want to know.’

My joy was undimmed, because I had just been served tea, in a pot with the tea bag in it. I was delighted; this had not happened often in France the previous year.

Our plan: anticlockwise down the west coast to the southern tip at Bonifacio, returning to Bastia via the island’s mountain spine through Corte. But first, two days cycling around Cap Corse. We stowed our purchases in our panniers and headed north towards Macinaggio as it began to rain.

Cap Corse sticks out like an appendix from the island’s northeastern corner. We had the first of many pain-au-chocolat stops a few miles north in Erbalunga where the baker’s gentle-eyed dog followed us on our wander through crooked-housed streets to the tiny harbour. We dipped our toes into the Mediterranean under the ruined Genoese tower; despite the spitting rain, the rocks and sea felt deliciously warm.

The following two days on the Cap felt to me like a concentration of Corsica’s essence. Moody skies with splashes of sunshine turned mountainsides into shades of blue, purple and yellow. Holm oaks and ash trees shared the roadside with towering cacti and aloe veras. The road wriggled through tiny hamlets tucked into rocky coves, clinging to the coast, sometimes rising to small but scary cliffs with no road barriers, sometimes dropping down to within spray-splashing distance of the waves. Familiar poppies and vetches splashed the fields, pinned amongst strange succulents and shrubs. The sea on our right, every shade of blue, and the island of Elba sitting dusky, far out on the horizon.

Macinaggio’s campsite lay a mile out on the far side of the village, a farmstead of clustered outbuildings and pitches under olive trees. An enormous barn of a bar was not yet open in the evenings, the owner explained, but we could get tea and coffee there in the morning. Then he went to fetch the sheep from where they’d been grazing by the sea and drove them through the campsite, bells ringing, through the farm into higher fields behind.

After dinner we walked along the beach into the village. The strangest shoreline: grey sand overlain by a mat of vegetable matter mostly composed of fragments of palm trees. It was nearly three feet thick, cut into miniature cliffs and bays by the sea.

The first ice cream of the trip and the first chance to eavesdrop on the Corsican accent. Thick and slow, it reminded me of the accents of rural west Cork, and of the north Wales countryside in western and southern Gwynedd; accents that have nothing in common with each other but a lovely, deliberate placement of all the syllables, and a charming unrushed-ness about it.

We fell asleep to the sound of rain pattering on the tent, and a digital sound like a submarine’s sonar: a scops owl’s beeping call.

The morning road rose up to the Col de Serra on the northwest of the cape. The Legs had entered early into the spirit of the thing, and declined to go down into bottom gear.

I had better explain The Legs. They’d starting talking to me last year, in Provence, and had never stopped. That is, they didn’t talk all the time but, having found their voices, certainly weren’t backwards about coming forwards with their opinions on my choice of gear, or the wisdom of attempting this or that hill. It wasn’t all complaining though; they were stolid, dependable, and rarely let me down as long as I fed them. I thought of them as a pair of pit ponies, stolid and dogged. The Bike, The Legs and me, all three, the cycle tourer’s trinity.

At the top of the col we walked to a viewing point and looked over the rocky land to the very tip of the tip of Cap Corse. A thin lane plunged down a steep hill towards the rocky headland below.

‘Off you go,’ Adi said. ‘I’ll stay here.’ I declined, not wanting to chug alone back up the hill. It’s a decision I’ve regretted since. I should have gone to the very northern tip! Although as we didn’t - spoiler alert! - in fact make it to the very south of the island in the end, it doesn’t matter so much. It’s only now as I’m typing this, three years later, that it occurs to me I could have left all my panniers with Adi and cycled it unladen. Oh well. It’s a good reason to go back in the future.

The wind had picked up, coming up the coast from the southwest and thumping deliciously into us. I was forced to pedal downhill, gripping the bike somewhere between firmly and desperately as the wind caught me on the exposed bits of the corniche. The road was hacked into the rock, following every indentation of the cliffs. Cycling on the right, we were close to the plunging drops; at least the wind was blowing us into the middle of the road rather than off the cliff. No wimpy road barriers here.

The colourful crooked village of Centuri-Port looked lovely far below. The long descent took us almost down to sea level. Wind-frothed cerulean blue waves rolled onto rocks and broke in spumes of spray. Lizards scuttled in the gravel on the roadside. A teenager on a bike yelled ‘Courage, courage!’ as he passed us, towed up the rattling, potholed rode by a friend on a scooter. Now that’s the way to cycle up hills.

We ate a picnic lunch in Pino, sitting on a stone bench just past the village, on a bench mysteriously placed with its back to the view. Possibly to keep backs to the wind, which blew chilly in the sunshine. Lemon trees, bearing actual lemons, grew in the garden below us.