For whoever is interested, I will do some irregular summary blog posts on rainy or otherwise uneventful days from our Corsica vacation and here we go.
There will be references to “Asterix on Corsica” (marked as such with an * – how I love that this works so well) which will not make any sense to the uninitiated.
Day 1 – 8th September – Berlin -> Savona
This adventure begins with an early start at 2:00 in the morning after 3 hours sleep (coming from a wedding celebration the day before) and we hit the road with a full car battery, a huge mug of hot coffee and a plan on when and where to charge the car.
It is a 1220 km trip and as I prefer to drive night shifts and Chris is more into daylight driving we had a natural halfway split of the distance. Driving and charging was uneventful, but as we crossed from Germany to Austria to Switzerland to Italy on our way through the Alps, the rain was so constant that huge waterfalls were shooting off the rock faces! And we did get a taste of Milan’s traffic jams. In the end, we got to the Italian coast in time to grab two pizzas to go before we embarked on this beautiful ferry scheduled to leave Savona at 23:00.
After this exhausting drive we indulged in a real luxury cabin although I was slightly disappointed that the advertised bull-eyed cabin had a rectangular window. But the view of the ferry pushing away from the quay was excellent.
Day 2 – 9th September – Savona -> Ghisoni
We had 5:45 hours of restful sleep just to be woken up at 5:00 in the morning by an unsympathetic voice announcing in four different languages that arrival is imminent which actually happened over an hour later. It felt a bit like being woken up in hospitals at 4:30 for breakfast for no good reasons.
But anyways, at least we could follow the landing procedure a bit and then spend copious amounts of time in our car in the dark belly of the beast waiting to be spit out and hoping that the captain knows what he is doing.
To bridge the time until the check-in into our airbnb, we explored the northernmost east coast lagoon, the Étang du Biguglia which coincidentally is a bird reserve known for its importance as a resting place during migration.
Unfortunately a bit early for this event (bird migration), we still had some nice sightings with Little Egrets, Bee-eaters, Zitting Cisticolas, and Cetti’s Warblers.
We did some initial grocery shopping amd then reached our temporary home in Ghisoni, which is centrally located at 690m altitude and provides easy access to a lot of hiking routes. Easy access is relative as to cover a distance of 40km will easily take you more than 90 minutes. Roads are narrow, not always in good conditions and really windy.
Day 3 – 10th September – Cascade des Anglais
Our first day of real hiking (yeah) started with an easier tour to the Cascade des Anglais, at least this is what we thought. First days of hiking are never easy (second and third days are even worse) and getting older does not improve the situation.
The cascades did not disappoint and one of the attractions are the big pools spread out over the stream where you can cool your feet or more.
Chris enjoyed a lot dipping into the pools, and I decided to press on a bit to exercise my mountain legs more. And to look out for the Corsican Nuthatch, an endemic species (for non-biologists, this bird can only be found on Corsica) as this valley is supposed to be one of the few places to find them.
I found a lot of beauty, but no Nuthatch.
It really was not that big of a hike but we both felt satisfactorily tired.
The day was not done yet as the sky was clear, wind was low and the moon was down at an appropriate time as well. So the perfect conditions for star gazing and photography. I couldn’t miss the opportunity to be in an environment with so little light pollution.
You try to get as much exposure time as possible of an object and then shoot different sets of calibration frames to get rid of electronic and thermal noise as well as of dead pixels in the sensor and vignette of the objective.
I did 300 exposures of 20s amd the final results can only be presented after a lot of computation at home (I will post this here later), but I want to share an exposure of the Andromeda Galaxy only slightly worked on with iPhone photo editing. I think it will be so much better when you have a layover of 300 exposures and use the calibration frames.
Day 4 – 11th September – Plateau du Coscione
I went to bed at 2:00 (Chris already deep asleep) and got up at 6:30 (Chris still sleeping like a baby), because I couldn’t let the Corsican Nuthatch get away with not showing up.
I had done some more research and found out that there had been sightings at a mountain pass only 15 minutes away from us and so I drove up there.
And lo and behold I was rewarded with calls that stood out for not being in my active memory and as you nowadays have the ability to check with Apps how a Corsican Nuthatch sounds like, I could easily identify it – interestingly Merlin Bird ID is not able to do this (yet), most likely because the bird is so rare and local. And not only one, at least 3 if not 4, which is quite amazing as there are only around 2000 pairs on the island (in the world).
They played a little game of hide and seek with me but after a while I got a good look at one of them and could even get a decent picture. As I said above, this bird can only be found on Corsica and here you can find no other Nuthatches. Evolution definitely rules.
I deserved a great breakfast for this “lifer” and Chris and I celebrated appropriately with a scenic breakfast on our terrasse.
We did have other plans for the day and they included another hike, this time across the Plateau du Coscione, a high plateau in the central southern region of Corsica which gets a lot of melt water until mid summer and is lush and green.
On the way there we experienced encounters with a lot of free roaming pigs and you always wonder, are these tamed wild boars or feral house pigs. *
A good thermic uplift attracted quite some Bussards and Red Kites and then one adult Golden Eagle to chill out and enjoy the clear view.
Speaking of views, they were amazing. Being on a lush plateau with clear skies is exhilarating and lets you breathe more mindfully.
The wild pigs are part of it and belong to the composition.
And then the thing happened, we heard another bird call and we were prepared. The only other endemic bird of Corsica (and Sardinia), the Corsican Finch, made an entrance and we could make out three or more of them flying around us.
The Corsican Finch is closely related to the Citril Finch / Zitronenzeisig which you can find in the Alps, Pyrenees, and rarely in the Black Forest (where I saw some two years ago), but they do have a brown backs instead of the Citril Finches green back.
Two lifers in Europe in one day and a Golden Eagle to top things off and I didn’t even try hard.
A wonderful day.
Day 5 – 12th September – Ghisoni
Today was a dedicated rest day, not that we needed it (yes we did), but the weather was forecasted to be nasty with heavy rain and high winds.
The rain came down hard, but after a while we got restless and couldn’t help but getting out for a small local hike of 7 km. We headed down to the river and walked upstream for kilometer or two.
After a while the sun showed up again and we were happy not to have stayed home.
This river turned out to be particularly beautiful and we skinny dipped in a pool and let ourselves dry in the sun and wind.
The said wind picked up speed a lot a bit later (as per App with gust speeds over 65km/h) and it was a bit scary to hike through a forest that already had a lot of broken down and fallen trees, but all remained vertical and we will live another day.
Close to home we had the opportunity to see a lenticular cloud which results from an upstream of air around a geographical obstacle (mountain). Not to be seen in Schleswig-Holstein or Berlin.
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