Corsica's Mare a Mare Sud: Travels With Uncle Berny

After visiting Uncle Berny’s ancestral home in Cap Corse (Corsica’s Cap Corse: Travels With Uncle Berny) we drove south along the eastern Corsican coast on our way to meet Berny’s friend Gael and his friends. Our plan was to meet Gael somewhere near the midpoint of Corsica’s Mare a Mare Sud (“southern sea to sea”) trek and hike with him for a few days. The drive down was punctuated frequently by Berny’s heavily-accented renditions of old Sinatra and Beatles tunes. On the way to Bastia, it was “Strangerz in zee night, what were zee chan-zes, eet turn out zo right, for strangzers in zee night. Dooby-dooby-doo…”

Every time Berny sang, my son would follow, slowly perfecting the thick Marseilles accent, until we all started cracking up. Past Aleria it was time for some Beatles: “I’d like to bee, unzer zee sea, in ze octopuzzes garden in zee rain.” We continued to roll along the Corsican coast, a coast that has brought the destiny of this island dubbed “La Montagne en Mer” (Mountain in the Sea). The ancient Greeks were here, in fact many believe the waters near the southern port town of Bonifacio are the setting for Homer’s Odyssey. In the middle ages it was the seafaring peoples from the Italian peninsula (first Pisa, then Genoa) that occupied Corsica. After a brief 13 years of independence from 1755 to 1768, the French have pretty much ruled the island, having acquired it 1768 from the Genoans.

We turned inland and the rugged mountains inspired a new tune. “Baby you can drive my car, Yez I’m going to bee a ztar, and baby I love you.” More giggles as we climbed up and over the craggy Col de Bavella, a dramatic mountain pass in the Alta Rocca region of southern Corsica. Near there, we passed the treacherous GR20, one of Europe’s toughest hikes, a 168 km ramble atop the mountainous spine of Corsica. By evening we arrived at our Gîtes d'Etape in Serra di Scodamene and had dinner with Gael, his wife and another couple. Gîtes d'Etapes are mountain refuges that offer dorm beds, communal showers, dinner and breakfast for between 35 to 45 Euros. Once we arrived, we chatted with Gael and friends and had a delicious dinner of vegetable soup, salad, beef stew, red wine and some custard for dessert. We stayed in three different gîtes while in Corsica and the food was uniformly good, the premises spotless and each one offered to pack us a bag lunch for an additional cost.

The next morning we started hiking through pine and chestnut trees with the only sounds being birds chirping and Bernard: “I’d like to bee, unzer zee sea, in ze octopuzzes garden in zee rain.” And rain it did. Much of the day, it drizzled on our way to Sainte Lucie de Tallano, one of Corsica’s oldest hill towns. The trail was rocky and littered with furry chestnut husks discarded by squirrels. Taking into account an hour to eat our lunch, we hiked for about six hours and our legs were sore when we arrived in Sainte Lucie. We took much-needed showers and had another delicious meal that night.

The next morning Berny rose from his bunk and said “Oh putain de con.” This particular combination of French swear words is extremely vulgar but coming from Berny, everyone in our group found it funny, including my son, who began perfecting his French accent. During and after the three days of hiking, every time Berny got up from a bed or chair, he frequently said the “p” word, as if to swear at his aching joints. While alone with Berny, I politely asked him to cut back on the “p” word around my son; less profanity and swearing and more Beatles and Sinatra.

The next day Gael and his friends moved on and we took a different route back to Serra di Scodamene, a route that covered 18 kilometers. We were mistakenly told it was a two hour hike; it took us over five hours, with the last hour a steep uphill. Berny kept us in good spirits by singing on that last stretch: “I’d like to bee, unzer zee sea, in ze octopuzzes garden in zee rain.”

Corsica's Cap Corse: Travels With Uncle Berny

Standing in the chilly Puno, Peru train station twenty-three years ago, no two people could have been more dissimilar. Bernard was a swarthy, French communist who didn’t speak English and hated Americans and I was a blond-haired, blue-eyed American capitalist who spoke no French, nor had ever been to France. We both were up before sunrise to buy tickets for the Puno to Arequipa train, a line that no longer runs. Peru in the 1980’s was more dangerous than it is now; local Peruvians advised us to band together for safety while on the train. In Spanish, Bernard said to me, “We can watch each other’s backpacks but we don’t have to talk.”

Despite the inauspicious start, we got along surprisingly well that day and traveled together for another two weeks in Peru before he had to head back home. Since then, Bernard and I have become very good friends. He has taken me on an eight week car trip in France; staying primarily with his communist friends scattered all over the country. I have shown him northern California, taking him to see San Francisco, the Redwood Country, Mendocino and we’ve climbed up the cables to the top of Yosemite’s Half Dome. He met my mother and I when we went to Paris in 2006 and our families spent a lot of time together when we did our Provence house exchange in 2002.

My son and I met Bernard – I call him “Berny” – for a week in Corsica and the first place we went was Cap Corse, the long narrow finger at the northeast corner of the island. I call him Berny and my son calls him Uncle Berny, perhaps as a way to de-Frenchify him, to tease him and make him seem more like a typical suburbanite in the U.S. The teasing goes both ways. He collects interesting knives from around the world and hangs them on the wall of his house in Marseilles. After he finally visited the U.S. he proudly showed me the new knife in his collection: a white plastic McDonald’s knife with its plastic wrapping intact.

The three of us went to see Bernard’s cousin and have a little genealogy lesson. We headed north towards the tip of Cap Corse, driving alongside Genoan watchtowers lining the Tyrrhenian Sea and past French-and-Corsican road signs with the French names spray-painted over. (There is a small independence movement in French Corsica; about 20% favor being independent) We arrived for lunch and Bernard’s cousin Phillipe and his wife Andre greeted us. While Andre prepared lunch, Phillipe gave us a tour of the convent. The convent was large, (perhaps 50,000 square feet), cavernous and cold. Uncle Berny can trace his family back to 1500 in Corsica and the family has been living in this renovated wing of the run-down convent in Rogliano for the past 200 years. The convent was taken by the state during the French Revolution and one of Uncle Berny’s family members had the foresight to buy it from the new government.

Uncle Berny and I communicate using a mélange of French, Spanish and English. When he suggested a year ago that we meet in Corisca, he wrote (in English) “It is very beautiful and the thumbs of my family are in the garden.” Thumbs? Was Uncle Berny a member of the Corsican mafia? A little clarification revealed that he meant “tombs.” We visited those tombs before lunch. They were in a modest plot overlooking the sea with long green grass starting to overtake the space. My son and I watched Berny lay down some flowers on the main tomb and we both wondered what it was like to have such a connection to a place.

Lunch was simple and typically Corsican. We started with warm figatellu sausage in a baguette. The intense flavor, seasoned by herbs from the local maquis that covers the island, was delicious even though it had a barnyard-like smell. Pasta with mushrooms from the local forest along with salad was eaten and washed down with a local Corsican rose. For the cheese course they brought out brocciu, the local specialty. The smell, just as intense and barnyard-like as the figatellu, was mitigated by the sweet fig jam that we spread on the cheese. It was a great meal and a great first day in Corsica.

My son and I envied Uncle Berny’s heritage and his connection to the past. Beyond the grandparents on both sides of my family, I know very little about my extended family. Perhaps this is why he has the ‘Uncle Berny” moniker; so that we can share a little of his connection to the past.