A circuit of Corsica
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orsica is France, but it is not French. It is a mountain range moored like a great ship with a cargo of crags a hundred miles off the Riviera. In its three climates it combines the high Alps, the ruggedness of North Africa, and the choicest landscapes of Italy, but most dramatic are the peaks, which are never out of view and show in the upheaval of rock a culture that is violent and heroic. The landscape is just weird enough to be beautiful and too large to be pretty. On the west are cliffs which drop straight and red into the sea; on the south there is a true fjord; on the east a long, flat, and formerly malarial coast with the island’s only straight road; on the north a populous cape; and in the centre the gothic steeples of mountains, fringed by forests where wild boar are hunted. There are sandy beaches, pebbly beaches, boulder-strewn beaches; beaches with enormous waves breaking over them and beaches that are little more than mud flats; beaches with hotels and beaches that have never known the taint of a tourist’s footprint. There are five-star hotels and hotels that are unfit for human habitation. A car seems a necessity, but cars are easy to hire, and, driving, one discovers how small Corsica is, how much can be seen in a week. All the roads are dangerous; many are simply the last mile to an early grave. ‘There are no bad drivers in Corsica,’ a Corsican told me. ‘All the bad drivers die very quickly.’ But he was wrong – I saw many and I still have damp palms to prove it. I had decided to make a circuit of Corsica, to rent a car and drive slowly around the edge of the island, then pause and make my way over the mountains, from Moriani-Plage via Corte to Île Rousse, arriving where I had begun, in Ajaccio, the capital city. Two decades ago the island was dying economically, but the arrival of ex-colonials from Algeria brought mechanised wine-making methods and the growing of mandarin oranges to Corsica. And now there is a degree of prosperity in Corsica’s agriculture, with the export of cheap wine. The good wine – and it is not the plonk the mainlanders say it is – is drunk locally. The Corsican table wine that is exported is little more than red ink. The Corsicans have a reputation for being unfriendly. They certainly look gloomy, and their character is incontestably sullen; but they are not smug or critical, they can be helpful, and they seem genuinely interested in strangers. ‘Simple in manner and thoroughly obliging,’ wrote the English poet Edward Lear, ‘anxious to please the traveller, yet free from compliment and servility.’ One old woman in the market at Île Rousse told me in pidgin Italian that she thought Americans were ‘sweet’. It is not a sentiment I have heard expressed anywhere else in Europe. fjord long, narrow, rock-bound inlet
Adapted from Paul Theroux, ‘A circuit of Corsica’, Atlantic Monthly, November 1978.
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Part 1
Leisure
Without looking at the passage, answer the following general questions. Compare your answers with your partner’s. What is the most noticeable feature of the scenery? Where can tourists spend their time? What is the main means of transport? What is the basis of the Corsican economy? How do the locals appear to visitors?
Now scan the passage and find the single word in each paragraph which could be used as a heading for that paragraph. Are your choices the same as your partner’s?