The final journey closed the loop of the island tour at Bastia. This is our arrival and departure port, apparently the busiest in France after Calais. We drove through the town from south to north, avoiding the tunnel with it's 2.6m clearance even though we are 2.3m and we continued a few km up the coast to a campsite, Camping A Casaiola. This is run by Veronica from Napier on New Zealand's north island. Here she almost micro-manages the positioning of tents and vehicles and crams us in.
There's a beautiful pool and the beach just down the road is quite stoney which we found a bit painful for a swim but we had one all the same. We had a nice evening in the sun but were wary of the forecast thunder overnight and into the morning. It wouldn't matter though, as we planned a day walking around Bastia old town and harbour.
The lightening and thunder did start overnight and the show was quite spectacular, as they usually are in hot summers. There wasn't too much rain until breakfast time when the heavens opened and Veronica's open spaces became flood races and it wasn't possible to step outside. The poor lady next door with two kids was split between a little tent and a little van. I don't know who was where but there was no shelter. We didn't have our shade erected so stayed inside until there was a break. It was good practice for future trips in UK weather - and the whole point of getting the Alu-cab roof that allows sleeping "up-top' without needing to go outside to get there up a ladder.
We left a couple of place markers and began the drive to Bastia. As we did, the storm got more intense and it was very hard to see whilst driving. Floodwaters waters rushed onto the road dragging masses of gravel on there too, making parts very lumpy to drive through. This is the view as it calmed down and we approached our parking spot at Bastia.
This was on the north side of the town. We found a space just uphill from the ferry port and decided that here was far enough, parking the Landy there. As we looked out to sea there were very black thunder clouds and underneath them silhouetted against lighter clouds behind, were more black curly bits of cloud, which we have seen somewhere once before. These are little tornados trying to form and break away.
We walked the twenty minutes into and across the old town, by which time the rain had stopped and we got to the marina. Just as we were getting used to a dry minute or two, the clouds got blacker and blacker. Something was about to happen!
Yes it really did look like this and we swiftly found a café just in time. The weather then went bonkers. I captured a screen shot on my phone to show the lightening strikes. The newest strikes are white and they are progressively "aged" by re-colouring in yellow then orange. Each block is a detected strike location, so there had been around 1,500 near Bastia over the previous few hours.
In the café we drank coffee and studied weather apps as the rain came down more and more heavily. The staff in there had to mop-up as water was coming in from the steps at the side. Here's what they looked like - and this state of water rushing down probably lasted about ninety minutes without let-up.
Now it was lunchtime and it seemed right and proper that we ate lunch whilst watching the tempest outside. Our little group of fellow guests, similarly imprisoned, were doing the same, except for a couple with a baby who for some inexplicable reason, decided that they had to be somewhere else, much to the concern of all and the protestations of the café owner.
Eventually, around 2:30pm we were able to leave and walked back to the Landy, a little concerned for its welfare. As we approached the port there were many sapeurs-pompiers and gendarmerie around the tunnel and we were shocked to find that it was completely flooded, almost up to the 2.6m ceiling.
Luckily the Landy was OK, although water had leaked in but nothing that wouldn't dry over the coming days. The traffic trying to get into Bastia from the north was severely affected by the flooded tunnel but also from a number of trees that were down and had closed the road. As we drove back to the campsite, past this traffic queue, we saw lots of chainsaw activity as the authorities worked to clear the road.
We only discovered what we had missed during our hole-up in the café when we returned to the campsite. The owner had heard about Bastia and she explained that a tornado had gone through where we had seen the trees down but even more amazingly, that a waterspout had played just outside the port, in front of a ferry. This made the news headlines on Sky I believe. Here are YouTube stills captured from two uploaded videos. The Landy was parked just a little off screen to the left hand side.
It was quite a day!
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