Palombeggia

We moved along the coast towards Porto-Vecchio. It feels very "south of France" here with villas in the rocky hills overlooking beaches that are hard to access. The landscape is low scrub, pink granite rocks and it is dry, dry dry. It could be southern California too perhaps. All the glimpses of the sea are still of beautiful turquoise. The holiday season is getting into top gear now, with cars parked at all access points.

One of "the best beaches in Corsica" is Palombeggia and we thought a visit would be in order. At the northern end, several parking areas appeared to allow overnight campers and we pulled onto one, in a huge area, informally cleared of scrub to leave plenty of trees for shade. Cars were parked at one side but everywhere else was informally arranged with camper-vans and motorhomes dotted about.

Camper-vans feature the ubiquitous VW T6 or T5 with various earlier versions featuring too. There are bigger motorhomes, some old and many new which also tend to be very big and must be hard to handle on these narrow roads.

An Italian couple decided to come onto the parking and provided great amusement. There's a (Vic) Reeves and (Bob) Mortimer sketch where they drive a car into an open field but choose to park in between two trees. They then can't get out without great difficulty. You see this at supermarkets and other car parks where someone always wants to park next to you even though there are other free spaces with more room around.

These Italians spent ages trying to decide which trees to park near and eventually chose a spot that was just a little two low and they couldn't quite open their roof-lights. So Mr Italy climbed up onto the roof and proceeded to break all the branches needed to make the required space. Bizarre.

The camping here is official (I think), costing €10 for the night rather than the €4 to park for the day but it won't pass any facilities tests, as there aren't any, save for a water tap and three showers.

This is one of a very few places where electric hookups aren't provided. Rather surprisingly almost no-one can manage without a hook-up. There are cooler units in the shade of all the campsites with an electric cable running to them, from the often very distant outlet. We haven't seen anyone else with a solar panel and no-one has a fridge like ours.

The only direct 230VAC device we have is the MacBook and the power to re-charge this comes from a cheap and cheerful inverter, now five years old, which is connected to our 12V through a dedicated fused supply and this will recharge the laptop in a few hours, as per normal.

Also, in spite of all the climate talk and plastic usage, we seem to be the only people who drink the water from the taps. It's beautiful stuff but the Swiss, Austrians, Germans and French buy bottled water in vast quantities and then have the bottles to dispose of.  At least the locals can be seen re-filling plastic at the pipes supplying direct ground water in villages. We cool our tap water in "hiking bottles" in the fridge.

The Palombaggia beach was a little busy but the water was very warm and we had a good few swims and a relaxing afternoon. After the day trippers had left we enjoyed a little walk before making our way back in almost total darkness to the camp.