Ile Rousse in Summer 2006 (part 1 / 2)

In August 2006, I travelled to Corsica together with four friends to visit some friends and acquaintances. Prior to the trip, we had divided into two groups, my girl friend and I took the plane, while the other two went there by car taking the camping equipment and the rest of the luggage. We had only light carry-on luggage when we went aboard the plane of the low-budget airline, which took us to Nice in only two hours. When we arrived, we took the bus to the ferry port of the city and met our friends who had come by car. Unfortunately, suddenly a storm came up, and before we could reach a nearby restaurant, we were all soaked to the skin. After lunch at a small takeaway, we got in the car where there was barely enough room for the four of us and joined the queue at the ferry, which - after two hours of loading and waiting - finally set off. It really was a speed ferry and we reached the Corsican port city of Calvi after only about four hours of journey.

Once we had arrived in Calvi, we returned to the car and the four of us took the three seats that were not covered with luggage. We took the national road to Ile Rousse which is about 30 km away. As all of us had already been to Corsica numerous times, we found the camping ground "Les Oliviers" without any problem. It is located in Ile Rousse at only 10-minutes walk from the centre of the town on the national road to Bastia. At the camping ground, two friends of ours, who work on Corsica during the summer and wanted to spend the holiday with us, already waited for us. They had already reserved a beautiful pitch for us in an isolated corner of the camping ground and had already settled there themselves. So, we just had to set up our tents and then had a "candlelight beer".

On the next day, we noticed that our tents were placed near a small footpath to the steep coast that begins right behind the camping ground. We walked a little round the coast and discovered a little bay that became sort of our own private bathing bay as all the other residents of the camping ground used to walk to the densely populated bathing beach of Ile Rousse. Our tents were set up quite far away from the camping ground's sanitary facilities, but we had direct access to the sea and we had no neighbours so that we could do whatever we wanted to.

After the first couple of days of our stay, which we had mainly spent sunbathing and swimming, we decided that now the time had come for us to be a little more active. With a Corsican friend of ours, we made an excursion to a small river in the mountainous centre of the island. The river was dammed up behind a little waterfall and was ideal for bathing. Mainly Corsican families were sitting on the gravel beach around the pool. It was a real insider tip. We climbed a little up the cliffs above the pool and swam and sunbathed and had lunch at a small Pizzeria near the waterfall. When we returned to Ile Rousse in the evening, we invited our Corsican friend and voluntary guide to a discotheque in Ile Rousse, the "Le Pub", to thank him. The main part of Le Pub lies in a cellar whose walls are covered with wood and it is a kind of mix of a pub and a discotheque. We spent a long evening there and then walked along the beach back to the camping ground.

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