The first in a series of blog posts written for the hikingcorte blog way back in 2010. This post describes my process of planning the journey overland to Corsica. Note that much of the information on booking tickets is now very outdated, though Man in Seat 61 remains excellent.
After I’d booked what I could and prepared myself with fleecy clothes, a survival bad, 2 kg of chocolate and other incongruous stuff, the next stage was getting to Corsica.
Flying?
I’m not really a huge fan of flying. It doesn’t exactly bother me – I quite enjoy the takeoff and landing, as they’re the only really exciting bits – but it always feels like the least interesting way to travel. Even by coach, with all its amusing associated challenges (how long can I go without drinking/going to the toilet) gives you a proper sense of movement and the feeling you’re travelling through a landscape. I’ve taken to thinking of planes as really slow, dull teleporters: you get on, sit in a rather featureless tube for a few hours, then step off and bang!: you’re immediately in another country, with a different climate.
Because of this sense that I’m cheating (myself at least) I’m rather ambivalent about the pervasiveness of the European low-cost airlines. On the one hand they really can’t be beaten for speed and economy for getting to anywhere further than Germany. On the other hand their mere presence makes a bit difficult to justify travelling overland just for the hell of it, especially when you’re supposed to be on a budget (and only taking a short break – this aspect went particularly wrong).
Sure, you can get to Poland in a day and a night by train (I have done this journey, but with many more stopovers – and for this kind of holiday it’s highly recommended) and it’s not that expensive – but we’re still talking twice to three times what you’d pay to go by EasyJet.
So I was oddly pleased to discover that, before May at least, there are no direct flights from the UK to Corsica. There are flights to various destinations on the Côte d’azure, but I managed to convince myself this wasn’t the way to go, because 1. They were rather expensive, and I really do resent paying anything like “normal” rates for low cost carriers 2. Many flights were Ryanair, and I’m prejudiced against them for not particularly good reasons.
Actually, Corsica in general can be difficult to fly to – apart from Ajaccio airport, all the other three airports on the island are a good distance away from the nearest city, and public transport on the island at the time of year I was visiting is almost nonexistant (demonstrated to me later rather memorably). Taxis are usually available (unlike in neighboring Sardinia, where I managed to get myself stranded in a little town 4 miles away from the regional capital, Oristano – and not a single taxi company was operating) – but very expensive.
The Train
Anyway, by factoring in the amount I would spend getting to and from the airports to my destination, I persuaded myself that taking the cheap bus to London, eurostar to Paris, and then TGV to Nice would work out slightly cheaper (and not much slower) than the airborne alternative. After a feverish night of mining my way through european train networks, I managed to net myself a pretty good deal and congratulated myself on beating the airlines. If only I knew…
For general information, I used the wonderful Man in Seat 61, which has increasingly encyclopeadic information on how to plan and book rail journeys from the UK to all around Europe (and beyond!). To book the French rail tickets I used raileurope.co.uk, which is run by the state rail company SNCF and offers French ticket rates billable in sterling (with a reasonably good conversion fee) – some have got slightly improved rates at the French language site. The latter also apparently doesn’t charge postage, but this was irrelevant to me as I opted to pick up my tickets from the automatic machines once in France for free. I would definitely recommend this method – printing out your tickets is, if anything, easier than the same process in the UK as you can collect from any French station and not only a specific nominated one (and all stations have machines. Heathrow, I’m looking at you). Chunnel tickets were purchased on eurostar.com.
I booked ferries to Corsica on Corsica ferries, which is the private carrier and is a bit cheaper if you’re a foot passenger, but the state carrier SNCM is pretty similar. Simple!
By fiddling around a bit I managed to get a “youth” eurostar ticket for £39 and a “youth” first class TGV ticket to Nice for £72 (I love being 25). For some reason the first class ticket was only a pound more, and this seemed further justify my overland choice. The timing was great – leave St. “Pancreas” Pancras at 9am, arrive 12pm; 3 hours in Paris for lunch; then TGV to Nice. So civilized!
Corsica ferries runs fast hydrofoils (about twice the price) as well as slower car ferries – since the Nice-Li’lle Rousse crossing is only about 5 hours on the “slow” boat, I figured I was in no rush and got a crossing for €16, after overnighting in Nice. For the way back I figured I could work in a night crossing, but eschewed a cabin as frankly they’re always pretty horrible. The princely sum of €21 would take me from Bastia all the way to Marseille.
The Return Journey
From Marseille I had a devil of a time trying to persuade the raileurope site to let me book a normal, non-TGV train to Geneva, where I would meet up with Alex.
The site will default, if at all possible, to only letting you book the TGV even when you limit your search to the cheapest routes. TGV tickets are, understandably, much more expensive than normal tickets (it was quoting me £110 for Marseille-Geneva, which I wasn’t going to pay). I did have a brief play with the SNCF site, but had no joy. I’m sure there’s a better way to do it, but I eventually tricked the site into booking me only onto the slower trains which use the parallel, and perfectly good, lower speed network. I did this by booking to a station the TGVs do not stop at – in this case to the tiny town of Culoz, about 10 miles away from the Swiss border. This would only work for one train a day (for some reason), but fortunately it was a nice sensible train leaving at 11am. Buying this and a short hop from Culoz to Geneva (with a few unfortunate hours in Culoz) cost me about £40, with a quick change in Lyon. It seemed like a lot of fiddling around, but to for a saving of around 70% I was prepared to spend a few hours strolling round (or drinking in) a nice provincial town.
I would spend a few days in Geneva with Alex, recovering, and then fly back to London with EasyJet. Travel on the island itself would be minimal – I really wanted to ride the narrow gauge train at least once (if only I knew…) but apart from that I planned to only use one bus route and I was sure that was running – to take me from where I planned to finish walking, Porto on the West coast, to Ajaccio. With my transport booked, all that was left was to set off…