AJACCIO, CORSICA

Monday, 17 October 2011

The whingers have started to fire up their engines now and are, frankly, becoming a little annoying. My favourite now is “Why do they keep messing around with the time? Why can’t we stay on UK time?” Biting my tongue I forbear to respond that we can’t really expect all these rascally foreigners to change their time just because we are in port. Another bit I observed earlier today was a conversation between two simple old ladies – and perhaps the emphasis should be on simple. The one was complaining that there was not enough time on the excursions to see everything while the other was agreeing and saying they should be shorter. Hmmmmm…perhaps she had in mind teleporting from the ship to the precise area she wished to explore and being teleported back to the ship? Good thinking, if a little advanced for current technology.

Then there is Mary, dear old Mary, whose nuisance value, sadly grows daily because we – mainly Rab I must say - have lent her a sympathetic ear. I am sure I mentioned her some days back – a Polish widow who moved to Australia in 1946 and whose husband died (ironically of prostate cancer some 35 years ago. She is not a happy camper and tonight was firing all guns on the disgusting quality of the food, while confessing that she was the worst cook in Australia. Ah well, you can’t please them all, but I do feel sorry for the staff. As we went past the Excursions Desk tonight, Ro was on duty again and listening with a fixed smile to some nebulous but long winded complaint, possibly about the time change.

It is odd that this part of our cruise is distinctly different from the first part, mainly I think, due to the make up of the passengers. Generalising fully, it seemed that there were a lot of people from the working or lower middle class from the North of England on the Baltic cruise. We always like those kind of people: they tend to get on with things with little complaint and often have a sense of humour. Certainly the ones we linked up with were funny as a circus. If I have time some time I must relate some of Carol’s stories: The Pup and The Parrot; The Prostitute and the Motor Mechanic; the sale of the Bridesmaid Dress to a Feller – the list goes on.

On the other hand, there seem to be mainly Southerners on this trip, a group who have a tendency to think that they are very important and all need special attention. This of course leads to comparisons, complaints and all manner of other grumbles. They tend to treat the staff in a different, superior way to the Baltic lot, who were often on first name and chummy terms: the current lot are almost into snapping fingers. And so it goes – where we could sit down and get an interesting chat going after introducing ourselves on the Baltic Tour, it tends to be harder to get any kind of response – and of course if we don’t take the first step, the entire meal is likely to end in a polite silence. I ran into a spot of bother on one lunch. We had been chatting to two retired English doctors, one of whom had been born in India and came to England at the age of 5, the other who had been born in England to his parents who had emigrated from India. Very interesting they were too. The last couple to make up the table were rather stiff and starchy and it was difficult to get a conversation going. During the course of a discussion on what lovely countryside there was in England, I cracked my Dad’s old joke (which he used to use about Australia) about the main problem in England being the number of Englishmen. Like Queen Victoria, they were not amused. The air crackled as the lady pointed out that there were TWO English people at the table and that I was perhaps being very rude. Chickening out, I forbore to point out that there were in fact SIX British people at the table, two of them tinted folk admittedly, but who had as much right to call themselves English. Ah, you can’t take the racism out of the old folk.

But the really odd thing is the answer to a bit of a riddle “Where do they all get to?” the first day out, with the weather somewhat inclement, every salon and lounge was full with barely a seat to spare. Of course in many cases two people were sitting at a four seat table or set of chairs, but that wasn’t sufficient to account for the large crowds. The following day, in the Bay of Biscay, there were less people about and we put that down to the minuscule movement of the ship which, by all reports was sufficient to cause sea-sickness in some. We would go up to the Captains Club for a pre-prandial drop as we had been doing to observe the first sitting people heading for the theatre, but there was no one in the Club and very few moving through. All very odd.

Of course once we got into warmer climes, south of Lisbon, many people spent a good deal of time on the decks, sun-baking as only the English can. I went up on the Promenade deck a couple of days ago – when we were sailing between Tangier and Port Mahon – and there they were by the hundreds. All lined up and laid out on their sun beds. They reminded me so much on my initial look of the crocodiles we had seen on the Mary River in Northern Territory on a fishing trip, where they all lined up on the banks, jaws wide open catching the morning sun and literally re-charging their batteries. Not sure that the crocs need to have the protocol in force on the ship – anyone who leaves their sun bed for more than 30 minutes forfeits it. Not sure how that is applied in practice, but that’s the rule On second thoughts I realised that in size and shape they resembled hippopotamuses rather than crocodiles but without the nous of a hippo who knows that over-exposure to the sun can lead to painful sunburn. Although my colour blindness is mainly in the red spectrum, even I could see that the pale whitish pink of the average Englishman was turning into a fiery red under the rays of the sun.

But enough of that idle chatter. We docked bright and early today in Ajaccio, the main port of Corsica and I couldn’t help reflecting, through the fog in my early morning mind, that there must be a limited number of people who have visited Napoleon’s birth place and the island on which he died – if only because it is so difficult to get to St Helena. I say my mind was foggy because I had a dreadful night last night with my cough and cold, waking at about 11.15 and battling to get back to a solid sleep. On the basis of my zombie-like behaviour, we decided to cancel the tour we had booked and just wander around as we had done yesterday in Port Mahon.

There were two other cruise ships in port – hulking great monsters, each carrying a couple of thousand people by the look of it and we were very surprised to find that the city was pretty well dead. Initially we thought that, since we were ashore soon after nine this might have been because the shops only opened at a later time. Then we thought that some of the shops might be closed because it was a Monday, as is the case in some Continental countries. But seeing shops closed down, seeing no build up of crowds, seeing the market with only a half dozen stalls, we could only come to the conclusion that the reported collapse of the travel industry in some areas applied to Corsica.

I know it is late in the season, but you’d think that with three ships in, there’d be a bit of a buzz. Mind you, having said that, I did notice that a couple of letters were missing from the signage announcing the offices of the local Chamber of Commerce, which were also badly unpainted.

We didn’t stay out too long. It was a nice temperature and there was a fresh wind blowing, but I needed to try and get a bit of shut-eye, so we came back to the cool darkness of our cabin and I got an hour or two in. On our tramp around the city Rab had spotted a cap she deemed to be a suitable replacement for my traded Australian one, which the Tangerine is no doubt wearing with pride. It is quite smart but not as attractive to my eye as the one rejected in Port Mahon yesterday – that was purple with a couple of geckos embroidered on it. I think it was simply too early to allow the substitution!! As we headed for the ship I found a good spot for one of my ‘mirror’ shots, which turned out quite well as the ship was in the background.

Unlike last evening when the comedian who came on board gave us a wonderfully funny show, there was nothing much on this evening, so we sat out on deck to watch the ship leave Corsica, listened to the music for a while at the deck concert and then came down for an early night. I’m feeling much better already and if I get a good night’s sleep we should have a good time in Florence tomorrow. We aim to head up there from Livorno, where we dock, by train on our own. Should be a fun adventure.