This section is designed to help you plan your trek: to make travel arrangements, calculate how much the trip will cost, and decide when to go, which route to follow and what to take with you. It also sets out basic advice on mountain safety and what to do in emergencies.
Of course how you approach a trekking trip is ultimately a matter of personal choice and there’s no replacement for hard-won experience in the hills. However, forewarned is forearmed, and time spent reading up and planning ahead will pay dividends. Decisions that may seem trivial from the comfort of your armchair at home – such as what kind of sleeping bag to take or whether you’ll be staying in the village gîte, hotel or refuge – can take on great significance when you’re miles from anywhere.
INDEPENDENTLY OR WITH A GROUP?
Corsica’s network of waymarked trails, gîtes d’étape and staffed refuges provides a trekking infrastructure that’s second to none. With the help of this book, the use of a phone or Internet connection and a smattering of French it’s perfectly possible to organize your entire trip yourself, from purchasing your plane ticket to reserving a dorm bed in a remote village.
If, on the other hand, time is tighter than your budget, you might prefer someone else to make all the arrangements on your behalf. Organized tours come in a variety of forms. Larger operators tend to offer a choice between group tours, where you join a guided party for the duration of the trip, and self-guided itineraries, where you walk at your own pace along a selected route using a written guide. In both cases transport, accommodation, meals and luggage transfer are standard. All you have to do is pay the bill, pack the equipment on the company’s recommended gear list, walk and eat the hot meals dished up on your arrival at the end of each étape.
Apart from sparing you a lot of hassle, the best thing about being pampered on an organized tour is that it allows you to walk unencumbered by a heavy pack. This can make a huge difference to your overall experience of the trail, especially the GR20 where it may allow you to attain altitudes otherwise beyond your fitness level. However, the luxury of sac allegé (literally ‘lightened bag’) is an expensive one: on the GR your kit will have to be carried by jeep and mule up to the refuges, which explains why the cost of GR20 tours are higher than low-level treks. The other drawback with organized holidays, of course, is that you’re tied to a fixed itinerary with little scope for digression, which can be frustrating. Depending on the people in your party, the group atmosphere can also get claustrophobic.
What you end up paying for your trek depends on a wide range of factors: the quality of the food and accommodation, the size of the group, duration of the walk, qualifications of the guide, and the time of year. The only way to ensure a company’s product is right for you is to read through its brochure carefully. Make comparisons between as many operators as you can (see p13 for a list of all those currently working in Corsica) and scrutinize the itinerary breakdowns and small print.
BUDGETING
A trekking holiday in Corsica needn’t make a big hole in your wallet, at least if you can resist the temptations of the island’s café terasses and mountain cuisine. At lower altitudes even those on flexible budgets will probably have to keep tabs on their expenses but the higher you hike the cheaper life tends to get. Apart from a handful of ski stations where it’s possible to splash out on four-course meals and draught beer, your only noteworthy expenses are likely to be provisions, which are sold at premium prices in the shops and refuges along the route. For rates of exchange see p87.
Costs on the GR20
If you camp or bivouac outside refuges, stay out of cafés and restaurants altogether, re-stock only at road-level shops rather than at the gardien’s stores and cover the entire route in 10 days or less, the GR20 will be a very cheap trek indeed by European standards. With a modest daily food allowance of, say, 12euro/£7.50/$15, plus camping/bivouac fees of 6.50euro/£4/$8 per night, you could spend as little as 200euro/£120/$240. Only a handful of diehards, however, get by on so little. You’re more likely to have at least a couple of cooked meals along the way, maybe half a dozen drinks, a night or two inside a hut in bad weather and a celebratory splurge at Conca. Add in transport to and from the trailheads, a night or two in a hotel en route plus a few days’ camping on the beach to round things off, and you’ll be looking at a minimum 400euro/£250/$500 spending money for the fortnight. Plenty of people, however, manage to get through double that – usually by taking time out at villages off the main route, ordering slap-up meals and sleeping in comfortable hotels.
Costs on the low-level routes
Passing through villages two or three times each day, low-level routes such as the Mare a Mares and the Tra Mare e Monti offer more opportunities to spend money than the haute-route. Your main expense will probably be accommodation, which for the most part means gîtes d’étape. With dorm beds priced at around 11.50euro/£7/$14 per night, gîtes aren’t all that expensive, especially if you cook for yourself in the hostel kitchen. However, the majority of people staying in a gîte tend to opt for half-board (demi-pension; about 25euro/£16/$24) when it’s available (in some cases you may even be obliged to take it; see p76). Then there are the cafés along the way, village épiceries crammed with tasty charcuterie and fromage corse and, of course, those lovely old hotels with their tempting sprung mattresses and hot showers.
Thus if you stick to half-board at gîtes d’étape, picnic lunches and don’t go over-board à la terasse a five-day trek will set you back in the region of 200euro/£130/$190. On a budget of 320euro/£200/$300 or more you could stay in hotels and afford the odd restaurant meal.
Of course, it would be possible to follow the low-level routes and spend virtually nothing if you camped or bivouacked, shopped in local épiceries and cooked for yourself. But by doing so you’d be both breaking the law (it’s illegal to camp in the Parc Naturel let alone light fires, see p78) and running the risk of upsetting local people, many of whom feel strongly that trekkers should pay their dues by patronizing local businesses. That said, if you stick to the woods and remote stretches of the path no-one is likely to bother you.
Calculating costs
How much your trip ends up costing will depend on numerous factors: which route you choose, how long it takes to finish, and where you eat and sleep. But there are also a host of other expenses that are worth taking into account when working out exactly how much cash you’ll need. A chunk of them are likely to be incurred travelling through the gateway towns – Ajaccio, Bastia, Calvi and Porto-Vecchio – where money can disappear very quickly indeed. Hotels on the coast tend to be pricier, as does eating out; and you might also have bus tickets, stamps, camera film and medical bits and bobs to buy. The most reliable way to estimate a figure is to calculate how much money you think you’ll need altogether, then add at least 50% on top of that, just to be on the safe side.
Getting cash
Places to change money are few and far between on Corsica’s trekking routes so you’ll need to carry enough cash to see you through. In all the major towns the high street banks offer bureau de change facilities where you can cash travellers’ cheques, but transactions usually incur a commission fee of 5–7.5euro. To avoid this, take cheques issued by Thomas Cook and cash them free at a branch of Société Générale.
Exchange rates tend to be better for travellers’ cheques than for hard currency but you may not always be able to cash them when you need to, which is where plastic credit or debit cards come in handy. These days it’s possible to withdraw money from ATMs (distributeurs automatiques de billets) at any bank or post office on the island using your normal pin number for a fee of 1.5% of whatever you take out. The downside, of course, is the worry of what you’d do if your card went missing: always take a second card as a back-up, keep some emergency cash in your passport or money belt, and write the telephone number of your bank or credit card company somewhere you’ll be able to find it if anything does go wrong.
It’s also worth knowing that many post offices in Corsica (which are more numerous than ATMs in the interior of the island) will give cash advances against a Visa or MasterCard.
WHEN TO GO
The trekking season for the GR20 gets underway as soon as the snow on the high passes melts, which it usually does by early June, and lasts until the return of icy conditions in late October or early November. In terms of both weather and trail congestion, mid-June to mid-July and mid-September to mid-October are best. At these times storms tend to be less frequent, visibility more consistently good and, most important of all, the route itself relatively uncongested.
For the island’s other long-distance treks, spring – when the weather is warm but not too hot and the wild flowers are most abundant – is the ideal season. However, from around the start of May until mid-June and between mid-September and mid-October, the gîtes d’étape on popular trails such as the Tra Mare e Monti and Mare a Mare Sud tend to be busy.
Spring and autumn are also the best periods for coastal walking: both the Littoral Sartènais and the Tra Mare e Monti can get unbearably hot and dusty in mid-summer, despite the on-shore breezes that blow in the afternoon, while the beaches are at their most packed.
Few trekkers come to Corsica in winter but with the right equipment and a bit of planning this can be a rewarding time to tackle the lower-altitude routes, which you’ll have virtually to yourself. Nearly all gîtes d’étape close from November until the end of March but with advance warning most gérants will open a dormitory for you as long as you’re happy to do your own cooking.
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