Toulon to Corsica

This is the Corsica ferry as seen from the beach in Nice. I'm not sure if this is the boat we took or not but they all look the same from a distance.

We boarded the boat from Toulon. There were two massive ferries in at one time, one heading for Bastia and ours heading to Ajaccio on the west coast of Corsica. First thing I noticed was the lack of gangways. I guess not every terminal can be as high tech as the Calmac terminal in Oban. I also spied lots of staff wearing uniform very similar to my old one ie. fluorescent yellow. I had booked the tickets online and all we had to do was show the person at the entrance to the ship the print-off, she put a number into a handheld computer thing and we were allowed on. Simples. We walked on an entrance at the car deck level and then got taken by escalator up to the reception area. I know, an escalator on a boat!! Could this ship get any more exciting? Yes. There was a spaghetteria on board. I'm not sure if "spaghetteria" is a real word or not but it did indeed serve spaghetti along with other types of pasta which was pretty good probably because the entire crew was Italian. There was also a wine bar but sadly it was closed. The boat had hardly any passengers so not everything was open.

When I made the reservation for the ferry I didn't book a cabin but instead booked 2 pullman seats because they were a lot cheaper. This turned out to be a bad idea. The pullman seats were in a room in the centre of the boat, basically just a room full of rows of armchairs. When we finally decided that we had had enough of exploring the boat (and cheekily using a socket to charge my camera) we headed to the Pullman seats only to find that all the lights had been switched off. So we stumbled our way to two random seats that weren't occupied and tried to fall asleep. Except the seats were ridiculously uncomfortable so we both ended up sleeping on the floor. Ruth had a sleeping bag with her because she had spent the previous weekend travelling but I was still wearing shorts after the sunshine in Nice and Toulon and only had my jacket for a cover. It was FREEZING. Luckily the crossing was very smooth but it was definitely not the most comfortable night I have ever spent.

The tannoy woke us up in the morning with an announcement that it was now 6am and the boat would arrive in Ajaccio at 7am. I'm not sure why they thought we needed a whole hour of notice but since I wasn't really asleep anyway I headed upstairs to watch Corsica approaching. Except it was still dark. So instead we sat in the lounge where there were lots of people sleeping on the couches in sleeping bags. Some of them even had blowup mattresses and pillows and had clearly done the journey before. So for future reference, either pay for a cabin or pay for nothing at all, because a pullman seat is definitely not worth it.

Despite a bad nights sleep, as soon as I got off the boat I got excited again about being on Corsica. After all, I could have woken up on Barra, where it is unlikey that there would have been 30 degree weather forecast.