CAMPOMORO AND THE GENOESE TOWER

When we arrived at Propriano, on the South-West coast of Corsica, my intention had been to do a bit of scuba diving, if possible. There were only two dive schools open at the end of October and I elected to go to Campomoro, about 20 minutes' drive away. The picture above is of Ruth's feet while she was sunbathing as I was diving. I was just around the headland to the right 27 metres down around a rocky islet.

Below is a shot of the Genoese tower which appears in the photos lower down.

A couple of views of us picnicking on the beach after the dive with Herve, my buddy for the morning, Yann the instructor and their wives and Mireille's (Yann's wife) mother. Ruth took the pictures.

CORTE

After having spent the first night of our sojourn in Ajaccio, we went on to Corte, which at one time was the capital of Corsica in the time of Pascual Paoli, president of independent Corsica for a couple of handfuls of years in the 18th. century. These two pictures are of his house, still pock marked. Corte is a stronghold of Corsican nationalism.

As can be seen from the photos, Corte has a considerable fortress at its centre.

After lunch, we went for a walk in the hills, before coming back and having a pretty good Corsican dinner. Corsican food specialities are distinctive and Italian-styled. Wild boar stew is a favourite, walnuts are popular, there's lots of pastas, chestnuts seem to find their way into many dishes and coppa is everywhere - rather drier than we are used to. The local aperitif is Cap Corse, a sweetened red wine flavoured with herbs. We found Corsican wines surprisingly easy to drink. We must be on the lookout for them here on the mainland. Something else we discovered was cedrat - a citrus fruit and ancestor of lemons. It (mainly the thick skin) is used for flavouring all sorts of dishes and we bought a cedrat bush for Ruth's birthday. Let's hope it lives! 

PORTUGUESE BULL FIGHT, MONT DE MARSAN JULY 2014

It's all in the title, isn't it? I was invited to go to a Portuguese-style bullfight in Mont de Marsan by a near neighbour, Henri. 
What makes it Portuguese is that the matador (not the right name) is on horseback and they don't kill the bull. Or not in the ring, anyway. I couldn't say, and didn't want to find out, what happens to the bull after the fight. 
It was pretty impressive though, primarily as a display of horseman-(and woman)-ship. Practically the whole fight is carried out from horseback, the horse having no protection from the bull but the skill of rider and horse. It is amazing that horses and riders are not touched by the bulls.

There are some distractors in the ring and, at the end, of the contest, 8 of them line up, one behind the other so that the bull cannot see how many of them there are, and tempt the bull to charge them. The reason why there is a number of them is to absorb the thrust of the bull. One of these men then goes to the bull and throws a loop over its horns so that it can be taken from the ring. This looks to be the most dangerous (from the human point of view) part of the whole performance and there was quite a sprinkling of human blood on the sand at the end of each bout.