Thursday, July 10, 2008
Criminalty in Cathar country
I get fed up with reassuring people how safe Corsica is for tourists. A number of my friends have expressed genuine anxiety at the idea of going to the island that spawned the word Corsair, invented the vendetta and has a reputation for blowing up unattended villas.
We have been going to Corsica for over 20 years and in all that time I have never been attacked, robbed, or interfered with in any way by the people who live here. The worst I have suffered here is very occasional rudeness in restaurants (usually by waiters from the mainland) and the odd bit of crazy driving.
However... On our way back to England from Corsica last month, we decided to travel back by car through mainland France - Nice, Carcassonne, Bordeaux, Angers and Dinan. It took us nine days. Having read Kate Mosse's excellent "Labyrinthe" and Stephen O'Shea's equally readable "The Perfect Heresy", we thought it would be an excellent idea to pop in to see The Cité of Carcassonne, where much of the action of the first of these two books is based. We left our car in a small car park outside the city walls, and when we returned, we found it had been vandalised.
The front quarterlight had been smashed and the thieves had helped themselves to my computer and our valuables - mostly inexpensive, mostly (like Chris's engagement ring) irreplaceable.
We'll be flying direct to Corsica when we return in September.
We have been going to Corsica for over 20 years and in all that time I have never been attacked, robbed, or interfered with in any way by the people who live here. The worst I have suffered here is very occasional rudeness in restaurants (usually by waiters from the mainland) and the odd bit of crazy driving.
However... On our way back to England from Corsica last month, we decided to travel back by car through mainland France - Nice, Carcassonne, Bordeaux, Angers and Dinan. It took us nine days. Having read Kate Mosse's excellent "Labyrinthe" and Stephen O'Shea's equally readable "The Perfect Heresy", we thought it would be an excellent idea to pop in to see The Cité of Carcassonne, where much of the action of the first of these two books is based. We left our car in a small car park outside the city walls, and when we returned, we found it had been vandalised.
The front quarterlight had been smashed and the thieves had helped themselves to my computer and our valuables - mostly inexpensive, mostly (like Chris's engagement ring) irreplaceable.
We'll be flying direct to Corsica when we return in September.
