Yesterday we pulled a pretty neat trick, we moved campsite, drove 25kms and ended up 350m from where we started. If you are looking for places to stay in Elba that accept the ACSI discount card, then you are limited to a couple of sites in Lacona and another in Marina di Campo, a slightly more substantial village about 9kms to the west. We fancied a change and we needed a supermarket visit so we packed-up and headed there.
Like in Corsica, the main roads on Elba are quite narrow, steep and winding. Cycling is popular, and negotiating the hairpin bends while making sure you give the two wheeled traffic plenty of room takes concentration and patience. The views are spectacular, though as the driver I had to content myself with an occasional glance.
Lacona had been busier than we anticipated, but hardly crowded. To our surprise Marina di Campo was heaving, a traffic jam of mohos outside the campsite, queues at reception and families wandering about all over the place clutching beach umbrellas, half inflated li-lo's and straw shoulder bags overflowing with towels and bucket and spades. We looked at each other and agreed this is not what we wanted and decided to head back to Lacona.
Not so simple as it sounds. I had driven past the camp site entrance and now was heading down the road to the beach which became ever narrower and increasingly crowded with families failing to control feral, over-excited toddlers. We came to a halt at the point where two beach shacks selling the usual seaside knick-knacks blocked further progress entirely. The road was too narrow to perform a three point turn in a 7m van. There were two options, either reverse 200m back to the traffic jam at the campsite entrance, or back into a narrow gap in the sea wall that led to a steep, badly surfaced slipway, barely wider than the van, with a metre drop on each side. Gill hopped out to conduct from the rear while I attempted this tricky manoeuvre. Success! I don't want to be too self congratulatory, but I am improving, a year or two ago I would not have had the confidence to even attempt such a move, though without Gill's assistance I still would have been stymied.
We speculated why Marina di Campo was packed exclusively with German tourists. Admittedly, Elba's tiny airport is right next to the village, but that did not explain the sudden appearance of scores of campers and motorhomes all sporting a DE badge on the back. I realise that if you are English there are certain words that are impolite to use in a sentence that contains the proper noun 'German'. Examples might be 'invasion' or 'occupation'. In the interests of positive international relations I have decided to use the more measured term 'arrival', though this captures neither the swiftness nor scale of the 'STA' (sudden Teutonic appearance).
This is not the first time our travels have been unexpectedly enlivened by this phenomenon. In May 2018 after a quiet sojourn around Corsica we arrived at the remote and rather idyllic Rondonara campsite to find the place buzzing with families from the Bundersrepublik. They were divided between two tribes, latter-day hippyish couples in grungy campers each with a brood of bare toddlers in tow, mixed with snazzier A class vans owned by Herr und Frau Sportliche und hyperaktive Kinder. The former were simply inadvertently funny, the latter more invasive, as a bunch of cocky adolescent boys decided to use the flat patch in front of our pitch for Fußball practice, which in turn attracted a gaggle of tweeny admirers who inspired ever greater and louder feats of athletic prowess from tomorrow's Bundersliga wannabes.
Exactly a year later found the 'Heels For Dust' expedition camped on a different idyllic island, Møn, a rather lovely spot about 850 miles to the north in the Baltic. It is very pretty, and to the English eye bears an uncanny resemblance to a Danish version of Suffolk. After two balmy days of tranquility we were assailed by STA 2, an intriguing variation on the previous one. It involved the sudden influx of brand new small VW campers, each one with a different livery, but all equally expensive looking. There was a certain similarly about their occupants too, all German, somewhat yuppified couples, around thirtyish, one or two were accompanied by spoiled to death pooches, but most were fussing overanxiously over a fashionably dressed toddler. What turned the mundane scene into something a little more remarkable was that almost all the women were pregnant, including a few who looked seriously impending. Had we inadvertently stumbled upon the summer meet-up of a shadowy organisation committed to reversing Germany's much discussed issue of population decline, or was it simply the case that the TV schedule over the previous Christmas period had been more than usually excrable? Who can tell, the STA phenomenon remained deeply mysterious.
We drove back to Lacona and booked into the other ACSI site. As Gill remarked, even if we only have moved a couple of hundred metres we will still have a different view.
To our surprise we discovered that the moment STA that we had experienced in Marina di Campo had occurred here as well. Even though we had only departed an hour previously, there was now only a handful of pitches available, the rest now full of recent arrivals from Germany and Switzerland.
It took a Google search on school holidays in Germany and a conversation with the Swiss family who had just squeezed their van into the pitch next to us to understand the whole STA business. Like France, Germany and Switzerland stagger the long summer break, different regions on holiday separately to avoid traffic jams and even out demand at resorts, hotels and campsites - a sensible idea. However, whereas France spreads the demand over July and August, Germany extends this to include June. The result is that
places like Hesse and Hamburg that started their month long summer vacation in mid June are coming up to their two week autumn break by the end of September, early enough to catch a bit of late season sunshine in the northern Mediterranean, like in Elba, and here they all are!
We've adjusted, accepting that the Tuscan seaside is simply not going to be as quiet as we expected. One aspect of this is a tad unsettling in the present circumstances. How Germany has controlled Covid so effectively is beyond me. From what we've seen in both in Germany itself and among tourists here is minimal interest in either mask wearing or social distancing. I can only presume that the German health service has better capacity than ours, and has an effective test and trace system rather than a useless one run by the failed CEO of a mobile phone company. Maybe Germany has developed a 'whackamole' strategy that actually works, not that Angela Merkel is ever going to stoop to Boris's infantile rhetoric to call it that.
I suppose in the past we have not stumbled across the early autumn STA before because we've sped further south more quickly. The majority of the German vans must be concentrated with a three day drive of home given that the autumn break is only for two weeks. Where we've headed previously - Spain, Portugal, the Mezzogiorno, Greece - is well beyond their reach. However, where we are going next week - the Maremma, is not much further south than here. I don't think we are going to find the empty, soulful beaches we dreamed about. Nevertheless, a lively Med. has its charms too, but not, perhaps, in the middle of a global pandemic.
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