Our naturist road trip through France 2022 - Week 7

When we visited Corsica 2 years ago, we only had the chance to go to the two most famous naturist resorts: Bagheera and Riva Bella. This time, we also wanted to visit the two other popular ones. Last week, you could read all about our experiences at U Furu and about how much the nature in the area had surprised us in a really positive way. So there was one more place to cross off our list: La Chiappa. A coastal resort in the very south of the island. We had high hopes… and maybe that was a part of the problem.

What happened at La Chiappa is very hard to explain, both to you and to ourselves. It’s a very large resort, with lots of campsite pitches and rentals, with two private nude beaches, two very nice swimming pools, several bars and restaurants, and even a dive shop. A resort that could probably find its way into many top 10 lists of amazing naturist places. But we just didn’t feel it. And we couldn’t put our finger on what exactly. It probably started with the checkin, where we got the choice of a number of pitches, but none of them was flat. When you’re traveling with a tent, this is your worst nightmare. Nothing is more annoying than sleeping in a tent that leans to one direction.

We were also told that our car could not be parked next to the tent. We’ll be honest, we hate it when that happens, but we can understand. We also hate it when people start driving around in the early morning or late in the evening. So to keep the peace and quietness, we normally don’t mind putting our car somewhere else. The problem was that the parking lot was more than 1 kilometer away from our pitch. You probably realise that we travel with quite some expensive equipment like cameras, computers, phones, etc. Stuff we don’t really want to leave unattended in a tent, especially not at a resort that allows day visitors. So every time we switched from working mode to relaxing mode, we had a decent walk ahead of us.

But that was not even what bothered us the most. When we started reading the campsite rules, we noticed that we actually could leave the car on our pitch, at an extra fee of 15 euros per day. 15 Euros is not that much, given the fact that we only paid 25 euros for our pitch. So for 40 euros in total, we could have a pitch with our car on it. We’ve paid more per night at other campsites during this trip. But it just felt so wrong. On one hand, they told us that we had to put the car in the parking lot to reduce the noise on the campsite, but on the other hand, we could just buy the privilege to make noise. It didn’t make sense at all.

Anyway, you probably realised by now that we did not get a good start at La Chiappa. All of this gave a bad feeling in our guts that we just could not get rid of anymore. People ask us sometimes why we never write a negative review of a place, and that’s because of these things. You won’t hear us say that La Chiappa is a bad resort and we won’t advise people not to go there. But we didn’t feel it, so it’s impossible for us to broadcast a positive feeling about La Chiappa. That’s why you won’t read a review of the campsite on our website.

We ended up staying a couple of days, get some work done, and then it was time to head over to our last naturist destination of this summer: PERU!

Just kidding, of course. If you’ve ever been to Riva Bella, the llamas will definitely look familiar. This is probably the only naturist resort in the world that actually has llamas. Except maybe one in Peru. Here’s a fun fact about the llamas, by the way. They have been part of the resort since the late eighties, and they eat lots of the weeds and shrubs, which actually reduces the chance of wildfires. Over the years, the llamas became very friendly, and as you can see in the pictures, they get pretty close to humans. But that’s probably mostly because they thought that we brought food.

For our last summer naturist resort, we wanted to do something special. We just didn’t really know what. Until we looked at the weather forecast and saw strong winds coming our way that would also make the temperatures drop. Our tent has done an excellent job throughout the summer (and the many years before), it kept us safe and relatively dry during the storms in the Dordogne, but meanwhile we lost most of our chords and the zippers don’t really zip anymore like they used to. We decided to leave the tent in the car and go for an upgrade. In fact, while we were at it, we decided to end this 2 month long naturist road trip in style. We got ourselves a rental, and booked some treatments at the spa. The next days, we were going to become luxury naturists.