Our naturist road trip through France 2022 - Week 6

Let’s talk about money. The most frequent question we are being asked is how we can afford to travel endlessly. We’re not “trust fund kids” with rich parents, we don’t have huge savings, and we have not won the lottery. We don’t talk about this often, not because it’s such a big secret but mostly because it’s quite a complicated structure. Most professions work on a “one income stream” basis. The baker earns money by selling bread, the accountant earns money by doing magic with numbers, and the CEO gets a (very fat) pay check for making important decisions. In our case, money comes in from several different ways. We sell travel guides, we write for magazines like H&E, Athena, and (newsflash!) soon also La Vie au Soleil, there’s Patreon, ads on our website and YouTube channel, and so on. None of these bring in huge numbers, but when added together, they help us pay the bills.

One very important income stream is deals with naturist resorts, and this is what seems to create confusion. We have some haters on social media who like to accuse us of being frauds who get paid to write good things about resorts. But that’s not how it works. We think that if this had been our business concept, everyone of you would have already figured this out and we would have lost all credibility. What these deals do include is that we help the resorts market their place online. Basically, we are selling the knowledge we’ve gathered during the last 5 years. Without wanting to brag, we are really good at this. We know how social media works, we know how to write texts, take pictures, and make videos that are attractive to a naturist audience. And we are using this to help resorts create a social media strategy, to create a more attractive website, we provide them with better pictures and videos, etc.

Here comes the interesting part: We are not a supermarket where the customer gets to decide whether they want to use our services or not. Instead, it’s the other way around. We decide which resorts we want to sell our services to. In the end, we still want to look at ourselves in the mirror. We would not want to help a crappy resort that happens to have a lot of money get more popular than a really good resort that may have limited funds. And this is where you, our Patrons, come in. We can only do this thanks to your support. Thanks to your help, we can be independent from resorts (and other naturist businesses) and we can say no to lucrative deals because we don’t believe in them. So thank you very much for that, both from us and from all our readers and viewers!

Why are we telling you all this? Well, we thought that a bit of background info was necessary to explain this week’s travel diary. At the end of last week, we had just arrived at Bagheera. A naturist campsite in Corsica with which we’ve had a very good partnership for several years. They have recent renovated some of their rentals and added new services to their list, and so they’ve been asking us to come back because they were in urgent need of new pictures. We got to tell you, these partnerships do come with some perks other than money. We got one of their best camping pitches, front row at the sea side, because they very well realise that we will be sharing our experiences on social media. They could’ve put us in the very back of the campsite, but chances would be much less that we would be posting “sunrise over the sea” pictures.

But, of course, we were there to work. And taking pictures means waking up early. Morning light is by far the most beautiful of the day, so the hour after sunrise is very precious to us. This means that we need to be ready with our camera gear by 6:45 am, and preferably already had some coffee first. We got to tell you, waking up this early is not something we very much look forward to, but once we do, we always realise the beauty of the early morning. It’s such a relaxed feeling to sip your coffee watching the sunrise, while most of the campsite is still fast asleep. In fact, we enjoyed it so much that we kept waking up this early for the following days, even when no pictures needed to be taken.

Another happy message arrived soon, when the owner told us that she also wanted to have some pictures of their massage services. This always sounds like magic into our ears, because here’s how those things work (at least, how we negotiate them). We don’t want to fake our pictures, where the therapist just pretends to be massaging. We ask for a full massage and only make photos during the first 10 to 15 minutes. Which means free massages for both of us. We said that the way we work can be complicated, not that that it’s not fun ;-)

The time when we’re not working for the resort, we mostly spend creating our own content for our blog, social media, and videos. While we were at Bagheera, we wanted to visit the Travignano river, which is one of the most popular places in Corsica because of its natural pools. But there was a problem: We didn’t bring bathing suits. So we decided to make a quest out of it, we would try to find a natural pool with no other people, so we could skinny dip. Once we arrived at the river, we realised that “popular” also means “busy” and the first pools we encountered were full of people. So we just kept walking down the river, passing one wonderful (but bathing suit infested) pool after another. Until a certain moment when we looked down from the trail and saw a small part of the river that looked totally empty. On first sight, it also looked pretty hard to get to (which could explain the lack of others), but we see “hard” as an encouragement rather than a reason to stop. It took a bit of climbing, but not much later we were skinny dipping in one of Corsica’s most famous rivers. This lead us once again to the conclusion that good things always happen if you’re willing to walk the extra mile.

Corsica is also a place where people are said to live healthier and happier than in most other parts of the world. We wanted to find the reason for that and started our search at the local market. Here we found lots of locally produced products: cheeses, meats, wines, natural oils, fruits, and so on. We figured that the reason must be in those so the rest of the day we dove deeper into those specialties. We visited a winery, tried the local cheeses, met a really funny man who distills natural oils, and talked to lots of Corsicans. In the end, we think that we have solved the mystery. We’re not going to tell you yet, in a couple of weeks you’ll see our discovery in a video!

Eventually, we stayed a whole week at Bagheera, but time flew by and other parts of Corsica were waiting for us. So we made our way south to a small naturist campsite called U Furu. This campsite is very different than the other ones on Corsica. First of all, because it’s in the mountains and not at the seaside. And secondly, because it’s rather small with only 50 pitches instead of the many hundreds of pitches at the seaside resorts. As we arrived at U Furu, we were accompanied by a strong wind. This was kind of a problem. When we started this trip, we had forgotten to bring a washing line, so along the way we had just tied the chords of our tent together to put our laundry on. And then one day, we had forgotten this self made line at a naturist resort. Meaning that we didn’t have tent chords anymore. This never seemed like a real problem, until today. We didn’t dare to leave our tent alone out of fear that it would leave the campsite long before we were planning to leave. Luckily, the wind only lasted for a day and our tent survived.

At first, U Furu seems like a random 3-star French campsite. It’s nice, but nothing special. But it has one thing that makes is pretty unique in the world: Direct access to a spectacular river, where you can hike naked. Basically, what we had been searching for a couple of days earlier at the Travignanu river, we found an abundance of here. We can’t stress enough how amazing this place is. The pictures may give you some idea, but they’re nothing compared to the reality. We’re not exaggerating, if you’re into naked hiking, this is a place that you MUST put on your bucket list!

We also made a couple of animal friends at U Furu. The house cat quickly became a regular on our pitch and it didn’t take long until Lins started inviting the cat inside our tent. And then there was a butterfly who loved to hang around us and land on our bodies. At first, we thought that it was a very social butterfly who enjoyed our company, but later we found out that it was just after our wine.

From U Furu, we made a day trip to the “lost naturist resort”. Long story short, campsite Villata used to be the most popular naturist place on Corsica, a large resort with direct access to a splendid nude beach. But the domain was divided in two different properties and one day the owner lost the lease on one of the properties. For some reason, he then decided to turn the part that he had left into a textile campsite. So now, there is a textile campsite with direct access to a splendid nude beach. How weird is that? The main reason why we went there was because we had heard that the property of which the lease was lost still had remnants of the naturist campsite. We wanted to see if we could find some ruins, and we definitely did.

We have about 10 days left on Corsica, during which we’ll visit the two other naturist resorts on the island: La Chiappa and Riva Bella. But that story will be for the next weeks.