Our naturist road trip through France 2022 - Week 5

NOTE: When you’re reading these weekly diaries of our trip through France and you hear us talk about the videos we’ve been recording, you may be wondering whether you missed a couple of them. Or if you’re watching our latest video, you might think that you’ve already heard about this weeks ago. We just wanted to let you know that this is absolutely normal. Here’s the thing: We’re recording about 2 videos per week, but we’re only publishing one. By doing this, we can create a buffer for when this trip ends. Because by the end of September, we need to return to Belgium once again because there’s a load of paperwork waiting. If you ever lost someone close to you, you know that there’s lots of stuff to be handled. As if losing a loved one is not bad enough, the government likes to add a bureaucratic mess to the sadness. Anyway, we want to avoid having to stop publishing videos again like we did in July, so while we are in Belgium, you will just be watching the last episodes of our France series. We just wanted to let you know, now let’s get to the story!

We had built in a 3-day break from video making so we could catch up with the many emails, messages, and comments that had been piling up during the last weeks. But that didn’t have to mean that we needed to stop traveling naked. We had been to Le Petit Arlane before and remembered it as a relaxed naturist campsite where people made no noise and with decent internet reception (which is rather an exception at French naturist campsites). When we arrived, we were happy to notice that it was still exactly as we remembered it. We got ourselves a lakeside pitch, and spent most of our days in the shade in front of our tent with a computer on our laps. With now and then a little break to have a skinny dip or to prepare some food. In the evening, we would open up a bottle of wine and watch the sunset in the distance. Even real “work days” aren’t that bad when you’re living on naturist campsites.

By the end of our stay, or mental batteries and the ones of our electronic devices were completely charged and we were ready to continue our journey towards our last stop on the French mainland: Campsite La Tuquette. Once again, a naturist campsite that we had never visited before. We had heard about La Tuquette though. The founders had previously run campsite Le Tuq on the other side of France, which was the 3rd naturist resort ever in France (after CHM Montalivet and Cap d’Agde). By the time they bought Le Tuq, in the early eighties, there were only 40 naturist resorts in the country. Today, the number is estimated to be about 200 to 300, including the small clubs. After 20 years, they needed a change, moved to the Provence and opened La Tuqette. Today, another 20 years later, the owners have retired and left the campsite to their 2 children, Brice and Caroline, and Caroline’s husband Arnaud. That’s how La Tuquette came on our radar. The current owners are only a couple of years older than us, so we were wondering how they would be running the campsite, which visions they have, and how they see the future of naturism.

Here’s the thing, the very large majority of the naturist resorts that we visit are owned and managed by people in their fifties, sixties, or older. Although we very much recognise the importance of their experience and their skills, it often feels like they are missing the ship towards modernisation. They are running their campsite in the same way as they did several decades ago, because “it always worked like this”. But naturism is changing and so do the naturists. And it takes fresh views to realise that implementing changes doesn’t have to be very time consuming or expensive. Something we noticed at La Tuquette from the moment we drove through the gate. The bar, which is the main central area, had a bit of a Caribbean vibe, with lots of wood and bamboo. Very refreshing compared to the many high-school-cafetaria-style naturist bars where we had been sipping wines before. We found the same style back around the pool and in the shower blocks. Modern, yet bohemian.

The reason for this success is largely due to the mentality of the management. La Tuquette is a small campsite (for now, because they’re planning to expand quite a lot in the next years), with only 50 pitches. The 3 owners could easily run the place all by themselves. We’ve seen plenty of other, even larger, campsites where two or three people do literally everything, from cooking to cleaning to maintenance to administration and check-in. At La Tuquette, they decided to hire some extra staff for the cooking, cleaning, and maintenance, for the single reason that this would allow them to spend more time with their guests. As a result, you get the feeling as if you arrive in a new family rather than at an anonymous resort. And your opinion matters too. Instead of just telling you about all their future plans, they ask for your opinion and input. And this works really well, because you may think that you have the best ideas in the world, if nobody else thinks so, you’ll end up with a crappy (and empty) campsite.

In the previous video we recorded (still to be published), we talked about what our perfect naturist campsite would look like. Ever since we finished recording, we were thinking if running a campsite would actually be something for us. At La Tuquette, we had the perfect opportunity to test the water and talk with people who had been running a naturist campsite for 4 years, but had been living on one for their entire lives. And that’s what the “La Tuquette video” will be about. It’s going to be less vlog-style and more interview-style and along the way we’ll try to figure out if we would have it in us to settle down and start our own naturist campsite.

As mentioned earlier, La Tuquette was our last stop on the French mainland, but our “naked French road trip” was barely halfway. Two years ago, we had briefly visited Corsica to visit the 2 largest naturist resorts on the island, Bagheera and Riva Bella. For years, people had been telling us about what a beautiful island Corsica is, but - and this may sound very snobbish - we never really believed them. We have traveled around the world, been on islands in Asia and the Caribbean, how could a French island in the Mediterranean Sea ever measure up to that? The moment we had arrived on Corsica and drove through the green mountains we regretted our plan to stay for only 6 days. We would barely get the chance to see anything else than the 2 resorts. So we immediately decided that one day we would come back to Corsica, for much longer! And today, almost exactly 2 years later, that day had finally come.

From La Tuquette, we drove about an hour and a half towards the port of Nice from where our ferry would leave. We don’t take ferries very often and the feeling vaguely reminded us about the days when we first took airplanes. Today, we’ve been on so many planes and in so many airports, that we can navigate the procedures with our eyes closed. But we remember the stress we used to have, to get in the right lane for our tickets, to look at the numbers on the scale hoping that our luggage would not weigh more than it’s supposed to. To get through security, and once again because we forgot to take off our belt. And then there’s immigration, finding the right gate, and so on. All of this with the constant pressure of knowing that the plane would not wait for us. The procedure to take a ferry is quite different, but equally confusing if you’re not used to it. And we wondered whether we loved or hated this feeling. On the one hand, stress is never fun, but on the other it did make us realise that we are not going numb on traveling.

Anyway, we got in the right lane way before boarding time, the ship left when it was supposed to, and a very uneventful 6.5 hours later we arrived on Corsica. It was about 7:30 PM and we had been considering the 1 hour drive towards our first naturist destination, Bagheera. In the end, we decided to get an Airbnb for the night in Bastia (the port town) instead. This meant that this would be the first night on our trip that we would not be staying in a naturist resort. But this little inconvenience did not weigh up to arriving late at the campsite and having to set up our tent in the dark. A very nice lady gave us a very hot room and at around 7 am we were both awake, realising that we had barely slept. The heat had something to do with it, but it had mostly been the noise that kept us awake. After sleeping in almost absolute quietness for more than a month, we just couldn’t get used to the sounds of trucks, cars, and motorcycles. It’s crazy how easily one can adapt to the sound of nature and how tough it is to go back to the “civilised” world. Luckily this was just for one night. The nice lady made us breakfast, we waved goodbye and little after noon our tent was set up at Bagheera on a pitch with sea view. For the next days, the only sound we would hear during the night would be the breaking of the waves. We couldn’t have been happier.