Thinking of heading to this large, personality-drenched Mediterranean island? Well here’s my rundown on the highlights from my marathon trip there.
Marathon? I covered a helluva lot of what is a pretty big island, sampling the highlights, covering vast tracts by foot and bike…the rest in my little Fiat Panda…all in less than three weeks. Yep, it exhausted me. And I wouldn’t necessarily recommend doing as I did. But I know no other way. Hmmph…
But, I should kick off by saying the place is perfect for food and outdoors fans, especially anyone who likes a robust dose of uncertainty spiking their travel plans. Much like the other Blue Zone I visited – Ikaria – it’s a wild, “rustic” island with a rugged history that very much determines both the feel of the place, the outlook of the people and various longevity factors such as diet and exercise. It’s quite “untouched”, too, leaving aside the over-done Costa Smeralda in the North, much of which was developed by some Arab guy in the 1970s and is now populated by people with deck shoes and large yachts from Italy, Russia and other places where deck shoes go down well (yes, visualise this!). But beyond this glitz belt, it’s very much high adventure territory. Which is just my kind of thing.
Oh, one other thing. Travel in Sardinia is really hard to research. There are so few guides on the place and the locals haven’t got their act together on the tourism front. WiFi is hard to find. Roads are impossibly winding. Few locals, especially inland, speak English.
I kind of liked the position this forced me into – I had to explore a little blind. Which required taking each day as it came, and following my nose and the advice of random people I met along the way, rather than a mapped-out itinerary. To my mind, this is what travel is really about – seeing where happenstance leads you. It certainly led me in some rich directions.
But to my highlights. I’ll do this over two posts, so I don’t swamp you. Below is a map of where I travelled. I chose to stay on one half of the island. To