Sardinia is an intriguing place. You’ll like it. But, as I always advise, it’s always best to make your adventure your own. And to not over plan. I’ve shared my thoughts on travel here before.
The big smoke of Bosa.
So, we left off at Gavoi in the mountains. I then drove over to the West Coast. I kinda liked it more over this side. It felt a bit more genuine, and the towns were both less touristy and more alive. The food scene was a bit more robust, too.
Bosa
A fabulous little seaside town – population eight thousand – known for it’s agriculture and fishing. I stayed 10km out of town at Tresnarragus, at Villa Gli Asfodeli Hotel Tresnuraghes. Why? The place is a bike hotel… and, it turned out, a super friendly place to boot. It’s a big old building with sloping floors and grand windows, an amazing buffet breakfast and with a pool. It’s perched in the middle of the village square, but with an outlook over the fields and the ocean.
In Bosa, make sure you check out the Cantina Malvasia – a wine cave where you can taste the DOCG wine along with, wait for it, dark chocolate filled with pecorino cheese and bottarga (the famous mullet roe from the region). I also loved the Restaurant Borgo Sant’lgnazio just around the corner from the Cantina. Very authentic food and you sit out in the cobblestoned street to eat. I ate
Chuck Close can be quite the oracle. I often stumble upon a lovely wisdom from this New York-based painter and photographer.
Image by Lisa Congdon
This one I agree with, with bells on:
“Get yourself in trouble. If you get yourself in trouble, you don’t have the answers. And if you don’t have the answers, your solution will more likely be personal because no one else’s solutions will seem appropriate. You’ll have to come up with your own.”
We humans are at our best when we have to fend.
From adversity the greatest things have come, and so on and so forth.
Problem is, so few of us confront adversity. And, so, so many of us have a little squirmy fear in the back of our consciousness that we never reach our best. We never dig in deep and fend. We don’t get to rise from ashes.
What if, though, we put ourselves in trouble? Or, at least, allowed the trouble. I don’t suggest walking in front of a bus. Or telling your inlaws to go jump mid-Christmas lunch. I’m suggesting embracing trouble when it comes along (as it does)… as a good thing. And sinking into the process Our Mate Chuck suggests: Not having answers, fending for yourself and coming up with a personal solution. Your own solution.
And it’s in this – developing something of your own – that the reward comes, that you get that little chuffed, intimate,
…But I don’t apologise for it. Are people wasting more food these days? Caring less? Or am I just becoming increasingly obsessed? A lot of all three, me thinks.
Shooting for I Quit Sugar 2
I’ve been working on a food shoot for my next book. That’s me above making sauerkraut, with my mallet from the toolbox. I’ve been flying a bit interstate, too, passing through food wastage hot-spots (in-transit eateries). And I’ve been eating out and at other people’s homes since getting back from overseas. I thought, then, it might be a good opportunity to share what I do to prevent food being wasted. I’ve been to the food wastage frontiers. Let me report back, in the desperate hope I can inspire even just one person out there (please let it be you!) to shift their ways a little.
For this is the reality:
Food wastage is the #1 environmental issue today, causing more carbon emissions than cars.
Consumers – us – are the biggest food wasters. We chuck 20% of the food we buy.
I suggest this is a conservative estimate.
So, some examples of what I did to stem the tide this week:
A swede and turnip bought for propping: cooked and mashed, frozen to top shepherd’s pie down the track. I cooked it while steaming veg for dinner that night (using a double steamer on top of the roots).
Sardines, cooked, used on shoot: I invited (forced!?) everyone to eat them…they left behind the heads and tails. I kept my heart-sinky disappointment to myself and took them home and ate on top of vegetables that night. They’re the best bits people! And I kinda think that if you’re not up for eating the whole fish, you shouldn’t be eating any of it. I know, harsh. But this is where the food landscape is at:
We need to earn our right to eat good food.
And please don’t give me the Oh But The Germs argument. We kiss our mates. We eat our lunch at our computers (which are festooned with more germs than a toilet bowl). We live in polluted cities. Some of us smoke cigarettes.
Fennel, beetroot (including the leaves) and leek bought for propping: cooked up into a soup that I took to a friend’s place,
It’s been a wonderfully full few months. So full, I’ve had to get very focused with my priorities. This is the best thing about fullness – it doesn’t allow room for hot air or bad energy. And, so I’ve had to – for the first time in almost four years – drop this blog for two weeks. I had a gap to build.
Choose life.
In spite of concerted efforts to slow my life down, things have sped up. I was in Forbes (central west New South Wales; population 7500) last week, speaking at a business lunch, and a woman in her forties approached me – with little tears in her eyes – to share that she, too, was trying to slow down but feared that because she was such a frenetic person who attracts lots of “doingness” into her life, she was doomed.
“Ah,” I said.
“You can keep doing, but be still while doing so.”
And you can have lots going on, if you own it in your own way.
It’s taken years for me to work this out. Slowing down for me isn’t necessarily about slowing down what I’m doing on the outside. It’s slowing down on the inside, getting gentle and mindful and happy with my speed and activity. It’s having techniques that I choose to turn to, so that I can do what I do best: doing. Because…
You can choose to be while you do.
One of the techniques I actively choose is having pauses. Proper pauses. I was overjoyed to read in Esquire’s What I’ve Learned series the other day that Radiohead’s Thom Yorke does the same. The headline is his, in fact.
I worked for the duration of my recent “holiday” in Sardinia. It was unavoidable and I chose to be OK with this. I’ve taken on a US book deal and, now, a UK book deal (this just happened), my business has grown from two people (me and Jo) to ten staff in just a few months, I have a second
Thinking of heading to this large, personality-drenched Mediterranean island? Well here’s my rundown on the highlights from my marathon trip there.
The hike up to Tiscali, carrying my trusty Byron Bay markets satchel and wearing… my green shorts.
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
You might recall this time last year I visited the Blue Zone in Ikaria, where people live a ludicrously long time. No? Well, I spent six weeks on the rugged Greek island with National Geographic, looking at various factors contributing to their abnormal longevity.
Sardinian mural…of men.
To refresh, I found that pork, wine, walking and eating no sugar all play a role. Now, to complete a bit of a circle, I’ve just left Italian island Sardinia, another of the five Blue Zones (the others are Okinawa in Japan, Nicoya in Costa Rica and Loma Linda in CA) and I’m trying to form a picture of what might be contributing to this freaky phenomenon.
Cop this: on an island of about 1.6 million people, 371 (as of last year) are over the age of 100. It’s accepted as a “thing” that islanders have an expression: A Chent’Annos (“May you live to 100”). I should highlight, though, that the phenomenon here applies in particular to men. Yes! Weirder, still!
Having spoken to a bunch of people in the past three weeks of travelling across the island, including through the isolated and largely unvisited interior where most of the centenarians live, I’ve ascertained a few factors. Pretty much all of them are things I bang on about here on this blog as general wellness advice.
Hills.
Sardinia is rugged and mountainous, as is Ikaria. This has meant to get anywhere the locals – mostly shepherds who had to wander after their stock all day – had to hike. Not just walk, but hike, which adds an extra dimension of robustness to things. I posted my thoughts on hiking and healing yesterday.
The wind.
One Sardinian academic believes the wind adds a certain element to the air here. They also attribute the long-living tendencies to the magnetic fields on the island. Everywhere I went folk mentioned the “energy” of the
The other day I had a twiddle with my social media feeds. It was one of those nights we all have – where we go down that rabbit hole of toggling between feeds to see…to see…what other people are doing and thinking and seeing… and what they’re thinking of us. It’s both comforting and disconcerting. It’s like picking a pimple…wrong and yet so viscerally satisfying. We all do it. We all have those nights. I don’t care what you say.
So I twiddled my Instagram profile. Changed the picture. And changed my little bio line to include this:
“I have a crankin’ auto immune disease that I tame with food and hiking.”
I wrote it. Then I realised the potency of it. Yes, food and hiking are how I manage my illness. I’ve been doing it for years. And I only just – in that late-night pimple-picking-ish moment – appreciated exactly why I’ve done it. It’s because it works.
Let’s talk hiking. Hiking is my default travel raison d’etre. When you travel solo, you have to create a travel raison d’etre. Couples and groups of friends have shared experiences and the very process of negotiating and compromising becomes a motivating and guiding raison d’etre in and of itself. It creates boundaries. When you’re on your own you can literally do whatever you want. So you have to reign things in and create a framework of purpose. It needs to be a framework that can stand up to the loneliness of moments, and the most angst-ridden existential meltdowns. Hiking does this.
PS I’ve recorded all my hiking journeys around the world and in Australia too with the hashtags #worldwanders #hike #bushexcursion
While I was riding a mountain bike in Sardinia’s barren hills last week a sugary fuss was hitting fans Down Under. Did you read the fuss?
Image via Favim
The upshot of the fuss, if you missed it, is that a Sydney nutritionist is putting out a book that counters I Quit Sugar. It’s called Don’t Quit Sugar. I don’t think I’m flattering myself when I say it’s geared as a direct attack on my work.
(As an aside, I always feared “I Quit Sugar” was a negative title… but this whole thing started as a personal experience and blog post. The name was from this initial blog post and it kinda stuck. The double negative title of this new book would kill me. Ditto the didactic tone of it all. I like to say “I quit sugar, it worked for me, you might like to try it too.” An invitation, not an edict.)
Now, normally I prefer to let fuss fly by. There is plenty of room on the planet for all opinions and approaches. And retaliation and negativity and getting all didactic is generally not a great way to make a point. Or a pleasant way to cohabit with other human beings who are also just trying to do their thing.
But there were questions from so many of you, I felt a blog post was the most efficient way to respond, especially when one is meant to be having a holiday. Of sorts.
I first came across the forthcoming book’s author Cassie Platt a few months ago when she had a blog by the very similar name – I Didn’t Quit Sugar – which she shared with her friend Kate Skinner. I had a bit of a flick. At the time, a few things struck me as odd:
1. The message was the same as mine. Which confounded me. They weren’t not quitting sugar. They
It was two chocolate croissants that undid me. I’d like to share how and why. I feel I need to, given that today marks DAY ONE of the new 8-Week Program that I spent ten months developing with Jo (and then Zoe, Jordanna, Stef, Jenn, Kate, Martyna, Shayne, Tom, Steve, and now Jane and another new Kate). I’d be a stinkin’ fat fraud if I didn’t. And, of course, I share only because I hope it Contributes Something Helpful.
Image by Greg Guillemin
So yesterday I ate two chocolate croissants. Let’s be sure: they weren’t even good ones. They were stodgy and filled with PUFA-drenched Nutella-like goo. And I’d already eaten a full breakfast. And ate them with extra butter. It’s not a big deal, of course. In the schema. Which is the point I want to make with you all, in case you’re making a big deal of “lapsing”. I really didn’t quit sugar to get all rigid. Nor to suggest that anyone else should.
Please note: this post has been updated a little to refine a few of the answers to queries in the comments below.
I ate two crappy croissants because I was having a flap. And the flap took me straight back to a well-grooved rut that I spent, ooohhhh, a good twenty years chiselling into my being. It’s the rut that I used to go to almost daily when I got hurt, uncertain, uncomfortable, wobbly. Stodgy, PUFA-drenched pastries were what I would drown myself in when the panic and anxiety in my gut got too much. The stodge was like a suffocating pillow I could jam down on top of the anxiety. It would work. For five seconds. Until vile guilt overwhelmed me. And the anxiety – now carrying the weight of a gluten-y, sugary pillow – would flare up again.
After I ate the two chocolate croissants, the same pillowy panic took over. I know some of you can feel like this when you “lapse”.
The rest of the day I felt incredibly ill. My thyroid symptoms kicked in. Sugar AND gluten in the one injection (gluten flares up my auto immune disease – I swell up in my joints, get foggy and weak). I should emphasise – the pain I was feeling was due to my auto immune reaction. When I was younger it was all about guilt and being caught in an emotional food cycle that I mention above. Although, to be honest, I know it will always be there, that pillowy panic, lurking in the groove. And sugar will often trigger it. However I now manage it, mostly with a way of eating and living that allows more freedom and gentleness. I should also emphasise – having a thyroid condition can cause unstable blood sugar levels and unstable moods…so you can see the cycle I can get caught in.
So maturity saw me get a grip. I now know what to do when I get off balance like this with my thyroid, and what to do when I “lapse”. I go for a walk. Get out! Move! So I hiked along some cliff tops and concentrated on calming down. I also sank into the ocean for a bit. I was not as emotionally open and grateful as I am normally with such experiences. I was aware of this. I witnessed how shitty I was with
Back in Australia I go to a yoga school (Power Living in Bondi Junction) and there’s a wonderful teacher there (Jason) who shares (during his class) that yoga is like life (excuse the woo-woo launch to this…it improves). You start off in child’s position and you end in corpse pose. And in between is the opportunity to….
practice finding the ease amidst the strain.
Image via Favim
Bam. Wisdom, right there.
In yoga, each pose is about using strength, while at the same time giving in, allowing. It’s strong, but gentle, all at once. This is what we practice. When it’s all strain and grunt, it doesn’t work. You never quite get to that oozie stage where you can glide into poses effortlessly.
And, yes, it’s a practice. In yoga we practice for real life.
Meditation is the same. We practice finding that delicate nexus where we can put in effort and care and strive and push, but do it in a way that’s joyful and soft and gentle and flowing. It’s in that delicate juncture between hard and soft, effort and acquiesce, force and release – in that weightless space – that we find the kind of peace that can really get us through life. When I hit it, that nexus, my spine disappears. I become light and happy. The more I steer myself to this delicate point, the more I can emulate
