Having decided to fly to Europe to go riding in the Balkans I thought since I was sort of ‘in the neighbourhood’ I may as well go to Sardinia to visit a friend who lives there and do a spot of riding as well. So that’s more or less what I did. A good decision but I regret not having allocated more time. I barely scratched the surface. It is a beautiful place and the riding, well it is truly outstanding. It even has fantastc mural villages . I hope to get there again in the not too distant future.
When I started looking into going to Europe, I had been thinking of going in their Spring (April) but I could not find a reasonably priced rental bike in Sardinia at the time I wanted to ride so I took the rather dramatic step of putting the whole trip on hold until October. This meant re-jigging bookings I had already made but it would give me more time for route planning and it also allowed me to take advantage of a cheap flight to Korea to go riding there. (See my South Korean trip here).
When it came to finding a bike for Sardinia I opted for small family-run outfit, Sardinia Rides that had a fleet of comparatively cheap Himalayans. Federico, the easy going and affable guy who runs the business, responded promptly to my online queries and helped me greatly in bedding the trip down. I never actually met him in person. I did howver, meet his father, a lovely man when picking up and dropping off the bike from his beautiful house in San Paolo.
It was raining when I arrived in Oliba after the short Volotea flight from Rome. Fedrico had organised for a and interesting and chatty friend of his, to pick me up and take me about 30 kms south to San Teodora to a hotel that was a few hundred meters from where my rental bike was waiting to be picked up the next morning. It was absolutely pissing down as we drove and my driver told me that the rain, which although unusual at this time of year, was very welcome as they had been going through a rather severe drought. He also told me that the area we were passing through is overun with tourists from April to September and that crowds had now thinned and prices dropped so nothwithstanding the rain that was bucketing down it was a good time to be in Sardinia.
We got to San Teodora and the driver before dropping me at the hotel took me along some dirt roads to show me the way to Fedrico’s father’s house where the bike would be waiting for me the next morning. I was not entirely sure I would remember the way … it was not only pitch black it was also pelting down rain so I could not really see anything at all. We went back to the hotel which turned out to be quite swish and rather expensive but lacking in covered walkways so my bags got soaking wet going from recepetion up to my room. Luckily it was a very large apartment and I was able to find lots of space to hang out and dry my stuff that had got wet in the torrential downpour. I went to a nearby restaurant attachedto the hotel to get something to eat and then went back to the hotel, checked my route for the next day and crashed.
