Sardinia: When the Fantasy Faded

 

A sucker for bath-like turquoise waters, naturally, I wanted to meet her.

The reality has been disappointing.

There is beautiful water.  There are glorious beaches but not at our hotels.  We have eaten some good food and drunk some excellent Sardinian wine.  But somehow the whole has never added up to the magical experience I had imagined.

Perhaps our expectations were simply too high.  We arrived expecting effortless Italian charm and discovered that Sardinia sometimes requires rather more effort than the brochures suggest.  Getting around can be surprisingly expensive and cumbersome.  The glamorous Costa Smeralda felt less La Dolce Vita and more La Dolce Visa Card.  A simple meal for two could easily cost EUR350.00 and an Aperol Spritz, EUR45.00.

Prior to what we hoped would be a chilled, exceptional five days in Porto Cervo, we did a 6-night walking tour of the northwest corner of Sardinia and across the water in Bonifacio and its environs in Corsica.   We were disappointed with the amount of driving, the lack of walking, the mostly uninteresting sites save Corsica.  Her geography was striking and sadly, we had such little time there. Then there was our guide.

Every trip needs a character, and ours was certainly that.  Knowledgeable, earnest and magnificently righteous, she had very definite views about Sardinia.  She also enjoyed pointing out when she thought you were wrong.

Unfortunately, she also had a limited repertoire.

By day two, the shepherds had made their second appearance.  By day three, they felt like old friends.  The same stories returned with such reassuring regularity that I began to feel I knew the shepherds personally – their habits, their hardships, their sheep.

There is something slightly surreal about sitting in a vehicle thinking, ‘Surely we haven’t reached the shepherd story again already?’  Only to discover that, yes, we had.

And this is where I must be fair.

Our guide wasn’t necessarily a bad guide.  Her stories of shepherds, traditions and rural life would probably have been fascinating to someone wanting a straightforward introduction to the island.

For us, though, the itinerary was simply too basic and repetitive.  We wanted more depth, more spontaneity, discovery and to enjoy the sea.  We didn’t have the opportunity to do the latter.  We were being given Sardinia 101 when, at this stage in our travelling lives, we’d hoped for the advanced course.

Part of the problem was assumption – mine.

Over the years, I’ve been extraordinarily fortunate with guides.  Some have created spectacular itineraries, introducing not just the sights, but to the texture of a place:  people I would have never met, restaurants I would have never found, stories that weren’t in the guidebooks and those wonderful, unplanned moments that end up defining a trip.

I’d become accustomed to that level of travel and, without quite realizing it, assumed that was simply what a good private guide did.

It isn’t.

I gave up too much control over the shape of this trip without asking what we would literally do each day. I assumed the magic would be created for us because it so often had been before.

There’s the irony in that.  Age and years of travelling are supposed to make you wiser.  In my case, experience made me complacent.  I knew what kind of traveller I’d become but ignored my own hard-earned wisdom.

My tastes have changed.  I don’t need more luxury; I need more INTEREST and physical activity.  I want depth rather than a checklist, spontaneity rather than another “must-see”, and experiences that give me some sense of the people and personality of a place.  I would rather have one extraordinary encounter than six perfectly respectable stops where I’m expected to purchase local goods on an itinerary.

Sardinia’s marketing certainly played its part.  The beautiful photographs are tremendously seductive.  But marketing wasn’t really the problem.  What I failed to scrutinize was how we were going to experience it.

And perhaps that’s the lesson.

Someone else could take the same trip and thoroughly enjoy it.   The itinerary wasn’t necessarily wrong.  It was wrong for us.

The destination is only half the journey.  How you experience it is the other half.

Hallelujah!