February 4th & 5th

It's almost springtime here in Sardinia ! Some trees are already in bloom and I'm taking off my long-sleeved sweater to pedal in a t-shirt from 9h30 this morning. It's going to be over 20 degrees, almost too hot ! Fortunately, I'm able to gain altitude to cool off a bit, and my first 4 hours of pedaling will take me to over a thousand meters. With a magnificent view of the mountains all around. A descent of almost a thousand metres also follows... And, as on the way up, it's quite vertiginous at times. My lifelong fear of the heights is getting worse as I get older, so I pedal in the middle of the road, because otherwise my head sometimes spins and I feel out of balance. The gusty wind on the descent clearly doesn't help!

At the end of the afternoon, I reach my B&B in Galtelli. The cheapest I've found in Italy since the start. I meet Lisa, a German hiker and hitchhiker who's been on the road for 5 years, and we immediately hit it off, very naturally. We have an excellent evening ! Inebriated with mirto, a homemade liqueur made by Andrea, our host of many lives and many talents (civil engineer, hostel manager, hiking guide, winegrower, mirto producer, comic-book scriptwriter, polyglot, etc...), we spend the evening chatting with various friends of Andrea and other guests, who all pass through the door and join us in a neverending waltz. With the help of the mirto, our Italian suddenly makes lightning progress and we find ourselves discussing construction work, jobs and conformity practices with Tonino... It probably didn't make much sense to an outside observer with an alcohol level of 0%, but to us it was (almost) crystal-clear. It was great! A little less so the next morning, but as it's a day off, I hang around in bed until I feel more or less fit.

Counting in Tonino, a passionate meat-eater and hunter, as evidenced by his long tirades in which he talks about grilled meat of all kinds, including zebra according to a local story or legend in which a group of hunters stole that animal from a traveling circus before turning it on a spit, Sardinia is a country of hunters. Given the number of specialist outlets, empty cartridges here and there, and the number of gunshots heard in the countryside this Sunday, it's quite obvious. And when it's not hunting day, it would seem that they're adept at a sport that's not very widespread : shooting at road signs, especially if they're announcing an automatic speed check. Some of them look more like an Emmental than anything else...

Cagliari to Bosa