People like reading lists, they say. The problem is they (the lists) tend to get a bit same-y after a while (people do, too, arguably), so the trick as a writer is to come up with something new and exciting. Here is one you likely never saw before: 5 top ways to get hurt traveling!
Traveling gives me a great deal of joy, it is true, but it’s fair to say that ain’t always the case. So in ascending order of pain and hurt and general discomfort, here are the five worst experiences connected with my travels over the years:
5. Went kayaking off the wild east coast of Sardinia, wearing lots of sunblock but no good sunglasses. Fierce sun, wind and reflections on the water combined with intense heat to create a witches’ brew of salt and chemicals that got into my eyes, rendering me effectively blind, as I was utterly unable to keep my baby blues open – something of a problem when one has to navigate dangerously bad mountain roads to get back to base. In the end I drove at a snail’s pace, stopping over and over to pry my peepers open enough to rinse them with water. It took a night in absolute darkness before I could see normally again.
4. Went diving in the Andaman Sea on a live-aboard boat. That’s a small ship that is out in tropical heat for a week, with everyone living in close quarters. Long story short, I caught something that developed into high fever right as we were disembarking; flying home from Thailand via London with 39+ degrees’ temperature in cattle class was literally a nightmare – I was hallucinating, and so weak they had to get me a wheelchair to go from one plane to the next. Once home I slept more or less straight for 48 hours before finally recovering.
3. First time paragliding in Spain. One of the first attempts to get airborne properly, running down a gentle hill, I managed to rip a muscle in my groin just as I was lifted into the air. The pain was excruciating, but the forward movement and physics kicked in and I continued upwards, which meant I had to fly and land for the very first time while trying not to black out from the agony. To this day I don’t know how I managed. It took months of grueling exercise to regain something like normal function in my leg.
2. Another diving excursion, this time to the Seychelles. Made the rookie mistake of having local food that was probably washed in local water. Within a few hours our stomachs were rumbling, and before long we were two people writhing in gut-wrenching pain, before embarking on a night of horrors, as our bodies went into overdrive trying to purge themselves of the foreign germs; trust me, there is no feeling quite like switching back and forth between projectile vomiting and having your intestines go full fecal Jackson Pollock on the one shared toilet, whilst your friend is knocking on the door to be let in to have their turn, NOW.
1. A romantic trip to Granada and Alhambra might not seem like an obvious winner of this list, but my companion on this sojourn was someone I was very much in love with, and she had agreed to go only as a way to end our relationship on a high note, as she felt we weren’t right for each other. So while it was a lovely experience, and the sights of Alhambra a wonder to behold, it was still with very mixed feelings I went on it. And at the end she did what she had said she would, and ended things between us. She broke my heart, and it took years to mend.
So there you are. A Top 5 List like no other. Honorable mentions go to Barcelona and Amsterdam, where I broke my PBs for marathons – painful experiences in and of themselves, but disqualified because they also gave me a lot of masochistic joy. Hope you enjoyed. If you think you have my travel horror stories beaten, let me know in the comments!
We’re on a mountain top made out of lava rock so perforated and serrated its like a giant cheese grater, and we the cheese.
The path is nowhere to be seen. Everywhere I look there are steep ravines blocking our way down, and there are storm clouds drawing ever closer. If this isn’t being between a rock and a hard place I don’t know what is.
I blame the effing elephant.
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To explain how this happened, we must go back a couple of days, to when we first arrived to Sardinia. The third largest island in the Mediterranean, yet so often overlooked, Sardinia, unlike Corsica to the north, has neither famous sons nor Astérix albums to its name. Like Corsica, it has been invaded over and over again over the millennia, and now it’s our turn.
My good friend Lesli is celebrating her birthday this week, which is as good an excuse as any to go on an adventure, and we decided Sardinia had what it took. We meet up in Cagliari, the regional capital in the south, and drive up the east coast, which is largely still wild and unexploited.
Our destiny is the village of Lotzarai, and the Lemon House, a bed and breakfast that has made its name among hikers, bikers and climbers as an excellent base camp for all kind of excursions. It doesn’t disappoint. We arrive late at night, but Riky, the gentle giant that runs the place, has been waiting up, and has us installed in no time, and even insists on having a midnight drink with us to celebrate our arrival.
Next morning he’s up cooking breakfast for a long table full of adventurers; there’s the British triathletes, the Swiss thruhikers, the Italian climbers, and us. Someone remarks upon the respective amulets we carry around our necks – me a Thorshammer, Lesli a Ganesha, the Indian elephant god – and I make fun of hers, saying how a pachyderm that’s in charge of removing obstacles but sometimes also places them in your path isn’t really worth its mettle. Little did I know…
Soon we’re setting out northwards along the coast on our first hike. The morning hours are exquisite, as the path hugs the coastline on its way to Pedra Longa, a natural rock outcrop, shaped like a pyramid one hundred and fifty metres high. It looms in the distance, marking the mouth of the ravine we’re planning to hike up. The sun shines down upon macchia made up of cistus shrubs and myrtle trees, tufts of thyme and euphorbia, with occasional eucalyptus and olive trees – all making for an impossibly green landscape that offsets the turquoise and sapphire waters of the Mediterranean. Lizards dart across the ocre ground like metallic blue arrows, and here and there are goats and even wild pigs*. It’s a stroll in Arcadia.
Et In Arcadia Ego.
Once past Pedra Longa we continue upwards towards the mouth of the gorge. It’s awe inspiring, like something out of Yellowstone plonked down next to the ocean, and suddenly the path is much more difficult to discern. We clamber up and down the ravine mouth, following every likely-looking goat trail and rockfall in an attempt to find the path again, knowing that it must be there yet infuriatingly failing to recover it. Brambles and spinablanca shred our legs and arms, tear at our clothes, and sliding gravel threatens to turn the slightest misstep into a lethal slide to the bottom of the gully.
In the end, after nearly two hours of searching, Lesli – who knows her Hindu gods – suggest that we give up and go back to Pedra Longa to cool off in the Mediterranean. So Ganesha has his way, and we give up on the hiking for the day to go skinny-dipping instead.
Submerging our scraped and shredded bodies into the sea stings a little, but it sure beats spending the night in a goat-infested grotto lost in the macchia. Maybe the elephant god knows something we don’t?
The second day we take the rental car over winding mountain roads up the coast to Cala Gonone. It’s over an hour’s drive, but well worth it, as from here we rent kayaks and go down the coast along a particularly scenic stretch of the natural reserve, past caves that conjure up the adventures of Tom Sawyer or the Count de Montechristo.
No elephant here. Or is there?
It’s exciting and peaceful in equal measure, if very hot as the sun shines bright. Fortunately the breeze is constantly in our faces – but after four hours that’s too much of a good thing, as well; my eyes are screwed shut from too much light, salt and wind, and smarting as if they too had been lashed by thorns yesterday.
Alas, Lesli doesn’t drive stick shift, so I have to get us home more or less blindly, traversing the winding roads at a snail’s pace, stopping every kilometre or so to bathe my eyes in what little water we have left to cajole them into staying open just a little bit longer.
It’s a desperately dangerous thing to do, but we have no choice. We stop in one lay-by to see if Lesli might manage to drive – she really, really can’t – and in another to see if we might convince the people in the car parked there to help us out. Turns out they weren’t admiring the view, as we thought, and it’s a testament to my desperation that I briefly consider asking the female passenger to give us a hand once she’s done giving the driver head. I don’t. Instead I dab my eyes with a soaked rag for what feels like the hundredth time, and drive on, cross eyed and crying copiously. Goodness knows what the couple must have thought we were up to.
We make it back in just under three hours.
Day three dawns, and after twelve hours in total darkness and plenty of saline solution my eyes have recovered enough that we can venture out again. Riky tells us that the path we searched for in vain on day one is in fact located on a ledge that looks impossibly thin from down at Piedra Longa. We decide to try to hike up the gorge again, and drive there to shorten the hike. Good thing, too, because the trail is so steep in places that we’re climbing rather than hiking it. The term “drop dead gorge-ous” applies here, as it is quite possibly the most beautiful nature I’ve ever seen, but also very unforgiving. The ledge is no more than a metre or two wide in places, and there’s nothing twixt us and a terminal drop.
The ledge. Note Pedra Longa (centre or the picture) for perspective.
We do get all the way to the top of the ravine without misadventures, and it seems as if Ganesha is finally cutting us some slack, but then we set out to the summit of Punta Giradili, the higher one of the two promontories enclosing the gorge, and that’s where it almost goes badly wrong. It’s a difficult hike, as the rock is pure lava, all sharp edges and treacherous holes, and the only way to navigate is by following cairns marking the path in amongst the undergrowth. That’s all well and fine as long as we’re headed upwards, as the little piles of rocks can be seen against the evergreens behind and above them, but coming back down is a different matter. Suddenly the cairns look no different from the million other stones, and before long we are lost.
By now we’ve been out for five hours and fatigue is setting in. One false move and one or both of us could be badly hurt and/or stuck in the cheese grater stones. What’s worse, everywhere looks the same, and we have no way of navigating. Going in a straight line is out of the question, as the dense macchia turns the whole flat summit into a giant labyrinth, and everywhere we look there are steep ravines barring our way, even if we did know where we were going. On top of that, dark, pregnant clouds begin to fill the sky, and there will be no cover to be had if the autumn rains decide to start.
The summit of all fears.
It’s a desperate moment, and I genuinely don’t know what to do. Lesli suggests going further inland in the hopes of circumventing the ravines, and I’m just about to give in to this when I recall that my trusty GPS-watch has a mapping function, which when switched on allows you to retrace your steps. In a manner of minutes we are back on the trail, happy to turn our backs on the wretched mountain. Garmin 1 – Ganesha 0.
The next day we decide we won’t hike at all. Instead we rent mountain bikes and load into the rental car. We drive up even smaller roads than before, deep into the mountains, and I’m having a blast, as these roads remind me of the forest roads my father taught me to drive on. It’s all gravel and hairpin bends of a kind I’ve only ever driven on in computer games, and I only wish I had a car better suited to the terrain.
Then we hop on the bikes and start the decent down towards the sea. Alas, Ganesha doesn’t give up. Three, four kilometres into the ride, my chain snaps clean off, and there’s no tool in the tool kit to repair it. Nothing to do but hike the whole damned uphill slog, pushing the bike, then get in the car and drive all the way back down again to have it fixed.
Once that’s done we decide not to push our luck, but to go for another Cala (sandy cove). Alas, poor map reading leads us astray, and we get on our bikes only to alight upon a gorge that is off limits to bikers. Instead we walk the rest of the way – Lesli wearing slippery bike cleats on a path made up mainly by shale – and finally arrive at the sea after another gruelling hike. The Truncated One might have had a point in getting us here, because it’s another spot of natural perfection, but on a no hiking, biking day, we managed to do a grand total of twenty minutes of biking and several hours’ worth of hiking, so we weren’t exactly over the moon.
There seemed to be nothing for it. We kept the bikes for another day, and set off yet again into the wilderness, and this time – on our last day – we seemed to be getting it right, or maybe I had just atoned for my hubris vis-a-vis Ganesha?
We rode our bikes down a remote gulch of stunning natural beauty down to Cala Sisine, a gorgeous pebble beach in the middle of nowhere. We had it all to ourselves, and I would wish everyone could experience that feeling at least once in their lives – surrounded by sparkling clear turquoise water, deep blue skies, steep cliffs clad in green, and nothing but the wind and the sun on your skin. Heaven.
Eden, a.k.a. Cala Sisine
It lasted all of an hour. Then a taxi boat came and dislodged a horde of tourists, bringing dogs and cigarettes and loudspeakers. It was time to go home.
In the end we didn’t get to go rock climbing, as Sardinia doesn’t have any licensed guides (they have to have ice climbing experience – not something easily gained in Sardinia), and we didn’t have time to go diving, but all in all it was a fantastic holiday, all the better for the mishaps and hiccups that occurred along the way (especially true once we decided (mis)adventure points could be converted into gelato points!). Ganesha came through in spades – even Thor came out and sent us off with the mightiest thunderstorm I have ever experienced on the night before we left – so gods willing I will be back to Sardinia for more of the same before long.
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* I’d tell you about the wild pigs, but I don’t want to boar you. Things take on such a littoral meaning along the coast.
