René Seindal

On Sunday the 30th of March we went paddling along the spectacular coast of Golfo di Orosei, where I also paddled last year. A 50km stretch of coastline is part of the national reserve of Gennargentu-Golfo di Orosei, which means that here isn’t a road or a house to see in the reserve.

I paddled along this part of the coast of Sardinia in October last year, and it is a very dear memory, and I couldn’t wait getting back there. I paddled the same boat again, because the Skim Distance has spent the winter at Francesco’s.

A few friends of Francesco had decided to come along. Francesco Ravasio from Cagliari was there, and so was Stefano Diana of Diana Canoe and two local girls Adda and Valeria. Stefano had brought a prototype of a new boat of Francesco for a first try in the water, and they had a long and heated debate all’italiana about who was to try it first, but in the end Stefano came out on top and started in the prototype.

We all drove from Cardedu to Santa Maria Navarrese at the south end of the national reserve, and launched from the beach just below on of the many ancient Spanish towers that dots the coast of Sardinia.

The first part of the paddle were along the sloping coast until we reached the Pedra Longa, a rock spike 128m in height which stands exactly on the coastline. You only really understand the size of it when you’re sitting just under it looking up. Fortunately, we had calm weather and it wasn’t a problem getting close to the rocks along the coast.

After Pedra Longa the coast changes to vertical rock wall, which must be several hundred meters tall, because the Pedra Longa seems small in comparison. Shortly after rounding a cape we arrived at the Grotta del Colombo. It is a very large open cave where the internal parts look a bit like a dove in flight when seen from a distance.

A bit further ahead is another cave. From the Grotta del Colombo the entrance looks small and bell shaped, but it is some 15-20m tall. The cave is rather deep and in the calm weather we had, we could move all the way in without any problems. The inner walls are of a strange green-yellow colour in vertical stripes, which I haven’t seen anywhere else.

Our first stop was planned as Porto Quao, the hidden harbour, which is a sheltered cove just after the Capo Monte Santu. We arrived there and hauled the kayaks up on the very limited space, the bottom of the cove is just a few meters wide, and had lunch and a rest there. Porto Quao is a place Francesco uses often on his excursions in the area, since is the an easy landing and launching spot even for unexperienced paddlers.

A few of us had a nap and Valentina found a dead goat. It had been dead for a while, because only the bones were left.

It had been our intentions to continue to Goloritzé a few kilometres ahead, but we had launched late and spend too much time fooling around on the way, so we decided to return from Porto Quao. It was a bit sad, because Goloritzé is an incredibly beautiful place, but it was the right thing to do.

The return was slower still, because we now had a slight headwind. We paddled back towards Pedra Longa, and had another short rest on a little beach close by, before continuing back to Santa Maria Navarrese, where we arrived at six thirty in the afternoon, shortly before sunset. Hence, we did right not continuing to Goloritzé, because then we would have had at least an hours paddle in the dark at the end.

Valentina had to catch a flight early the next morning from the airport of Alghero which is two and half hours drive away. There was little chance of making the journey in the morning, so we left almost immediately from Cardedu towards Alghero with the intent of finding a hotel for Valentina near the airport. We drove in the darkness through the tiniest of mountain roads, and it was well after midnight before we said goodbye to Valentina at the hotel. Francesco and I drove back to Cardedu, but suddenly on the way back, Francesco turned down a small by road and parked the car in front of an old stone wall. It was a nuraghe which he thought we should have a look at now we were in the vincinity. We arrived at four in the morning.

On friday the 28th the sea was livelier than we wanted to be part of, and we decided on an excursion by car to the mountains in the Ogliastra hinterland.

First we drove to Jerzu which is a bit further inland from Cardedu, where the mountains really begins. Francesco drove up some of the steepest and most curved roads I have ever been on, up to what is called the “Tacchi di Ogliastra”, meaning the high heels of Ogliastra. They are a series of mountains where the top is surrounded by vertical rock walls of maybe 100-200m. The mountains in Sardinia aren’t high by Himalayan standards, the tallest peaks are just over 1800m, but they’re still impressive in all their ruggedness.

The many vertical rock walls are a little paradise for climbers, who come from all over to play in the Sardinian mountains.

We continued along the slope of the valley to Osini. The town seems to stick magically to the mountain side, and on the other side of the valley the town of Gairo clings on to the other slope. You can see from one town to the other, and there might only be about 2km across, but going there by car would still take an hour. It would probably be faster to ride a donkey over there.

The towns were less sticky in the good old days. A few kilometres down the road we passed Osini Vecchia, the “Old Osini”. The old (probably ancient) town of Osini were slowly sliding down the mountain side, for whatever reasons, and in the 1950s it had to be abandoned completely, and the entire population of Osini moved to the “new” and current Osini.

The story is by no means unique. Just across the valley “new” Gairo was located a couple of kilometres from “old” Gairo, in much the same way. Not everybody in Gairo moved to the new town, though. A part of the population moved further away, to the lower hills towards the coast, and thus Cardedu came about. Cardedu too is a new town, and a child of the landslides in the mountains.

From Osini Vecchia we moved up some roads even smaller, steeper and more curved than before, with the intent of finding a nuraghe.

The nuraghe are unique to Sardinia, where there are still over 6000 nuraghe in existence. In the rest of the world there are none. A nuraghe is a neolithic building or monument from the period 2500-1500 BC so they were already ancient when the Phoenicians and the Romans settled in Sardinia. Little is known about their purpose as their constructors have left no hints, but they do give an impression of being defensive fortresses.

Most nuraghes are made of a single conical tower with double walls. In the centre is a single room, sometimes with niches in the walls, and inbetween the two outer walls a stairway to the top or rooms further up. The walls are built by roughly cut stones stacked without the use of mortar.

The nuraghe is almost always placed in a strategic position on a hilltop or on a ridge in the mountains.

Larger nuraghes consist of several closely grouped towers, at times with surrounding walls or ramparts.

We ended up at the Nuraghe Serbissa after a very long drive on some very rough roads through a forest, and we only found about an hour before sunset. The Nuraghe Serbissa is the largest I have seen so far. There is a well preserved tower which can still be climbed by the original stairway, and two other towers standing to a lower height but still clearly recognisable. On the ground the outline of maybe another five or more towers could be seen.

Underneath the nuraghe is a large natural cave with three entrances, which was also a part of the entire complex.

The Nuraghe Serbissa is now situated in a completely deserted mountain forest, but who knows how the landscape was 4000 years ago, and how these people lived.

Along the road there were signs for several other nuraghes in the vincinity, but it was getting late and dark, and we still had over an hour’s drive home along the winding mountain roads.

That evening we ate out, in a local restaurant in Barisardo. Francesco had a steak so huge it couldn’t have been made in a normal frying pan, it was served on a pizza plate, and Valentina had a dish of grilled fish and seafood that was plain scary. I have no idea how they got through those quantities of food.

Francesco Muntoni has run Cardedu Kayak for ages. He organises kayak excursions for both beginners and experienced paddlers along the middle part of Sardinia’s eastern coastline, from between Muravera and Cardedu to Cala Gonone, which includes the national park of the Golfo di Orosei.

Visiting Francesco without ending in a kayak is an impossibility. On our first day we went for a short afternoon paddle from Marina di Gairo south along the coast, admiring the fantastic rock formations in the red rock of the Cardedu coastline. Many look like manmade sculptures. There’s the eagle, the old lady and many others.

Francesco spends most of his time either on the water with tourists, or getting ready or cleaning up after an excursion. In his spare time he works for a local wine cantina. The Perda Rubia cantina is one of the very last cantinas that still produce Sardinian red wine of the local Cannonau grapes in the traditional way.

We got a special guided tour of the cantina, which is a fascinating place with fermentation tanks and oak barrels so huge they have been built inside the cellar when the cantina was started in 1949. Francesco presented me quite unexpectedly with a very special and absolutely priceless gift: a bottle of Perda Rubia from 1964, the year I was born.

Sardinian cuisine is a journey in itself. That evening we had culorgiones, a kind of large ravioli with a filling of potatoes and pecorino.

Tuesday evening (March 25th) we left Palermo for Trapani. The ferry was scheduled to depart at nine in the evening, but we ended up at Giacomo’s chatting until after seven, and arrived at Trapani harbour at ten to nine, only to discover that the ferry departed from a new more distant pier, which we had problems finding as the signs weren’t quite in working order. We hauled our gear from the car onto the ferry, said a hasty goodbye to Giacomo and hurried on board, only to hear a message on the loudspeakers that departure had been postponed to ten o’clock.

Initially the sea was quite rough, but it got calmer during the night, and we had a reasonably quiet passage to Cagliari where we arrived at about ten in the morning.

Francesco Muntoni of Cardedu Kayak wouldn’t be able to pick us up until in the late afternoon, so we carried our gear to the nearby bus station where it was possible to leave luggage for a while. We checked in our bags, and a greenland paddle, and set off exploring the city.

Cagliari is an ancient city. It was founded by the Phoenicians some 800 years BC, and later pass into Roman hands, followed by Byzantine, Pisan, Aragonese, Spanish, Austrian, Piedmontese and finally Italian. We walked through the busling lower quarter Marina on our way up the hillside to the old fortified city, the Castello, which in comparison seen almost lifeless.

Francesco Ravasio, one of the persons who brought sea kayaking to Sardinia over twenty years ago, met us at the station at half past three, and he took us for a short excursion to Nola before dropping us off at Diana Canoe, a local kayak producer run by Stefano Diana.

Diana Canoe makes a wide range of recreational kayaks in fiberglass, and they can make almost anything in fiberglass and kevlar. When we were there they were even working on some fiberglass roofs for ambulances.

Francesco Muntoni of Cardedu Kayak came to Diana Canoe a bit later to pick us and a couple of kayaks up. Francesco uses kayaks from Diana Canoe for most his excursions in the Ogliastra area in Sardinia. The kayaks in question are in part designed by Francesco himself, especially for daytrips with less experienced paddlers along the rocky coast near Cardedu and in the area of the Golfo di Orosei.

We had a quiet drive to Cardedu in the dark, and arrived there at about ten in the evening, dead tired and ready for bed.

The weather has gone haywire in most of Europe, and we’ve got our part of the fun here in Sicily too. No snowstorms though, its not that extreme, but we’ve had a lots of rain, winds between force 4 and 7 and seas so rough many ferries have been deviated or had to remain in port.

The weather hasn’t given us any chances for a relaxed holiday paddle, but we’ve spend quite a bit of time with our Sicilian kayak friends Giacomo della Gatta and Salvatore Bartoli.

Salvatore has the dubious honour of having a pizza named after him at a local pizzeria, Actually the Pizza Bartoli is a very good pizza, with cherry tomatoes, mozzarella di buffala, red onion, anchovies, and a touch of rucola. We all enjoyed it immensely, except Salvo who didn’t feel well.

The day after we had a spectacular meal at Giacomo’s, with mackerel and sausages on the barbecue, salad and an unbeatable chocolatecake for dessert. Poor Salvo still didn’t feel well so most of the laughs were on him as he snored away on the sofa, but the rest of us had a great time.

We’re spending a good deal of our time with Valentina’s family. After all we don’t see them that often. Sunday was justly one of the few sunny days this Easter, and we went for a walk on the beach at Isola delle Femmine. The wind was strong, though, and we didn’t stay for long.

Today we gambled on decent weather in spite of a forecast of rain, rain and more rain, and we’ve been reasonably lucky. In the morning we left for Segesta, some 75km west of Palermo, where one of the worlds best preserved hellenistic temples stand, near the ruins of the ancient Elymian city of Segesta. We were fortunate enough to have some nice long spells of sunshine,and we took our time to explore the ruins.

From Segesta we went to visit some very dear friends in Castellammare del Golfo. I’ve known Mariangela and Paolo since before I started to learn Italian some 15+ years ago, and a visit to Sicily without dropping by in Castellammare del Golfo is just not right.

Mariangela and Paolo took us to Balata di Baida to taste a local delicacy, the cassatelle. They are little half moon shaped cakes, filled with ricotta cream, deep fried, and covered in fine sugar. Our short excursion for the sake of a cake became a two hour meandering through the landscape of western Sicily, between fields of durum wheat, beans, vineyards, olive groves and citrus orchards, with a multitude of houses in between, large and small, old and new, beautiful and ugly, abandoned or well kept.

Tuesday is meant to be our final day in Sicily for this time, and we have a bit of shopping to do before we move on. We do not know, however, if the ferry will depart tomorrow evening as scheduled. The wind will be at its strongest tonight, up to 35 knots, so the ferry might not be able to depart from Trapani in time, it might not even be able to arrive there, or even to leave Cagliari tonight. We’ll have to call the shipping line tomorrow for news.

There are more photos from Sicily on Flickr.

We’re in Palermo now. The journey went smoothly and we’re fine.

For some reason flight is the opposite of most other commodities, in that the less you pay the more you get. Our itinerary took us therefore first from Copenhagen to London, Stanstead, where we had to collect our luggage as our two flights weren’t connected. We then had a two hour wait before the check-in for the London-Palermo flight opened, which we spend in a slightly italianised Café Alba with the slogan “Vivere con gusto”. Time passed as we tried.

We checked in and boarded a completely crowded plane with a screaming yellow interior, where I incredibly managed to half sleep half the way.

After another three hours flight we approached the airport of Palermo in the dark, the plane swaying left and right due to the strong gusts of wind. Nevertheless, the descent went well, until we were about 10m above the runway, when the plane just seem to smash down into ground with a huge bang. People gasped and screamed, but the landing gear withstood the impact and we swayed on as we drove down the runway towards the terminal building.

When we finally stopped in front of the terminal, we were told to board some shuttle busses waiting for us. I was a bit surprised, as we were just in front of the terminal, but they’ve been changing at lot lately at Palermo airport, so we boarded the busses and waited patiently for them to fill up. Then, the busses started, drove 30m forwards, turned slightly to the right, continued for another 20m and stopped in front of the terminal, maybe 15m from the nose of the plane.

Our bags were there.

We’re off to Palermo tomorrow morning, but the winter here in Denmark decided to give it one last try. This is the view from our kitchen window this afternoon:

This little fellow doesn’t really care

and neither do we, because the weather is fine in Palermo and we have all our paddling gear with us

When my Pentax Optio W10 died last November, I bought the newer model Optio W30, expecting it to be at least as good as the W10 if not better. I was wrong. it is not a better camera for several reasons.

The Optio W10 was easy to operate, even with cold and wet hands, and it took good photos for an economic point-and-shoot compact camera.

The Optio W30, in comparison, is much harder to operate. The buttons aren’t very responsive and often it takes a bit of fiddling with both hands to change a setting, something that was achieved much faster with one hand on the W10.

The camera sometimes doesn’t recognise the memory card. The card might be working for a while, and they the camera suddenly complain about “Internal camera memory full” and it has lost the card and stored a handful of photos in the camera’s internal memory. The only cure is to switch it off and on again.

It’s a point-and-shoot camera, so it should be able to turn on quickly and take photos almost instantaneously, but the W30 is extremely slow, much slower than the W10. The delay from the shutter button is fully pressed until it takes a photo can easily be 1-3 seconds, after which the chance for a special or particular shot has often passed.

The culprit seems to be the auto-focus function. The camera takes a long time acquiring focus, and in the view-finder you can see it try several times, using both time and battery.

The colours in the photos are much too bland when using the preset modes, and the photos often appear both undersaturated and slightly overexposed. The only solution I have found to this problem is to always use the P mode, which allows me to increase the saturation and manually adjust the exposure value.

On top of all this, the camera is excessively flash-happy. It will practically try to flash whenever there is anything less then bright sunlight. I have even seen it flash when outside, on an overcast day, when using the landscape preset mode. I fail to grasp how the camera firmware can even consider using the flash when in landscape mode. How can it make sense using the flash when I have explicitly stated than the motive is outside the flash’ range?

When disabling the flash the photos come out grainy and unsharp. They’re often grainy and unsharp when the flash fires too, because the motive is too often outside the flash’ range.

The Pentax Optio W30 only works fully satisfactory in perfect light conditions, and that is not satisfactory, especially not when an earlier model performed so much better.

I’m not an expert on the innards of digital cameras, but to me it seems like Pentax has used a CCD chip that is not sensitive enough for the camera, probably to keep costs down, but by degrading the central element of the camera, whey have ruined it.

Do I need to add that I’m not as happy with the Pentax Optio W30 as I was with the older W10 model. If only I could have my old camera back.

Kokatat will be using a photograph I took in Sardinia last year in an ad in the May issues of Paddler Magazine and Wavelength Magazine.

The photograph is taken in the morning as we were rounding the granite formations of Capo Testa.

Kokatat sponsored us with Knapsters, Storm Cags, Anoraks, life vest, Seawesters, and hydration systems.

I’m preparing the last leg of my circumnavigation of Sardinia, which I plan to do in April. The route is about 320km (circa 200 miles) from Fertilia down the western coast of Sardinia to Cagliari. I still don’t know if I’ll do this trip in early April or late April, as I have other affairs in Italy to attend to too, such as starting a kayak company in Venice.

I’ve been looking at weather statistics, and it doesn’t really look that bad, at least not if the Sardinian weather this April behaves like it has in past Aprils.

Temperatures should be between 10° C and 15° C, and the water temperature 14°-16° C. The water will be warmer than the air most of the time.

Wind should be mostly W to NW and mostly in the range F2-F4, but on the average there’ll be 5-6 days during the month with F5 winds or stronger. There’s a 5% risk of having a day with winds of F7 or more. This trip will be the first time I paddle alone for longer distances, so I will probably be rather cautious and not venture out if the winds are F5 or stronger.

Waves should be around 1.5m the first 3 weeks of April, mostly E and with little variation throughout the day and night. This is not worse that what I have tried before, but I will probably get some surf landings unless I can find sheltered beaches. In late April the waves should fall a bit, to 0.8m-1.0m, with some variation during the day and the direction will be mostly ENE.

I’m already all eager to go, but there’s still some time