Sardinia hike 2, day 5. To Baunei.

Hey all,

Definitely something pretty NQR with the foot – if I step on it wrong it hurts badly – once this morning so much that I stood there and swore for a good minute or so, which made the nice neat German day-trippers with their kiddies and their brand new special hiking pants stop and stare as they rounded a corner. There are lots of Germans tourists in Sardinia – they almost outnumber the wild pigs – though credit where credit is due: they are slightly more friendly.

Nice morning apart from the foot issue – made myself breakfast and admired the view which I had completely to myself, with the exception of a bunch of wasps who smelt the food – another climber perched against the sea on the edge of the spire, on the way up. Once out of the gully it was a pretty tedious walk back to Baunei along the road, but the views on the way down were nice, and the bus drive back to Dorgali was extraordinary – forbidding alien mountain landscape. They could surely have at least one walk here as long and famous as the GR20 if they thought about it a bit – I don't know why they haven't. 15 refuges, say an average of 60 hikers a night for 5 months of the year, each spending an average of 25 EU a day. 15x60x25x150 = about three and a half million EU a year, for the price of a few log huts and overpriced pasta. You would make your money back on set up costs in the first year – then it would be gravy from that point on. 10 years of that, not to mention the drag-on tourism that it would bring here, much like the big hikes in Corsica bring in tourists who never do them or have any intention of doing them.

Back in Dorgali – here tonight and tomorrow night – will organise a ferry back to the mainland tomorrow, try to get online somewhere (no 3G here, so useless to try to post the blogs), sleep in, let my foot not have to deal with a pack for at least one full day, enjoy another shower, enjoy wearing clothes that don't have salt stains all through them from sweat, enjoy not having to worry about packs of wild pigs, availability of water, food supplies etc. etc. Only downside is that I ran out of anything to read a couple of weeks ago apart from the NT and some Patrick O'Brian audiobooks. Neither are terrible options, but it would be nice to spend a day reading a good novel I have not read before. 

Solzhenitsyn's In the First Circle, was, by the way, fantastic. This is the first time the uncensored version has been translated into English. Like a lot of Big Serious Russian Writers (BSRWs, as they are known in literary circles) Solzhenitsyn has a bit of an intimidating reputation, but this was an easy read – and often very funny – not a bad effort considering it is set in a Stalinist prison. With One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and The Gulag Archipelago Solzhenitsyn probably did more than any other individual to destroy the notion of Soviet Russia as some kind of Utopia – he is so closely bound up with Soviet Russia and Stalin that, now that both are dust, Solzhenitsyn himself has fallen out of the limelight. 

But he will come back – is a great writer – and there is something about a prison, like a boat, that lends itself to acute observation – a small enclosed world with no way out. And listen to this: “At school, literature had meant nothing but intensive study of 'the message,' the ideological standpoint adopted, the social class served by all these writers” (p. 292).  He is talking about literature as it was taught under Stalin – but frankly it would apply to most of what is taught in high-school and university in the West today. A wonderful novel – and as intense as it was, readable enough to enjoy when utterly exhausted in the middle of the night in Corsica getting blown around in a gale.

Photos. 1. If you have a Hennessy Hammock, you can sleep here in comfort. 2. Which means you can wake up to this. 3. And this. 4. And this, all without having to deal with camp grounds, or other people – or wild pigs, for that matter, who would see this slope, grunt in outrage, trot away and console themselves by having a poo and finding some mud to slop about it. 5. Walking down towards Baunei. 6. Lots of motorbikes around today – you can see why – I am taking this shot from the same road pictured. 7. Coffee, while waiting for the bus. 8. Hot chocolate somewhere else, doing the same.

Cheers, B.