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Married?
At a gas station the next morning, my tiny bladder working overtime, I tried to add another word to my list of overseas washroom utterances: gabinetto. But judging from the idiotic expression on the attendant's face, either gas stations in Italy didn't have washrooms and that was the strangest request she had ever heard, or, more likely, I had wholly mispronounced the word and had requested to take a leak in the sink. Either way - look out bushes! The day began overcast and moderately windy - a good temperature for cycling as long as we were turning our pedals, but decidedly cool when we were not. I stopped to take a photo of stunted seaside evergreens. The chilly breeze sliced through me, making me feel like an Eskimo who had left the igloo without his favourite parka. I hastily clicked the shutter and prepared to make a quick getaway. Shoving my shoe into my toe-clip, I was about to push off when I noticed something peculiar: the wind wasn't blowing nearly as strongly as the scrubby evergreens were indicating. They were bent nearly double, leaning at a precarious angle as if in a belligerent southerly. Then it struck me. They were permanently misshapen. Somewhat apprehensively, I noted we were heading due south. "Cycling around the island counter-clockwise wasn't such a terrific idea after all," I whimpered, teeth chattering, and pointed towards the hunched trees. "Yeah," Sharon responded quietly, having already come to the same conclusion herself. "We wanted the lane closest to the sea for a better view but if we have to ride with our heads between our knees all day, we aren't going to see anything except our shoelaces." Staring at the pavement we battled onward until my next photo stop where I scrambled from my bike and meandered amongst ancient rocks looking for a suitable angle for my subject. Finally, realizing that all sides were equally photogenic, I peered through my 24mm Zeiss wide-angle lens and focused on the prehistoric, three-story beehive-shaped dome of volcanic basalt called a nuraghe. Sardinia boasted more than seven thousand of the intriguing structures. (I hazarded to bet that the only thing more ubiquitous on the tiny island were sheep.) "Wouldn't sleeping in a nuraghe be neat?" I asked enthusiastically after clicking the shutter and returning to where Sharon was waiting. "You're always on the lookout for new accommodations, aren't you?" Sharon laughed. "Unfortunately," she continued, "most nuraghi are on private land and besides, they're under government protection." I could tell she had been reading her tourist brochures. "In ancient times - like 1500 bc - 500 bc," she said, filling me in on nuraghi's historical context, "whenever the island was invaded, Sardinians would hole-up in these virtually impregnable fortresses. And since Sardinia is strategically located in the middle of the Mediterranean, invasion was a fairly frequent occurrence - more than a dozen times." "Apparently Sardinia has been the vacation spot of choice since before the time of Christ," I grinned. We left the nuraghe to the grazing sheep and slugged out a few more kilometers into the desiccating wind, our throats becoming as scratchy as sandpaper. Just when I knew I couldn't take it any longer, I hoisted my water bottle for soothing relief and found it drier than a biscuit fart. Not even a dribble. Unbeknownst to me, the wind had made Sharon thirstier than usual as well, and while I had been scrambling around taking pictures of old rocks, she had stealthily drained my water bottle. Having fallen victim to our misconception that Europe was entirely urban (friends had said to us before leaving home: "Why would you want to go to Europe? It's just one big dirty city."), we slogged on, waterless, not a house in sight, tongues flapping against our spokes like a clothespinned playing card. "Hey!" Sharon yelled suddenly, and slammed on her brakes to point at an overhead aqueduct. I skidded to a stop beside her, dropped my bike onto the parched earth, and shinnied the aqueduct's ten-foot concrete abutment. Peering over the edge, I gaped into the U-shaped trough and grimaced at the yellowish-green liquid slime apathetically squirming its way along the bottom. "How's it look?" Sharon called. "Pretty good!" I called back. This is a job for Katadyn I thought as I jumped down and got out our Swiss-made water filter. I climbed back up, pumped two bottles full, climbed down, and handed one of the purified bottles to Sharon. She raised it to her desiccated lips and took a slug as I waited for her words of praise. "Slough water!" she spat. "So much for gratitude " I muttered, acting hurt, but refusing to test the fetid water myself. Thrusting my full bottle into its holder, I mounted my bike and we ground onwards for a few more slow kilometers. "Let's take a break at that abandoned barn," I yelled, the wind against Sharon, a mere meter in front of me. We pulled over, gingerly leaning our bikes against the building. Huddling next to its weather-beaten wall, we temporarily sheltered from the relentless wind. I dug into my pannier and thirstily pulled out cheese and bread. Maybe I could suck the moisture from the cheese? The first (and only) car to come along stopped. The driver rolled down his window. "Marry, marry," he said brusquely, and pointed into the distance. I thought he requested we move along. "Si, si," I replied tiredly, waving impatiently at him. "Marry, marry," he repeated. I still didn't understand what he was trying to say. Besides, it was Sharon's turn to guess. She did her best, first pointing to herself, then to me. "Si, marry dieci anni," she replied in pseudo-Italian - Yes, married ten years. That was it! The farmer, a satisfied look on his face, waved and drove off. "You're a genius!" I bubbled, duly impressed. "That was a strange first question to ask someone," Sharon said, not entirely convinced she had fully comprehended the farmer's gist. "Maybe they're big into families," I shrugged, and continued to munch contentedly. Sharon wasn't as complacent. She had a niggling suspicion she hadn't interpreted the farmer correctly, and urged me to hurriedly finish eating. We threw the plastic wrappers into our panniers and hopped on our bikes to make a quick getaway before the old codger could return with reinforcements and order us off his property. Back on the main road, we hadn't gone more than ten meters before we figured out what the old gent had been trying to tell us. A sign pointed to the sea: 'Mare 1'. Sharon burst out laughing. "I didn't know that marry meant sea," she said, a twisted grin spreading across her face. "The old man hadn't been trying to hassle us after all; he had merely been trying to inform us that the sea view was a much more elegant lunch spot than his dilapidated old sheep shed. I must have really confused him when I said we had been married ten years!" Sharon hooted, brown eyes dancing. "Look at the bright side," I chuckled. "With our language skills improving so rapidly, in ten to twenty years we'll be masters!" Still snickering at our linguistic foolishness, we wound our way along the coast of Costa Paradiso until arriving at a vantage point high above the medieval town of Castelsardo. We pulled to a stop and gazed down. Far below, Castelsardo's Genoese citadel faced the sea, standing royally on its rocky promontory. The town's whitewashed buildings, mimicking a princess bride's enchanting train, flowed down from the castle's base to the sea. Whitecapped waves, like tiny pieces of confetti, completed my imaginary wedding scene. Sharon and I raised our plastic water bottle chalices of slough water and drank a toast to the newlyweds. The view far exceeded the taste of our swampy water. Any remnants of dreamy thoughts abruptly vanished when the wind suddenly shifted. Just over the fence was a livestock feed-trough and its accompanying manure stench. If my notion that Europe was just one big cosmopolitan city hadn't been erased before, it certainly was now. I had to accept the fact that, even in Europe, the barnyards were never far away. Like two dive-bombing hawks, we plummeted off the mountainside and burst onto the peninsula in quest of a bank. I tried three more auto tellers, all with the same depressing results: the display read something in Italian, then spit out my card like a chunk of bad pepperoni. Italy. We were in Italy. That truth slowly sank into my head for two reasons. First, because I couldn't understand a word anyone said and, second, more crucially, because we lacked Italian currency. It appeared that if we were going to eat in Italy, making a person-to-person hand-gesturing transaction with a real live bank employee was in order. But, alas, although it was still only early afternoon, the banks had already closed for the day. "Too bad the banks are closed," I said. "I can hardly wait to get in there." "I'll bet," Sharon answered, noting my sarcastic tone. The lack of Italian currency wasn't what had me concerned most; rather, it was that, at lunch, we had eaten the last of our provisions. And, truth be known, the phrase "out of food" never fails to strike terror into the heart of even the most stalwart touring cyclist. Having no money and being out of food was somewhat inconvenient. We had to think of an alternate plan. Perhaps grocery stores accepted credit cards? When I tried to implement Plan B however, I found credit in lieu of cash was simply not an option. It wasn't that grocery stores didn't take plastic, mind you. It was that there were no open grocery stores. Sharon and I stared at one another in silence. Or, rather, we stared at each other's empty panniers - the ones where the food should have been. "What kind of way to run a country is this?" I grumbled, and clutched my belly in anticipation of the hunger that would surely follow. Wretched, and with growling stomachs, we admitted we were far too accustomed to North America's twenty-four hours a day services. "My kingdom for a 7-Eleven," I announced, and managed a weak smile. Since there were no takers, we started to pedal, dejectedly, out of Castelsardo. A trio of boys yelled to us, "Do you speak English?" "A little," I shouted back. "Sometimes," Sharon called. It was the first time we had heard English spoken on the island, so we stopped to chat. Amusingly, we quickly discovered they had already shot their entire wad of English. And my attempt to continue the conversation by using our Italian phrase book and speaking some Italian words met with immediate derisive laughter. "It's difficult to learn a language," I said to Sharon as I shoved the book back into my handlebar bag, "when you are mocked every time you open your mouth." We said arrivederci to the sneering lads and rode into the countryside. Before long, we began to pass families harvesting olives. "Now that looks like a low-stress job," Sharon observed. "Lots of fresh air and if you have any frustrations you beat the branches to help the olives fall." A bright orange net spread beneath the boughs caught the ripe fruit as the workers whacked the trees. Seeing us, they giggled and waved. We laughed and returned their greeting. "I wish we had taken a course in Italian," Sharon said, infected by their friendly manner. "Our travel experience would be so much fuller if we could speak with them." I nodded and kept pedalling. I had no desire to be mocked again. Out of daylight, a few kilometers short of the city of Porto Torres, we stopped alongside the shore of a puddle-sized lake. Sporadic plops of rain dribbled from the sullen sky and formed concentric ripples on the pond's surface. Sheltered behind forty-foot-tall bamboo-like cane, we assembled our tent in the growing darkness. Compared to our previous evening's starry spectacle, the only lights visible on this night were artificial: a nearby town, resembling the milky way, lit up the entire mountainside. I climbed inside the tent. My stomach grumbled loudly, protesting its emptiness. "Was that thunder?" Sharon jested. |
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