Spring trip to Sardinia

Last week, on a whim, I jumped on a flight to Sardinia; it's an island I hardly knew anything about beforehand.  It's nothing to do with sardines, either.  No, Sardinia is the second largest island in the Mediterranean and has a wealth of ancient history, good beaches, fine food and beautiful men.  It also doesn't seem to be particularly on the radar of most English tourists, which is a great shame.

After such a Satanic English winter, a week's trip turned out to be just the antidote I needed - after just a two-and-a-half-hour direct flight to Cagliari, I was on a different planet.  I spent four days of the trip, just on this gorgeous beach.

Chia beach has thirty-metre high white dunes, sand so fine and bleached it is like talcum powder, and a dense cloak of juniper trees; the beach is remote, accessible by rutted lanes and has a necklace of even more isolated beaches nearby.  A swim here is breathtaking, as the ocean, even this early in the season, is bath-warm, shallow and stained a dazzling jade-blue.  The locals say dolphins can be seen off-shore, although I didn't see any.

The roasted sea bass I enjoyed at mid-day at the nearby restaurant was irresistible, rich and melt-in-the-mouth; shallots, large zesty lemon halves, pungent locally-gathered herbs and ever-so-juicy plum tomatoes.

After a day spent under startling blue skies and with salt drying on my sunburnt skin, we stopped en route back to the hotel to look at a simple market stall in a village selling lemons.  It is a pleasure to see such produce for sale in such stark contrast to the fruit we normally find withering in the supermarkets in Britain.  Juan, keen to treat me to something authentically Italian, soon put a few lemons in the hotel's only blender and presented me with a delightfully chilled, refreshing glass of just-this-minute-made lemonade.