Untouched paradise

The problem with DH Lawrence’s trip to Sardinia was that he went too soon.

A train journey he made into the mountainous interior in the winter of 1921 was amusing at first, but after sunset it became cold and dark and there was nothing to see.
The village at the terminus was boring, the food and lodging mediocre, and next morning he took the first train out. After nine days he sailed away in high dudgeon, which he proceeded to vent in a vividly irritable travel book, Sea and Sardinia.
In the aftermath of the First World War the island was hardly geared for tourism. It is now, but far from the glitzy resorts on the Costa Smeralda a narrow-gauge railway meanders into the heart of a landscape that has changed little since Lawrence’s whistle-stop tour.
The Trenino Verde, the “little green train” that runs for 160km from the east coast to his overnight stop at Mandas, is a roller-coaster ride through a convoluted jumble of mountains and meadows that must rank as one of the world’s great small railways. The name was coined by the World Wildlife Foundation because it travels through some of the greenest, most sparsely populated parts of the island.
Beyond it lies a little known treasure – a nature reserve where the last wild horses of Europe roam free with boars and wildcats on a high basaltic plateau.
Lawrence took the direct railway from Cagliari to Mandas, but the more circuitous Trenino Verde begins its laborious ascent from a pink railway station by a little harbour filled with fishing boats in the port of Arbatax.
Above the village is a modern rustic hotel, the Relais Monteturri, with a dining terrace overlooking the kind of bay that Neapolitans sing about, a place to savour fine food and wine by moonlight and watch boats sailing home across the dark, glistening sea.
In the early morning, a thin stream of mist was hovering over the bay as passengers queued at the station to buy tickets for the Trenino Verde’s first run of the season. This took some time, not because there were many of us, but because the tickets were written neatly by hand by a bespectacled clerk.
When the tracks were laid in 1888, most of the travellers were farmers, shepherds and shopkeepers. Now their descendants have roads and cars, and the Arbatax-Mandas line is maintained as a tourist attraction.
The trains used to be pulled by steam locomotives, but they had an unfortunate habit of setting fire to the countryside, so now diesel engines do the hard work – but they still have great whistles.
Smartly on time at 07.50, the station master blew a whistle, the engine driver replied with a shrill toot-toot, and with a shake, rattle and roll we were off.
Speeding away, we were treated to a succession of long, happy whistles. After the long winter lay-off, our little train was like a horse bolting from a stable to run free.
We were trucking along at a fair old speed, easily more than 20mph, and soon we were winding among foothills of dry, scrubby land framed by craggy peaks, sun-washed ochre against an azure sky.
Then a long, sinuous climb into the mountains began, the trenino’s exuberance faded, and our engine toiled.
After an hour we chugged into the town of Lanusei, where a sign informed us that we were precisely 555.4m above sea level. There was a leisurely interval while engine and passengers were refuelled with diesel and cappuccinos, before we resumed our journey into the heart of old Sardinia. Emerging from a forest we ran among crags, gazing down on plunging ravines and rock faces etched with switchback paths and villages perched improbably on precipitous mountainsides.
It was reminiscent of the Old West, as we snaked between bluffs of sand – coloured rock in the high sierra, our iron horse chugging bravely into the Badlands – and so it used to be. To the north lies the Barbagia, the stronghold of rebellious peasants and time-honoured banditry recorded by the Roman geographer Strabo in the 1st century BC.
With another train due along in the afternoon, some passengers broke the journey by getting off at a place called Seui.
A sign by the platform listed local attractions as an historic centre, an old watermill, a grotto and an ethnographic museum. It seemed a lot for a small town in the middle of nowhere.
When Lawrence was here with his wife Frieda, she asked a railway worker if there was anything to see in Mandas. “Hens,” he replied. “At Mandas, one does nothing. At Mandas, one goes to bed when it’s dark, like a chicken. At Mandas, one walks down the road like a pig that is going nowhere.”
Not much seems to have changed. On a hot afternoon in Mandas even the pigs and chickens were comatose. The big tourist attraction here lies a few miles away at Barumini, in the form of a massive bronze-age stone edifice.
This Stonehenge of Sardinia baffles archaeologists, who cannot decide whether it was a castle, a temple or a mausoleum.
Rising more than 1,300ft from a broad plain is a volcanic plateau called the Giara di Gesturi, a nature reserve of ancient cork forests.
This botanical garden in the sky is a haven for wildlife, far above the din of humanity, complete with rich pastures and rainwater ponds. It is also home to the cavallini della Giara, Europe’s last wild horses, believed to be descended from animals introduced by Phoenicians around 1,000 BC.
About 500 of them roam in a world of their own barely 10 minutes’ drive from the picturesque village of Tuili.
Poor old Lawrence. He missed the best bit.