I mentioned in my last post D.H. Lawrence's Sea and Sardinia, in which he describes the journey across the island that he and his wife took in 1921. Having wearied of Sardinia's capital, prematurely in our view, the couple headed off up-country. First stop: Mandas.

We're in Sardinia too late in the year to enjoy the "little green train" (definitely something to come back for), but we thought we could replicate some of his slow train experience by travelling on the regular service to Mandas.

In Lawrence's day, the train would have started from the centre of Cagliari. In fact, the line still exists, and usually there's a tram that runs on it. But at the moment, upgrading is in progress, so we had to go out to Monserrato on the CTM bus. This was our first bus ride here, and it was all pretty easy. You can buy tickets (EUR 1.30 gives you 90 minutes of travel) at many of the "tabbachi" (those little stores that sell magazines and lottery tickets as well as tobacco products). Then you just time-stamp them once you're on board.


The train journey took us 90 minutes, whereas it took Lawrence and his wife about five hours... Still, you could relate to much of what he describes. He notes, for example, that the landscape is different from what he's used to in other parts of Italy. Not up-and-down, but "running away into the distance... It is like liberty itself, after the peaky confinement of Sicily".

You can definitely feel that openness:



He says it's like Cornwall, but I really don't get that... In fact, I rarely think that places look like other places...

As you get closer to Mandas, your little train definitely does more climbing and winding:




Lawrence's experience of the village was -- predictably -- brief. There's a station restaurant, he says, where you can also get a bed. There's "a quite pleasant woman behind the little bar", and she shows them to a bedroom that smells "horrid and sourish". The bed is clean, but the tablecloth looks as though it belongs to some 2000 BC mummy... They sit down to dinner: "The room -- in fact the whole of Sardinia -- was stone cold, stone, stone cold." Three soup-slurping station officials join them for the meal. They tell the travellers that in Mandas what there is to see is hens... And what you do is nothing: "At Mandas one goes to bed when it's dark, like a chicken... At Mandas a goat understands more than the inhabitants understand. At Mandas one needs socialism..." In short, the left-leaning railway men are bored, and would much rather be in Cagliari.

Next morning, Lawrence is again comparing the view from his window to Cornwall. Or maybe Derbyshire. Or a part of Ireland. Or then again, maybe not... "Perhaps it is not Celtic at all: Iberian."

Now he's liking the cold, "after two southern winters". But he realizes that he hates lime-stone...

Lawrence is not overwhelmed by Mandas: "The village itself is just a long, winding, darkish street, in shadow, of houses and shops and a smithy. It might almost be Cornwall: not quite." Here we go again...

They walk to the end of the cobbled street. The q-b (short for queen bee -- which is how Lawrence refers throughout to Frieda) likes it, but won't commit to saying she could live here.

And what do you think happened? Correct: "There is nothing to do in Mandas. So we will take the morning train and go to the terminus, to Sorgono." Another one-night stand.

Given that D.H. is not exactly complimentary about the little town, we were surprised to see how intensely he's commemorated here:







It seems Mandas still hosts an annual D.H. Lawrence Festival.

Anyway, our first stop was Mary and Manu's Bar, for cappuccini and cornetti:



And then, we wanted to find a nuraghe...

A what?

Nuraghi, we have learnt, are stone towers. There are about 7,000 of them in Sardinia; they were built between 1600 and 1200 BCE; they're not found anywhere else; and we don't really know why the Nuragic civilization that built them thought it was a good idea to do so (were they fortifications, dwellings, food stores, places of worship, astronomical observatories, or a mixture of all the above?).

Well, we've been in Sardinia for more than a fortnight now, and although we saw a few things that might have been nuraghi on our train trip down to Cagliari, we've not seen a single one up close and personal. So today was nuraghe time.

We'd actually seen a good one from the train to Mandas:


But marked on the map, not far from Mandas station, was another.

Nice walk:




But from the road there was no sign of a nuraghe. We headed down a track and into a field (not at all sure that we weren't trespassing), and there, hidden by the undergrowth, was what HAD been a nuraghe:


OK, well... Picturesque, I guess... Not quite what we'd had in mind.

After that, we had a bit of a walk down the main street of Mandas, and I feel a bit DHL-ish when I complain about the lack of pavement...





The journey back to Monserrato was also very pretty:



Now, I have to tell you that we paid absolutely nothing for this train ride... And not for lack of trying...

When we arrived at Monserrato for the outward journey, we went to see the man at the desk in the station. No, he couldn't sell us tickets. Normally, you'd buy them from the ticket machine on the platform, but at the moment it's broken. So we should tell the folks on the train that the ticket machine is broken, and buy our tickets from them. On the train, several guards nodded at us very civilly, but none asked to see our tickets. Eventually, feeling bad about this, because PT is a terribly honest tern, we asked the young official at the front. No, she couldn't sell us a ticket. Best we asked at the station in Mandas once we got there.

So, when we arrived in Mandas, we made a bee-line for the ticket office. Closed. So we went off to do our thing, resolving to buy four tickets on the way back.

Our Mandas explorations behind us, we return to the station. Ticket office still closed. We accost a couple of officials on the platform, one of whom drags out the guy who will eventually sell us a ticket (he says). So we mooch around a bit, keeping a weather eye on the platform and the ticket office.

The minutes tick by. The train's there, and it's only a very short while until it's due to go. The ticket office still has little boards in front of the slots where customers normally slide money across, and the official slides tickets back.

I don't know what's happened, but the ticket person doesn't rematerialize, and at one point someone runs along the platform bearing a toilet roll...

We're probably looking a bit panicky by now, but one of the assembled railwaymen tells us to get on the train, and buy at ticket at Senorbi station... Like that's going to happen... Leap off the train, seek out the ticket office, go through the ticket-buying palaver -- only to see my train rolling out without me? Yeah, right. A passenger got left behind on Lawrence's train. I'm taking warning.

Anyway, our guard passed up and down the carriage several times. He greeted us, he smiled at us -- but he didn't ask for tickets, or offer to sell us any.

So, effectively, the trip was free. Maybe there was a Christmas Eve special... We resolved we'd give what we'd saved to a good cause.