Sardinia and the Road to Cala Gonone (That I Never Reached)

The ferry from Barcelona had deposited me in Sardinia four days earlier, and honestly, I was grateful just to be upright and riding.

Barcelona hadn’t exactly ended on a high note. The last night—Johnny’s last night before he flew home—we’d discovered a tapas place in the Gothic Quarter where people queue for hours just to get in. One thing led to another. We made friends. Started a crawl through the old city. I was walking backward with my camera, trying to frame a shot of the guys on the cobblestones, when I stepped on a loose stone and went down hard.

Face first. Camera bag still on my shoulder. No hands out to break the fall.

I spent that night in the emergency room at Clínica Barcelona. CT scan came back clean—no concussion, no fracture, no bleeding on the brain. But the hematoma on my forehead was the size of a grapefruit, and by morning both eyes had gone deep purple. I looked like a raccoon. Or a comic book villain. The ferry ticket was already booked, so the next day I loaded the bike and crossed back to Italy looking like I’d lost a fight.

Barcelona, two mornings after. Bruised, patched up, and grateful to be back on the bike — the road to Sardinia started here.

The first few days in Sardinia were slow by necessity. I found a place on a bluff overlooking Castelsardo on the west coast—whitewashed walls, infinity pool, views across the Gulf of Asinara that went on forever. I took short rides. Valledoria. Costa Paradiso. Nothing ambitious. I wore my helmet low and my sunglasses dark and tried not to startle anyone at gas stations.

But after a few days, the swelling had started to come down, the bruising had shifted from fresh plum to something more like old wine, and I was ready to actually see the island.

I’d been looking at the map, and Cala Gonone kept catching my eye.

It sits on Sardinia’s east coast, tucked into a bay where the Supramonte mountains meet the Tyrrhenian Sea. The village itself isn’t particularly famous, but it’s the launching point for something that is: a stretch of limestone cliffs, sea caves, and beaches that can only be reached by boat. The kind of coastline that shows up in Italian tourism posters and makes you wonder if the saturation has been turned up too high. It hasn’t.

The coast beyond Cala Gonone — limestone cliffs and coves reached by boat. This is what I was riding toward.

I wanted to see it. Not just the photos, but the place itself. The boats heading out in the morning. The cliffs rising straight out of the water. The sense of inaccessibility that makes certain landscapes feel more real.

So I pointed the bike east.

Crossing Sardinia by motorcycle is not like crossing most places. The island is only about 170 kilometers wide, but it doesn’t feel small. The roads climb and drop and switchback through landscapes that seem to shift every twenty minutes. Coastal scrub gives way to cork oak forests. Valleys open into plateaus. The air cools, then warms again. You pass through towns built from stone that matches the hillsides. They belong.

That morning ride started warm and stayed pleasant. Keeping off the primary roads, I found myself alone—as if I was the only one exploring. Sometimes in the distance I could see and hear the muted roar of Sardinia’s version of a highway—a reminder that I’d chosen the right road. You know, the kind of riding where you’re aware of everything—the sound of the engine settling into its rhythm, the way the bike leans into curves, the smell of wild herbs baking in the sun. No music. No podcast. Just the road and the landscape moving past.

Somewhere around mid-morning, I pulled over at a roadside spring—one of those simple stone fountains where cold water pours continuously from a pipe in the rock. There were a few cars parked nearby, people filling bottles. I drank straight from the stream, refilled my own bottle, and stood there for a few minutes in the shade. The temperature had dropped ten degrees since the coast. The air smelled like pine and stone.

Dropping into the alternate route — cooler air, tighter road, less margin.

A man filling a bottle nodded at me. “Dove vai?”

“Cala Gonone,” I said.

He made a face—part shrug, part grimace. “Bella,” he said. “Ma…” He waved his hand in a way that could have meant anything. Traffic. Tourists. Who knows.

I thanked him and got back on the bike.

The road to Cala Gonone descends through a series of switchbacks that drop nearly 1,000 meters in over just a few kilometers. It’s the kind of descent you’d see on a cycling blog, with gradients and hairpin counts and warnings about brake fade. I’d read about it. Looked forward to it, actually. A slow descent down a good switchback road is its own kind of allure—on a motorcycle.

Except when I punched in the address of the café where I’d planned to park in Cala Gonone, the GPS voice crackled through my helmet speakers: “There is a road closure on your route. Rerouting.”

The legendary SP26—the main road into Cala Gonone, the one with the tunnel through Mount Tului—was closed.

Apple Maps offered only one alternative: SC Cala Gonone. I’d never heard of it. Had no idea what kind of road it was. But according to the map, it was the only way down to the coast from here.

Every car bound for Cala Gonone was rerouted onto the same narrow road.

I could have turned around. Headed back west, found something else to do. But I’d come this far, and Cala Gonone was only a handful of kilometers away. The alternate route couldn’t be that bad.

It was worse.

SC Cala Gonone is not the kind of road that ends up on tourist brochures. It’s narrow—barely wide enough for two cars to pass if both drivers are paying attention. It hugs the mountainside, carved into cliffs that drop away sharply on one side and rise sheer on the other. No guardrails in places. Just road, rock, and air. The gradient hits 14% in sections—steep enough that you feel it in your wrists as you hold the bike steady.

But it was also beautiful.

The road descended through a canopy of oak and juniper, the kind of tunnel-like shade that drops the temperature another few degrees and makes the light go green and dappled. The tarmac was good in places—smooth sections where the bike leaned into curves easily—but patchy in others, broken up by weathering and the occasional scatter of loose gravel. For stretches, it felt like one of those rare roads that exist just for the pleasure of riding them.

Then I saw the cars.

A line of them, stopped. Hazards blinking. No one moving.

I pulled up alongside, engine off, and tried to see what was happening ahead. The road curved out of sight, so there was no way to tell if this was an accident, a breakdown, or just gridlock from too many people trying to use a road that wasn’t designed for this kind of volume. After all, anyone wanting to reach Cala Gonone had been funneled onto this same narrow alternate route.

How long would I be waiting here?

I sat there for a few minutes, weighing the options. I pulled my sunglasses off to get a better look at the route on my phone. I wasn’t far from Cala Gonone—maybe a few more kilometers. I could wait and hope it cleared. I could try to squeeze past on the narrow shoulder, though that felt optimistic at best. Or I could turn around.

The road behind me had been tight but manageable on the way down. Going back up would be slower, more deliberate, but it was doable. And the alternative—sitting here indefinitely on a cliffside road with no idea when or if it would clear—felt like the kind of gamble that rarely pays off.

I started the engine, checked my mirrors, and began the slow process of turning the bike around on a road that offered almost no margin for error.

And that’s when I lost my sunglasses.

I didn’t notice at first. I was focused on the turn, making sure not to clip the panniers against the rock wall or let the front wheel get too close to the edge. But when the dappled sunlight broke through the canopy, I realized they weren’t on my face.

I had to stop. Pulling over was treacherous—the narrow road had a steady stream of cars still heading down. I seemed to be the only one who’d decided to turn around. I ran back a few meters, scanning the pavement. Nothing. Then back to my bike.

Unbelievable.

There they were—hanging from the foot peg, one arm caught in the metal framework. They’d been swinging there since I turned around, somehow staying lodged with each movement of the bike.

I grabbed them from their precarious perch. They were fine. Not even scratched.

Turnaround point. Sunglasses recovered. Plans adjusted.

It was such a small thing. Almost absurd, really. I’d just given up on a destination I’d been riding toward all morning, and what I felt most relieved about was not losing a pair of sunglasses. But that’s travel, isn’t it? The big moments and the small ones, all tangled together. You don’t always get the view you came for, but you remember where you were when your glasses almost disappeared into a ravine.

I put them back on, got back on the bike, and started climbing.

The ride back up through the canopy was different. Slower. More deliberate. I wasn’t chasing anything now—just retracing my path, enjoying the shade and the curves and the fact that I was here at all.

Cala Gonone would still be there. The boats would still leave in the morning. The cliffs would still rise out of the sea. I hadn’t seen them today, but maybe that was fine. Maybe better, even.

Some of the best travel stories I have are about the things that didn’t happen. The train I missed in India that turned into a day wandering a town I hadn’t planned to visit. The closed museum in Paris that led to a conversation with a stranger in a café. The road to a destination I never reached.

Travel is supposed to be about the unexpected. We say that all the time. But we don’t always mean it. We make plans, book hotels, plot routes. We want the unexpected to be surprising but still manageable. Delightful, but not inconvenient.

Sardinia doesn’t care.

When I reached the main road again, I stopped and looked at the map. There were other routes, other towns, other coastlines—Sardinia was mine to explore. I had time. No fixed schedule, no deadline. Cala Gonone could be tomorrow, or next week, or never. It didn’t really matter.

What mattered was that I was here, on this island, on this bike, on a day warm enough to ride with the vents open and cool enough to enjoy the shade. The road had said “not today,” and I listened. That felt like enough.

I pointed the bike north and kept riding.