We were very interested in visiting Olbia as it is in one of the five blue zones in the world. A blue zone is a region that has a very high concentration of people who have lived to 100 years with minimal amount of health problems. We had been in another blue zone without realizing it when we lived in Okinawa. We were surprised to learn that a third one was in Loma Linda California where a friend of ours lived when we were in California.
When we pulled into Olbia, which is a pretty town we saw a large cruise ship. So despite our best efforts to find a centenarian the only old people we saw were Americans and Northern Europeans.
We enjoyed walking around Olbia, but the crowd from the cruise ship put us off a little. Fortunately we quickly learned that if we ventured just off the main shopping street we had the place pretty much to ourselves.
We stopped and had a coffee on the main street, but quickly decided that we were not going to learn why people from this area have such healthy lives and moved on.
Close to Olbia is the Coasta Smeralda which is one of the most high end vacation spots in the world. It was largely untouched until the 1950’s when Prince Aga Khan cruised by on his yacht and decided to develop it as an eco friendly resort.
The center of the coast is Porto Cervo, so we headed there to check on the rich and famous. Besides having housing for 460 permanent residents it has hotel rooms that can handle thousands including one of the most expensive hotels in the world. So we expected a bustling place with lots of rich people doing whatever rich people do on a sunny October day in Sardinia.
When we arrived instead of finding the Clooneys and Obamas and their friends lounging about as we had been lead to believe, we found a very quiet place with a few other tourists and many decidedly bored looking shop keepers tending to empty Cartier, Rolex, and Gucci stores.
When we first arrived Ton took a quick look around and said it looks like Sedona on steroids. The buildings were all very stylish but felt contrived and sterile to us.
Ton mentioned a church in town that people said felt like it was built by Gaudi. He is an architect that built the famous modernist Cathedral in Barcelona that we both enjoyed. So we headed up the hill to find it.
It was a good climb and we were beginning to wonder if it was going to be worth it, when I spotted a short cut through the grounds of another high end hotel that saved us a lot of climbing and walking. We must have looked richer than we thought because no security descended on us when we cut through the hotel to the church.
When we reached the church I liked it. The lack of angles and the use of natural rocks as pillars were very Gaudi like and I thought it worked. As I was admiring it, Ton came by and said it looked like something Fred Flintstone would build. So I guess she was not as impressed.
At the end of the day we didn’t find any 100 year olds in Olbia, or any rich and famous people in Porto Cervo, but we did enjoy ourselves. We also had a nice lobster spaghetti dish at a roadside diner in the mountains above Porto Cervo so we were a happy couple on our drive back to François for the night.
