CYCLING THE HEEL OF THE BOOT slow moving travel in Puglia
Article and photos by Leon McCarron
O
ver the last ten years I’ve ridden close to 20,000 miles on bike tours, including an eighteenmonth hiatus from ‘real life’ when I pedalled most of the way around the world. It was then that cycling first became an intrinsic part of my lifestyle. Now however – older, wiser and less flighty- my approach to touring has changed somewhat– these days I have to balance trips with my work as a writer, and the even more precarious circumstance of being a relative newly-wed.
We settled on a trade-off for the summer – we could travel by bike (my choice) as long as we went to Italy and ate lots of ice cream (Clare’s choice.) Italy, of course, has it all; pizza, pasta, seafood; gelato, coffee, wine. Towering mountains, Alpine lakes and 5000 miles of coastline. More UNESCO world-heritage sites than any other country on the planet – the only difficulty with the country is deciding which of its many assets to explore given just one month.
My wife and I tend to disagree terribly over holidays. To me there should be no distinction between that and an adventure (and an adventure should be unplanned, challenging and mostly miserable.) To Clare, a holiday is something that should be enjoyable at the time, not just in retrospect.
We Googled various provinces until we found what we were looking for; coastline, sunshine and a lack of major mountains (a dealbreaker for Clare.) The result was Puglia- the heel of the distinctive boot shape. At first glance there are few standout tourist hotspots, and I doubt any of the cities would be recognizable to
100 Cycling World October 2015
a non-Italian (unless you’re a particular aficionado of Serie B football clubs.) Yet I’ve always been a fan of places that are slightly off the beaten track, and the unknown element was appealing to us both. Our plan was relatively simple. Flying into (and out of) Bari, we’d keep briefly to the northern Adriatic coast and then head inland, cutting across the region. Once we hit the Ionian coast on the south we’d follow the shoreline counter-clockwise, rounding the tip of the Salento (the given name for the southernmost part of Puglia) and back along the Adriatic to our starting point. So long as the ocean was on our left for the first 30 miles, nowhere to be seen for the next few days, and then on our right for the rest of the trip, we couldn’t go wrong.