The mountain path

 We start at the valley bottom very early in the morning. The weather forecast is great and although there is no indication yet of the rising sun, the mountains are starting to appear as the darkness disappears. After a strenuous passage through a dense pine forest, we continue up a rocky path that has never seen a car or truck before.

These alpine trails are only for hikers or one or two wild alpine farmers riding motor bikes, which have been specifically adjusted for crazy and steep paths. Up in these high alpine areas, one either walks, or if available, transports goods by aerial ropeway or even by helicopter.

After a while, we reach a level where pine trees do not grow due to the altitude. We can smell the fresh green grass while hiking up a steep hill. As the sun starts to rise, more and more cow bells can be heard everywhere.

Arriving at the hut, the alpine farmer, who is also the cheesemaker, offers us some rustic bread, a coffee and some hobelkaese* – a hard grating alpine cheese. What a combination! We also had some beer with the hobelkaese but thought a chilled German riesling would really taste good with it. Everything in the hut smells like fire (the fire they use to heat up the milk). *Shaved cheese.

The cheese making

In June, the farmer walks up to the hut and spends all summer there, so the cows can feed on the delicious alpine grass on the steep slopes. Every day, the farmer and his son milk their few cows and turn the milk into two alpine cheeses of about eight kilograms.

After milking the cows in the early morning hours, the cheese maker heats up the milk to only 28 degrees, then adds fresh cultures and later on rennet at 31 degrees. He cuts the cheese by hand and then slowly heats it to about 46 degrees before taking it out of the small vat by hand with a cloth. (See actual process here.)

 Just cutting, collecting, chopping and carrying the firewood to the alpine fromagerie is a lot of work. All milk is heated on a small in-house fire, and the smell of the whole hut, all the clothes and even the fresh cheese reflects that.

Once the cheese is taken out of the vat, the cheesemaker puts it into a small “Jaerb” (a basic Swiss alpine style hoop), and then presses it by hand before subjecting it to a simple pressure mechanism – the main weight is a hanging stone! After 24 hours of drainage on the press, he puts the cheese in a salt brine before maturation.

 The production in a lot of alpine factories is often so small, that most of the cheese is eaten by hikers or by the cheesemaker. If you tasted this in the hut, you would understand immediately. Any cheeses left at the end of September, are carried into the valley by aerial ropeway. What an effort for 16 kilograms of cheese per day, made with passion!

 Hard cheese

 The remote position of most alpine huts is one reason why Switzerland has a strong tradition in making hard cheese. Because cheese could not be transported immediately after production, the cheesemakers had to focus on cheese that had a long shelf life and could survive the tough journey down into the valleys.

 Visiting Alpine cheesemakers, I am always impressed and feel very passionate about what they do! And while visiting, always eat a bit more cheese than normally…

Kuta has an obvious village atmosphere. Bare-chested old men in sarongs sit on platforms and groom their fighting cocks. In and around the thatched buildings, scabrous dogs, chickens and swayback pigs root around, wistful-eyed cows graze in nearby coconut groves.

Traditionally dressed women place little woven trays of flowers, rice, and incense, as offerings to the gods at shrines and strategic sites. Soldiers with guns walk around the market stalls. Hippies and Bali Boys ride motor bikes along the beach waterline.

Aromas of kerosene lamps, charcoal cooked satay, durian, tropical blooms, open drains, Bali kopi, burning rubbish and clove cigarettes pervade the atmosphere. Crashing surf and the strains of gamelan and Bob Marley provide background music.

Coconut cocktail and frog’s legs

I’m staying at the Kuta Beach Club Hotel. I jump in the pool and order a cocktail from the poolside bar. The bar boy, Ketut, (or was it Made?) climbs up the nearest coconut palm, grabs a coconut and back on the ground opens it with a machete.

He shakes the thin coconut milk with various spirits and ice, pours the brew back in the coconut shell, inserts a straw, adorns it with a frangipani blossom from a handy tree and floats the shell carefully in the pool in front of me. I sip and think, Mmm, Bali.

In the pool I meet an Australian singer, Mary Jane Boyd. Naturally, I ask her out to dinner. We go to a nearby restaurant, eat a huge plate of sautéed frogs’ legs and drink Bintang beer. The little bones that accumulate remind me of human tibias and fibulas and such.

Next day the spirit of the legless frog takes revenge – I have my first attack of Bali Belly. I have revisited Bali on about ten occasions but I haven’t eaten frogs’ legs since.

Kuta Beach Club Hotel, Bali, 2009

The hotel’s still here – looking a little careworn. But then again so am I. The coconuts are still there, the pool is bigger, now with a sunken bar. Bar tender Made (or was it Ketut?) seems to have moved on.

The hotel serves a fortifying buffet breakfast, and daily we stuff down eggs cooked to order and cups of smoky sweet Bali Kopi. Other breakfasters, gourmet travellers, connoisseurs of the exotic, produce their jars of Vegemite and Nescafe to enhance the experience.

No longer a village, Kuta is now a lively, traffic-clogged, strung out city. Most of the thatched roofs are gone, along with the livestock and the coconut groves. Due to recent outbreaks of rabies, the dog population is minimal. Tap water (despite squillions of tourist dollars down the drain) is still unfit to drink. Footpaths look like an earthquake has hit recently.

Hardly anyone smokes clove fags anymore. It is now forbidden to ride motorbikes on the beaches around Kuta. Unlike Fraser Island and Sunshine Coast beaches in Australia, where you can hoon around the national park beaches as it suits you.

The hippies and Bali Boys have mostly gone or grown old and tired. Security men wave metal detectors and under-car mirrors, soldiers walk around with guns. Modest offerings to the gods still sit outside hotel rooms, near little shrines and on every car dashboard.

I love it.

Tourists move on

August is part of the high season but tourists are sparse on the ground in Kuta proper. Maybe it’s the aftermath of the Bali bombings. Nevertheless, it is also evident that the tourist focus has moved away, towards the apparently uncontrolled, exponential development of Legian and Seminyak.

For us it means that getting a seat in local restaurants that used to be busy is never a problem.

The exchange rate is good in August: 8300 rupiahs to one Australian dollar. A simple one course meal for two, with beer, rarely costs more than $5 per head. Of course, you can find expensive European style restaurants here as well – but why would you go to Bali to dine as you would in Australia or London?

Wine gouge

Wine, as ever, is over-priced – something to do with crippling excise I believe. There is a pleasant local drop: Hatten Wines – their products made from grapes grown at Singaraja on the northern side of the island. However, we are happy to forego wine in the hot, humid non-wine friendly climate and drink beer – Bintang and San Miguel for preference.

If you want a day trip, transport agents and touts are everywhere. Going rate for eight hours car hire, with an English-speaking driver, in a small air-conditioned car – petrol included, is $50. Comprehensive insurance? Don’t ask.

We pay our fifty bucks to the driver and enjoy a leisurely day touring, checking out the spice stalls at the Denpasar morning market, antique stores in Batubalan, bustling Ubud, wood carvers in Mas and the silversmiths of Celuk.

Indigenous crafts

Ubud, it should be noted, is no longer the peaceful mountain haven it once was. But it was still nice to see the local woodcarving and painting artisans, pursuing their ancient crafts: creating didgeridoos and boomerangs.

Recommended eating and drinking

Triple Bob’s Bali Beach Bar. Take your togs down to the Kuta surf for a swim, and afterwards head up the sand to the treeline. Find a shady space and look for local surfer Bob. He will serve you an ice cold Bintang in a stubbie holder and provide a plastic chair and table (a plastic Bintang crate actually) for the grand sum of $1.80. Sip beer, watch sunset.

Warung Nikmat. Jalan Bakung Sari, Kuta. Halal/Muslim, down market eatery, serving mainly Javanese tucker. Two plates of Nasi Goreng with fried eggs, fried tempeh, and two beers cost $5 total. Look for the cute serviette dispenser – a cylindrical plastic container with a hole in the top through which you extract the required amount of pink toilet paper.

 TJ’s, Poppies Lane I, Kuta. Spacious, airy restaurant. Great enchiladas. Better Mexican tucker than I’ve eaten in Australia. Good service, inexpensive.

Aroma’s Restaurant, Jalan Legian, Kuta. Organic, vegetarian. Extensive menu of stylishly presented vego food. Delicious.

Made’s Warung Jalan Pantai, Kuta. Mades has been there for forty odd years and never seems to change. One of the best spots to beer and snack and watch the intermingling of tourists and locals.

Mumbul Restaurant, main road, Ubud. We usually go to the Cafe Lotus but the menu looked expensive and there was a minimum charge per diner, so we went to Mumbul, next door. Modern Indonesian/Balinese cuisine. The terrace sits overlooking a charming little gorge and a tiny shrine.

Costs

Agent: Flight Centre. Package of airfare, and seven nights hotel accommodation (including breakfast and transfers) $1165 per person. Visa $35, exit tax $18 per person. Local transport: nowadays blue taxis – air-conditioned, metered – are cheap ($0.60 flag fall) and ubiquitous. Prices above based on exchange rates at the time.

Imperia is one of those places that one would normally skip as a tourist, yet it is interesting and in many ways charming. Imperia was an invention of a certain past leader of Italy, the one with the large chin that made the trains run on time but set Italy on the wrong path; the city is actually the artificial fusion of the very large fishing ports of Oneglia and San Maurizio. Agrodolce is situated in Oneglia right on the quays, in a curious mélange of residential palaces and industry, so it is normal, while sitting at a table under the arcades, to get the occasional whiff of olive oil, fish and pasta from the nearby plants. The chef of Agrodolce is Andrea Sarri, and with his wife Alessandra he runs what I consider to be one of the best fish restaurants. Photos of some of the dishes are interspersed throughout this article.

The meal was excellent as always, but the service in summer appears to be in disarray, the outside terrace gets very busy, crowded with lots of what I call boat people, so the atmosphere is far from the conviviality of dining inside, in Agrodolce’s pure cylindrically vaulted white room. The dishes were mostly in top form, as you can see from some of the pictures. The night ones were taken with the help of Luk’s pocket LED spotlight, which gives them a very interesting effect… I must buy one of those gadgets! Unfortunately the temperature dropped while eating outside and we had to beat a retreat indoors for dessert.

The Terre Rosse Pigato was very good. Like Provence for its reds, I think Liguria with its mastery of the minor grape vermentino has a lot of potential for whites – and Liguria is way ahead of Provence right now! It seems to me that the two regions should develop a kind of twinning around wine, Provence reds and Ligurian whites. I’ll work on that…

The following day (July 14) we drove along the Via Aurelia (and part of the Julia Augusta), as Cathy continued her photographic project on roman roads. By the evening we were in Genova, we went down to the port and queued the car up for the overnight ferry to Sardinia. Driving along the entire coast close to the sea reveals some interesting places, one is Laigueglia, a small fishing town we know well, but this time we noticed that Noli may also deserve a second visit.

We spent a week in Sardinia with some easy going wine tastings, so easy going that we did not even bother visiting the nearby Capichera winery, at 38°C you just don’t feel like it… and so we went looking for hidden beaches instead – the top one, a minuscule beach surrounded by huge rocks bizarrely sculpted by the elements, with crystal clear water and a view of Bonifacio in Corsica, right at the end of Capo Testa near Santa Teresa. We stayed at the Hotel Rocce Sarde in San Pantaleo, with distant beautiful views of the blue sea of the Costa Smerald. Even up there you can see the enormous yachts that clutter this Sardinian version of the St Tropez coast. We had stayed at the friendly Rocce Sarde in 2002 and were pleased with the half-pension, even this time the food was mostly good (consider that the “pensione” meals can be very ordinary in many hotels). A few dinner wines all from Argiolas: S’elegas from Nuragus grapes, a low priced very mellow wine nice to drink in the torrid heat ; Costamolino, a Vermentino lacking somewhat in balance and miles from the Ligurian standard. Myrtle liqueur was a big hit.

July 22 we took the ferry back to the continent, landing however in Civitavecchia near Rome. We headed east on the Via Salaria, managed to get across despite the dozens of forest fires raging throughout Italy, and settled for the night in Montelparo, in the Piceno, a beautiful area with gentle hills and beautiful landscapes, reminiscent of Tuscany minus the German and English tourists.

We stayed at Hotel La Ginestra, a very nice place with a nice pool set in a magnificent landscape, in fact La Ginestra could be truly grand. The main building where the restaurant is located, and most of the attached residences, are of traditional stone and pale brick construction, with the exception of one banal white building that sticks out like a camp dormitory right in the middle – and guess where we had our room! The room was clean but thin-walled and hospital-like, with bargain furniture not quite up to Ikea standards, and under the intense heat with no air conditioning it was even more uncomfortable. It appears that the other residences are completely different and of a different “class”.

The meals at La Ginestra were fine, simple but expertly prepared, a good mushroom risotto to start was followed by an expertly roasted delicious pork shank (“stinco”) , and with a simple carafe of Rosso Piceno of unknown origin it hit the spot perfectly. Breakfast was classic Italian minimalist, adequate except for the rancid butter packets. This is the kind of place that is 95% perfect, but is missing the crucial 5%… and please knock down the dormitory!

As an Italian expatriate, I can say that dessert is not the high point of Italian cuisine, so my expectations are never high, so distractedly we chose the crema catalana (serves us right!) which turned out to be neither crema nor catalana, it was vanilla pudding with two splotches of liquid caramel topped with that scourge of Italian cooking, crushed industrial amaretti cookies. I think a law should be passed to ban industrial amaretti, these horrible biscuits are made from apricot pits to simulate the taste of bitter almonds, and are further flavoured with some additive that reminds me of the noxious bitter aftertaste of artificial maple syrup; this product finds its way into many traditional recipes that would be delicious if the amaretti were left out or perhaps if they were home made – for example, in Emilia they ruin the filling of pumpkin ravioli, while in Piemonte they destroy the otherwise sublime bunet chocolate pudding.

Nearby in Petritoli we discovered an excellent olive oil from Frantoio Alfredo Agostini, at just over 6€ a litre it is an excellent deal – the same oil in Tuscany would have been 30€. After We bought 10 litres, which should last us about 10 weeks.

On July 23 we hit the Adriatic coast and took the highway to get as quickly as possible up to Fano, where we took up the roman thread again with the Via Flaminia, driving back west through the magnificent Gola del Furlo, a gorge in the Appennines with lots of Roman bridges and ruins that leads to Umbria. Again fires were threatening all around, especially as we passed close to Urbino. We spent the night at the Casa Giulia near Trevi, a very nice town that somehow we had skipped in past visits to Umbria. At Casa Giulia you get to sleep in authentic ancient rooms in an Umbrian country house, and the service is very friendly. The pool helped us deal with the intense heat.

Dinner was at I Maggiolini in Trevi, recommended by the hotel, and again I decided to go for the no-name plain carafe, the Sagrantino of Montefalco was good, young and with the help of a bowl of ice we managed to get the bottle around 26°C, which tasted very compared to the ambient 36°C… Perfect with strangozzi (pasta) al tartufo nero, and a magnificently prepared “tagliata” of veal in three versions, thinly sliced veal fillet with balsamic vinegar, with herbs and with rocket salad.

Before leaving Trevi we managed to get into the small church of the Madonna delle Lacrime on the outskirts of town, to admire Perugino’s restored fresco of the Adoration of the Magi.

On July 24 we continued along the Flaminia until past Narni and there we grabbed the highway up to Chiantishire. In 4 hours we went from sub-40 temperatures to around 25°C in Chianti, and by the time we arrived at Radda we even got a few drops of rain. We had planned to stay one night at the Borgo di Vèscine, a very beautiful complex of old stone buildings tastefully converted to hotel rooms, with a very nice pool. The resort is well placed in a forested area of Chianti with a few vines, very… Tuscany. We liked the place so much we decided to stay a second night. Meals at the hotel are available, but they are expensive and very ordinary.

In the evening we headed for Castellina, our mission being to try to see if the Antica Trattoria La Torre is still operating, and if it is as good as if was during our last memorable visit in… 1991! Well, Mr. Stiaccini is still at the cash register, and his family is still cooking, so it looked promising… Don’t let the hordes of tourists fool you, the food is very good and honestly and expertly cooked. Cathy took the same thing as the last time, roasted pigeon, a real treat, despite the fact that after 19 years in France we prefer our pigeon meat pink, the Torre style is great, with rich caramelized skin and well done but tender meat. I started with a ribollita – compared to previous days, it felt “cold”, so why not go for a hearty soup so thick you can eat it with a fork? After driving through Lazio and Umbria and seeing so many porchetta stands along the ancient roman roads, I had a craving for the stuff, and I was lucky, because the menu proposed roasted piglet prepared in the porchetta style, delicious. We drank Montevertine 2004 and it was a treat, I thought the Pergole Torte would be overkill for roast pig, so I settled for the regular Montevertine and despite the tannin it went well, the spicy porchetta filling seemed to enhance the wine’s spicy aromas, very persistent. The price was another good surprise, €60 for three people plus €30 for the wine.

On the last day we headed for San Gimignano and for the fourth time we went to see the magnificent cathedral, with the Old Testament painted on one side and the New on the other. I wanted to show my daughter the scene from hell, an absolute masterpiece and more gory than any Harry Potter story. Tourists in short trousers are invited to cover their knees on entering the church, luckily mine are just below so this ridiculous procedure does not apply to me, but as I go in I am shocked to see paintings depicting Moses himself parting the seas wearing fairly skimpy surf-style shorts. Job is also showing some knee, and Saint Stephen is wearing nothing but standard white underwear (and several arrows). I thought of pointing this out to the guardians of the moral order, but then remembered this is vacation… To say nothing of what the demons were doing to completely naked women in Hell, including sticking animal horns in (censured)… After the visit we tried a glass of Vernaccia at a local bar, it was truly horrible… so we headed for the famous prize winning gelateria on the Cistern square, not the big one at the entrance to the square but the little Gelateria di Piazza on the short side of the square, truly fabulous ice cream, reputed to be the best in Italy. They even have a flavour called “champelmo” – champagne and grapefruit…

I was very pleased with the eating experiment that Cathy proposed for this trip: we decided to play it cool and not look up every Michelin and Slow food guide, and just follow our instincts and some local recommendations. We wanted to see if one could still eat simply in Italy without spending a fortune and get really good food. I am happy to say that I almost feel liberated from the tyranny of the guide, and while I do enjoy the occasional post-modern osteria, I get tired of the pretentiousness or preciousness that these places sometimes exhibit. Maybe there was a need in Italy during the 90’s for modern terroir-conscious affordable convivial eateries, but with the new millennium you are not guaranteed the conviviality nor the affordability, and sometimes the search for terroir and creativity goes no further than the omnipresent token sprinkling of balsamic vinegar or the serving of lardo. As regards the real traditional osteria, it is virtually extinct, there are not enough of them left to keep the genre going and even those have been placed in a guide, thus ensuring their imminent destruction. But the normal good restaurant still exists and can be more friendly, more affordable, more traditional and more satisfying than the osteria concept. It is hard to explain, but while the po-mo osteria aims higher, it more often than not falls short of its food goals, while the simple restaurant can meet its own goals of consistently well prepared simple food. On that basis, it seems reasonable to conclude that when I want to eat something really special in Italy, I will skip up to the level above the new osteria and go to places like Agrodolce. Otherwise there are plenty of good things available in normal restaurants…