A walk on the wild side in Matera

Before I declare the toughest and most rewarding walk of our excursions through France, Spain and Italy, I’ll first provide several contenders.

The common denominator on our journey through Paris, Cahors, San Sebastian, Bilbao, Bari, Ostuni, Matera, Lecce and finally, Milan has been walking, and lots of it. It fills our days and provides a journey of discovery.

I have a hand-me-up Garmin fitness watch, now a renovator’s dream (see picture), from junior son Jack that has kept me amused, frustrated and informed. People might see that we both have a screw loose but it’s just another gadget that is a lot smarter than me.

A quick audit towards the end of the trip indicated we would average 12km a day totalling around 525km for our grand tour.

Our first major walking challenge came in Paris when we completed a lap around the big ticket sites, including the Eiffel Tower, Louvre, Notre Dame and a patisserie in the back blocks of the Latin Quarter serving wicked wild berry tarts with cream. Walk faster.

Anybody who doesn’t get a buzz from Paris should draw the curtains and watch re-runs of Days Of Our Lives.

The gadget recorded 23,000 steps or roughly 18km. A fair old trot for a couple of 71-year-olds. Significant I guess but I know other couples who would regard this as simply a walk in the park.

A reasonable level of fitness is required to handle some of the challenges oldies like us can manage. Leonie’s not a spring chicken but she’s not a dilapidated duck either though she has a wonky hip that can keep her on her toes, literally.

And I had a knee replacement a little over a year ago, making it an appropriate time to thank surgeon Dermot Collopy, as there has been barely a protest from it in our walking travels.

The next major challenge was in the medieval town Cahors in the south-west of France where we scaled Mont Saint-Cyr for a magnificent view of the old town on the banks of the Lot River and later walked around Saint-Cirq Lapopie, a postcard perfect village, rated as one of the prettiest in France.

San Sebastian, though, trumped all that had come before in two separate hill climbs, Mt Urgull and Mt Ulia, where oxygen was in short supply and our calf muscles had an afterglow like two-day-old embers.

San Sebastian is stacked with wow factors, especially La Concha Bay and the lasting memory for me is a sun-bronzed middle-aged bloke, flat out on his back with the stump of a small cigar in his mouth. Two empty beer cans rest in the sand and you can’t help but think this is his two-finger statement to our health-conscious world.

High above the town on two separate climbs as vertical as a fireman’s pole, San Sebastian is on display in all its glory with sweeping views of La Concha from Mt Urgull and both La Concha and Zurriola, a surf beach, from Mt Ulia.

It was too premature to crown the San Sebastian walks as joint-winners because we still had almost a month of travel in Italy, and when Ostuni, the whitewashed village on the hill in Puglia, came into view we quickly realised the previous walks had some serious competition.

Ostuni is in the boot of Italy, whose old quarter is a maze of steps, courtyards, piazzas and more steps. Shiny steps too, where walkers need to be mindful in descent, with Leonie and me often crabbing our way down.

A walk skirting the perimeter of the old town is visually rewarding and physically demanding, often passing some of the best restaurants — they all serve bread to the table in brown paper bags — we dined at in our travels. The orecchiette pasta was superb, especially when married with little clumps of sausage and a light tomato broth, or with pesto paste.

So, now the selection has become complex, with the walks of San Sebastian and Ostuni both strong candidates.

But wait, there is more. Our next stop was Matera, the oldest village in Italy, in the Basilicata region (next door to Puglia), and we couldn’t get enough of it, including what we regarded as the best pizza we have ever had in a restaurant called Al Casale. The thin crust was topped with truffle cream, mozzarella, local mushrooms and crumbled Norcia-style sausage. This was the meal we didn’t want to finish.

This totally unique village, on a hill (of course) with multiple churches (of course), is where you can call somebody a caveman and not get your head knocked off.

In short, according to some historians the civilisation, which mainly lived in the caves in and around the Murgia region dates back to the Old Stone Age, (10th millennium BC).

Matera has over 150 rupestrian (art done on cave walls) churches dug into the rock walls, displaying frescoes spanning nearly 1000 years. Incredibly some are in one of the arched walkways leading to the main square of the modern part of town.

Anyway, to the walks. As with most places in Europe, walking tours have become a phenomenon, with people jamming up walkways, standing like bollards at a shopping mall.

So, we headed to the Murgia Materana Park on the edge of the two old towns — Sasso Barisano and Sasso Caveoso and collectively known as the Sassi — to escape the pedestrian traffic and take some photos of the village from across the valley. A challenge for Leonie’s hip and my knee.

It was a rugged, rocky path down the windswept canyon and across the Gravina stream which meanders along at a leisurely pace.

The 70m pedestrian suspension bridge, known as the Tibetan Bridge and as narrow as a footpath, danced to the tune of the gusting wind. As somebody who suffers from acrophobia, anything above house gutter level will trigger it, my sphincter was asking a lot of questions.

After negotiating the crossing, we zigzagged our way up towards the ridge on surfaces that varied from random stones to pot-marked clusters of rock as shiny as Peter Dutton’s scone.

All the while we stopped sporadically to enjoy the view back across the gully of the grand old dame of Italian villages who glowed in all her finery without a hint of make-up.

Matera in fact enjoyed a remarkable makeover, though, after the authorities rounded up the 16,000 troglodytes in the 1950s because of sanitary concerns — sharing a cave with six kids, sleeping in the same space as chooks, a pig and other animals, will create that — and putting them in special housing up on the “piano”, the flat land above the Sassi.

And, from across the valley, the Sassi looked remarkable — unique, ghostly and other-worldly. At times our gaze fell on the Sassi, at times the landscape, and at other times, they were one of the same.

Our other walks were all delightful, but Matera triumphed unanimously as our most treasured one.

English author Geoffrey Chaucer, most famous for The Canterbury Tales, in 1395 wrote that time and tide wait for no man.

Could our bodies handle this same exertion in three years time? I doubt it. In 10 years? No way. Travel Lesson 101 for us now, is do it while we mentally and physically can muster the energy and motivation.