The main road into the hills from Tortola is the SS198. What a piece of bliss that road is. Perfect tarmac, sweeping bends and not too many others drivers. It would be ace on a good sports bike or even a GS.
Once on the planned route, I followed broken tarmac alongside a reservoir. Cows licked the tarmac along the route, casually ignoring vehicles. At a sign for a Cascada, I veered off the route to go take a picture. Thus turned into an hour of uphill driving which took me through upland pasture to the 1100m contour, below Monte Terraba at 1500m.
Multiple mountain farms were perched in little pulleys, surrounded by trees. Springs brought water to the surface and ran in myriad streams, gathering into the main river to drop to the valley. Purple Gentian grew all over the grass, but the very healthy looking cows, with their tinkling cowbells, kept the rest of the undergrowth at bay. Small herds of pigs turned the soil over whilst digging up roots, mushrooms and the like. I'm not sure if there are wild boar in this area or what the main predators are, but there are no dogs with the stock at all.
I met an old fella 2/3's of the way up, who told me the road finished after 2k and I wouldn't be able to get to the highest peak, Ardu Gennargentu. That was fine, I wasn't looking to get there. Once at my turn around point, I had lunch, took some pics and then went looking for that Cascada.
Once back on tarmac, a winding route took me back up, this time to the 12 and 1300m contour lines. A ruined Nuragic fort stood out on the skyline and the tarmac finished, leaving piste taking me across some ridges past the fort.
A fabulous landscape opened up, with granite boulder fields interspersed by wind blown low pines.
I spent a couple of hours traversing this area and at 4pm, I decided to camp early. So tucked in behind a granite slab, out of sight, and parked up. It'll no doubt be cold up here tonight, but hey, what a place. A quick squint at the map showed me I was now on the SW side of Terrarba, so had travelled from my lunch stop on its NE side.
