Nomad spirit

Yesterday, Janice Soderling, a long time Facebook buddy, commented on the photos that I'd posted of Rosselba Lepalme:

"I so admire your nomad spirit, traveling to learn."

I was quite touched, because it does encapsulate why we choose to wander for months on end. It's not a holiday or an escape, but something more absorbing than that, an opportunity to scratch our curiosity itch, which, as Phillip Pullman asserted should be regarded as the key virtue missed off Aristotle's original dozen. I have learned as much from travel as I ever have from books or the media simply because you may speak figuretively of becoming lost in a book, but when visiting a place it actually happens as you stray beyond known territory into a 'faraway nearby' as Rebecca Solnit so succinctly put it.

Though we like to explore the Mediterranean, that is simply a personal preference, we could learn as much simply wandering off the beaten track nearer to home, it's just we like sunny climes and the food culture of the Mediterranean.  The beauty of travel is that it constantly challenges your preconceptions, you assert something in one place only to have it contradicted in the next, and perhaps confronting our misapprehensions is the only way we learn.

A good example of this was our original mantra that the Heels for Dust 'mission' was to discover places we had not visited before. This proved to be mission impossible, as we criss-crossed Europe on the way to somewhere new it was inevitable that we passed through places visited previously. This has its charms too, sometimes your previous impressions are re-enforced, sometimes contradicted, especially if some years have passed; places change, and we change too. It was like that when returned to Antibes, somewhere we visited frequently with the kids back in the mid-nineties, we found it more corporate and bland than we recalled, it had lost that sense of Riviera panache that we associated with it, we felt slightly crestfallen.

Conversely, sometimes a return visit can be delightful, like meeting an old friend after a long time and simply picking up where you left off, though years have passed.

Where we are right now, camped in Rosselba Lepalme, is a case in point. We were here sixteen summers ago, staying in 'en-famille' in a Eurocamp erected tent.  I remembered the place as a bit idyllic; it has not changed. One of our topics of idle conversation as we travel concerns the best places we have stayed, we tend to focus upon our travels by motorhome since 2013, but what hereabouts demonstrates is that we also discovered some truly lovely spots on family holidays before then, and Rosselba le Palme has to be a contender as one of the loveliest.

Its situation is spectacular, occupying a steep wooded valley overlooking Portoferraio across the bay. A few metres down the road from our pitch and this is the view that greets you on your way to your morning ablutions.

Looking inland a chain of low mountains run along the back of the site, including this conical peak with a ruined castle on top. When we were here last Matthew and I climbed up to it in 35° temperatures, it was a brutal scramble, and probably a tad foolhardy. I miss having the kids with us to inspire us to be more free-spirited.

The site faces westwards, if you climb to the highest levels in the evening the sunset across the bay is spectacular, even if it's a tad stormy like yesterday, the light effects are beautiful.

From all this you might conclude that what makes Rosselba Lepalme special is its wildness, that it is nested within a beautiful natural setting, and it is. What makes it truly unique is that the site is centered around the grounds of a substantial villa, dating from the early twentieth century by the look of it, though now it's divided into holiday apartments. 

Whoever built the villa made it their life's work to turn the grounds into a big botanical garden. Sheltered in a south facing valley, it hosts palms, succulents and tropical flowering shrubs from across the globe. The campsite has left the garden alone and made a decent effort to maintain it. As it's the shoulder season we had it to ourselves.

The swimming pool occupies a terrace above the garden and the site's spa and wellness centre is by the entrance, giving both a slightly tropical ambiance. I suppose it's these luxury touches that enables the campsite to call itself a 'resort'. To English sensibilities this does conjour images of Butlin's I think; given Elba's popularity with the Germans and Swiss I suspect spa and health retreat was more the the image they were after.

You don't really sense that right now in these cooler autumn days as the site winds down towards closing next week, but when when we here last in July 2006, the alluring mix of health spa style with an infectious Italian social buzz is what I recall, it exuded a kind of quiet exuberance that tempted even this normally sceptical Englishman to become hyperbolic. I wrote this a few weeks after we returned home.

So if Janet was right and we travel to learn, then the lesson of our return visit to Rosselba le Palme, is not simply that nature is a solace during difficult times, but our darkest days will pass and we will gather and celebrate life freely once again. Until then all we can do is travel in hope.