By bike

Author: By Julie Hatfield and Timothy Leland, Globe Staff

Date: SUNDAY, March 9, 1997

Page: N1

Section: Travel

Answer: Take a vacation to the islands of Corsica and Sardinia.

That's what we did.

We biked, we hiked, we rode in a restored turn-of-the-century steam-powered train, and, in the end, we traveled from one country to the other (Corsica is a part of France and Sardinia is Italian) in a high-speed cigarette boat.

Well, to be completely accurate, not every member of our group went by boat from one island to the other. One of our friends made the 12-mile trip from Corsica to Sardinia in the water. She swam.

Whatever way one goes -- by plane, boat, or Australian crawl -- Corsica and Sardinia should be high on your list when it comes to visiting special European destinations. If you like beautiful beaches, rugged mountain vistas, quaint old villages, friendly people, and lots of good food and wine, you'll love both of these two islands. And if you can speak French and/or Italian, you've got it made.

Butterfield & Robinson, the travel company that organized our trip, offers luxury bike tours to 38 other destinations around the world but had never before gone to either Corsica or Sardinia. The tour leaders didn't quite know what to expect, and neither did we.

The ground rules of the trip were the same as all the other B & R bike tours in Europe (this was our seventh): Each morning, every traveler is provided with a state-of-the-art, 21-speed bicycle and a map, marking the best route to the luxury hotel or chateau where you'll stay that evening. The rest is up to you. It's pedal or perish. (Vans carry your luggage from hotel to hotel.)

From Ajaccio on the southeast coast of Corsica, where Napoleon was born, we had our first look at the island's breathtaking seascapes, blue-green coves, and miles of craggy mountains in the distance, which evoked nervous worries about whether our calf muscles could take us up and over.

Not to worry. B & R had determined that we would follow the foothills along the coast of both Corsica and Sardinia, avoiding the steepest terrain. Our routes, while hilly, were not impossibly so, and the views were so spectacular along the coastlines that pushing uphill for a morning or an afternoon was a minor inconvenience, accomplished with relative ease in low gear. The downhill flights, of course, were pure joy.

(Many would-be cyclists might be turned off by the thought of the difficult mountains on both islands, but if you're in good enough shape to bike a few consecutive hours in the suburbs of Greater Boston, you can bike Corsica and Sardinia.)

Corsica, called the Isle of Beauty, is surprisingly uncrowded.

In ancient times, the coastline was invaded by so many other countries that the Corsicans moved into its center to hide in the mountains and the dense foliage known as the ``maquis.'' The island also had a serious mosquito problem, with death from malaria a real threat to anyone who spent time on the warm coastlines.

With the interior of the country considered the most valuable, Corsican men inherited the inland property while their sisters inherited the cheaper land along the ocean. Guess who now holds the most valuable real estate on Corsica.

When it comes to commercial development, however, Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket could both learn a thing or two from the Corsicans. Any foreign company trying to build a high-rise hotel on the coast of the island is frequently in for an unpleasant surprise. That's because the FLNC, or Front Liberation National Corse -- the nationalists who want to split from France -- have a nasty habit of visiting such sites in the middle of the night and bombing the foundations to smithereens before the structures are completed. The result is an unspoiled natural coastline, one that made the real estate moguls on our bike trip drool as they bicycled along the ridges of uninhabited, undeveloped oceanfront land overlooking the turquoise waters of the Mediterranean. Gorgeous white sand beaches are largely empty on beautiful May days when we were there.

Oh, there's an occasional beachgoer -- nude, of course. There might be a tiny, family-owned restaurant on a cliff with a view of the water every so often, but for long stretches, the land is free of human activity.

That's even truer as you go toward the interior. For bicyclists, an empty road is a perfect road, and in Corsica most of them are perfect for most of the time. The backroads of this 3,350-square-mile island make the lonely bike paths of Burgundy feel crowded. You don't see a car from one hour to the next.

Granted, part of this peace and quiet resulted from the fact that we were there ahead of the tourist influx. But even in the high season, the number of ferry boats to the island are tightly controlled so as to limit the number of visitors, and berths on the ferries are so precious that one must book them two years in advance. (Only 250,000 Corsicans live on the island year round.)

If the emptiness of Corsica is remarkable, so is its cleanliness.

The sight of a piece of wrapping paper at the side of the road was cause for great surprise. Only occasionally did we see any trash barrels, carefully enclosed in wire trash bins, and we never saw a single landfill.

Similarly, although we had heard that Corsica was poor, we never came across any visible signs of poverty there. No trailer camps, no shacks, no shantytowns, no street beggars.

What we did see as we biked through the Corsican countryside -- and we saw them frequently -- were the strange carved rock formations left by prehistoric people, archeological remains that dot the landscape. Called megaliths or ``menhirs,'' they were discovered in the 1940s and, it is conjectured, were either religious symbols or shelter for the people of the Stone Age who may have put them there, with great time and effort, between 6000 BC and 1400 BC. Prehistoric Bronze Age Torreen settlements dating between 1300 BC and 800 BC gradually replaced the megalithic culture. Almost every day in both Corsica and Sardinia, a cyclist with an interest in prehistory could take a rest/ culture stop amid these huge stone people or one of their rock shelters that dot the landscape.

At one point in our Corsican bike tour, it was necessary to cross an interior mountain range, an awesome prospect. Happily, B & R opted for an alternative to our usual means of transport, and we snaked up the hairpin-turn roads in the back of a van, driving in comfort through the thick, impenetrable ``maquis,'' which helped French partisans hide successfully from German troops during World War II.

Up and up we went, through the scrub growth mixed with myrtle, Scotch broom, wisteria, lavender, and the spiky white agapanthus (which costs $65 per pot if you purchase it at Winston Flowers on Newbury Street, but grows like dandelions in Corsica) until, stopping at a restaurant in the mountains for lunch, we could look out across all of Corsica to the Mediterranean, and across the Mediterranean itself to our next destination: Sardinia.

The next day, a motorboat picked us up after breakfast at the dock of our Grand Hotel de Cala Rossa, and we sped along the southeastern coast until we reached the stunning old town of Bonifacio, built on top of 200-foot-high white stone chalk cliffs. (Don't pass up a chance to explore the sea-level grottoes that have been carved out of the cliffs by the waves, if you have the opportunity.)

Then -- following a delicious al-fresco lunch in a sun-splashed cafe in the old city -- we boarded high-speed cigarette boats for the quick trip to another country, another culture, another language, and another currency.

Geographically, Sardinia is similar to Corsica. It is slightly larger, but still has the wonderfully isolated feeling that only islands bestow upon their inhabitants and visitors. Biking the near-empty roads along the coastline was every bit as delightful as on those of the French island to the north.

The jewel of Sardinian hotels is the famed and beautiful Hotel Cala de Volpe on the Costa Smeralda, or Emerald Coast.

When Karim Aga Khan discovered this undeveloped coast in the 1960s, he set out to create one of the most exquisite resorts in the world. With the help of architect Jacques Couelle, an extraordinary adobe structure was built in perfect harmony with the land, stretching around the lovely cove where it sits, providing private, sun-filled balconies for every room in a style that is half Moorish, half Mediterranean.

Yachts pull up to the front door, and beautiful people from all over the world play tennis and golf in its back yard. Some of the clientele may have sniffed when our motley group of bicyclists wheeled up for one glorious night's stay, but they let us in the front door, regardless, and even into the dining room.

Speaking of dining . . ..

Unlike our other European bike trips (to places like Provence and Burgundy), no one promised gourmet fare on this trip, and we weren't expecting much. In the end, we were pleasantly surprised -- but it was the lunches rather than the dinners that made the greatest impression.

How could one forget the lunch of wild boar, for example, served with slices of dark brown walnut polenta in a rich fruit sauce? That was the specialty of the day in the Swiss Alpine-style restaurant on the top of a mountain in Corsica.

Another lunch featured the classic ``soupa Corsa,'' made of potatoes, cabbage, onions, tomatoes, pasta, and broad beans in a combination that is so thick you can stand your fork in it straight up. (If you can't, you send it back to the kitchen.)

There was the lunch, served poolside at the Cala di Volpe, that offered fresh live fish you selected directly from the chef, who then cooked them to your individual order.

And there was the lunch on the terrace of the farmhouse that featured an endless succession of antipasti, homemade ravioli, braised mushrooms, julienned and deep-fried sweet zucchini, fresh bread, assorted cheeses and the special Corsican dessert made from bracciu (similar to ricotta cheese) with sugar and aquavite grappa sprinkled on top. All this, of course, washed down by large quantities of wine in earthenware pitchers -- red, white, and rose.

By the time we finished that meal, we could scarcely get back up on our bikes.

What about the wines of Corsica and Sardinia?

Well, let's be honest, we're not talking St. Emilion or Margeaux here. But the wines of these islands are thoroughly pleasant, and some of them have a surprising amount of character. Muscat, a sweet white Corsican wine, makes a particularly nice aperitif, served cold at cocktail time.

The bottom line is that the Corsica/Sardinia tour is a perfect option for the well-traveled vacationer who has been to the Continent before and is looking for something new in a European experience.

There is plenty to do and see on these two islands, as we discovered. In addition to some memorable biking along the coast, we took a lovely 7-mile hike down a deeply forested mountain trail in the heart of Corsica. We rode through the countryside of Sardinia on an exquisitely restored steam-driven train, its wood-and-leather interior gleaming, its brass fixtures polished to a high gloss.

And if you overdose on exercise, you can always soothe your sore muscles -- as we did -- in the hot sulfur springs of Caldane, where it is believed the Roman centurions used to bathe before going into battle.

Oh yes, about that swimmer . . ...

She was a friend of several members of our group from Colorado: Jennifer Figge of Aspen, Colo., a former long-distance runner and all-around jock who wanted to become the first American woman to swim from Corsica to Sardinia.

Bureaucratic red tape prevented her from doing so on the same day we traveled from one island to the other in cigarette boats, as she had desired. But a week later -- after spending a total of five hours and 22 minutes in the water -- Jennifer made it to Sardinia on her own. By muscle power.