MEET: Destinations Where Eco-tourism Will Soon Flourish

My journey to the Mediterranean is looming on Monday. I’m happy to say that I’m NOT flying to Rome via Moscow, nor am I returning from Provence via Turkey. I have adjusted my flight plans and all seems pretty good right now. I’m going to take two separate eco-tours, both in very beautiful parts of Italy and France with an organization called MEET.

The intention of my hosts is to get more tour operators and travelers to know about the many eco-tours that take place in countries around the Mediterranean, and they’ve crafted a roster of ten pretty exciting trips.  I’ll hop on a train in Sardinia’s capital city of Cagliari, and head for the island’s west coast, our destination the small village of Cabras.  The next day we’ll board a sailboat and begin to discover the Sinis Peninsula, which is famous for its natural beauty and a long history dating back to the Phoenicians.

Tharros is an archeological site we’ll explore, and in San Giovanni di Sinis, we’ll climb a Spanish tower and see some of the terrain we’ll be hiking through toward the San Marco Cape.  Both of the trips involve transport across water, train travel, kayaking and lots of hiking. This is just the kind of activity that GoNOMAD.com’s readers and I especially enjoy. I also like meeting interesting people–and one of them will be a boatbuilder who will explain how he builds ‘is fassonis’, the name for the pointed boats used in Sardinia.

In Provence, the following week, the theme is ‘the Undiscovered French Riviera,” in Port Cros National Park.  We will walk and take buses to most of the destinations, one of which is an old copper mine museum. We will be meeting the owners of a bio dynamic vineyard and meeting a chef who will teach us how to make tapenade and pastis.  We’ll jump on bikes, riding the salt route along the Giens Peninsula where salt was once harvested–today it’s a place where more than 250 species of birds make their homes.