I will never forget the moment I realised my suitcase was still sitting on the platform at Cagliari station. There I was, triumphantly stepping off the train after a four-hour journey from the airport, feeling rather pleased with myself for navigating the Italian rail system with only moderate confusion. The bus to Arbus was pulling up, I grabbed my rucksack, hopped aboard, and watched the station shrink behind me. It was a full ten minutes before the awful truth dawned. My entire summer wardrobe, my decent walking boots, my carefully packed suncream - all abandoned on a concrete platform somewhere south. I spent the rest of the bus journey laughing in that slightly hysterical way you do when something is too annoying to actually process.

The approach to Arbus itself soon distracted me. The bus wound through cork oak forests and past scattered farmhouses, the landscape growing wilder and more magnificent with every mile. Then suddenly there was the sea, that extraordinary Sardinian blue that looks almost artificial, stretching out to a hazy horizon. I found myself pressing my face against the window like an overexcited child.

The property sat on a hillside just outside the village, a traditional stone house with a terrace that seemed to float above the coastline. My host, a wiry local chap called Franco, took one look at my single rucksack and raised an eyebrow. I explained my predicament in broken Italian mixed with theatrical gestures. He nodded slowly, then disappeared and returned with a pair of his own walking sandals, two sizes too large, and a faded t-shirt featuring a fish. "Per camminare," he said firmly. For walking.

I had arrived planning serious hikes. The Costa Verde, this stretch of Sardinia's southwestern coast, is renowned for its dramatic coastal paths. I had researched routes from Scivu beach northwards, ambitious treks along clifftops and through maquis scrub to hidden coves. The following morning I set out in Franco's enormous sandals, armed with a borrowed hat and enough water to hydrate a small village. The path from the property dropped down through ancient oak woods, emerging suddenly onto breathtaking coastal views. I felt properly adventurous, if slightly ridiculous.

Then the weather turned. Not dramatically, not with storms or anything cinematic. The temperature simply climbed, and kept climbing. By mid-morning the path had become an oven, the rocks radiating heat upward, the air thick and still. I reached a viewpoint above a beach called Piscinas, famous for its enormous sand dunes, and simply stopped. Sat down on a rock. Drank most of my water in one go. The sensible thing, the planned thing, would have been to press on along the coastal trail for another three hours. Instead I sat there for twenty minutes, watching distant figures below me moving in dreamlike slow motion through shimmering heat haze.

I thought about my abandoned suitcase, my carefully laminated route maps, my intentions to be someone who completed challenging walks rather than someone who sat on rocks contemplating surrender. Then I thought about heatstroke, about Franco's concerned expression, about how sometimes the landscape tells you what it wants rather than the other way around.

I turned back. Took the lower path through gentler terrain, found shade where I could, stopped at a tiny bar in the village for a granita that tasted of lemons and salvation. The afternoon became about wandering rather than hiking, about following my nose down lanes scented with wild fennel, about discovering where the locals actually swam rather than where guidebooks suggested.

That evening on the terrace, watching the sun descend through colours I have no names for, Franco produced some local vernaccia wine and asked about my walk. I confessed to retreating. He shrugged. "Troppo caldo," he said. Too hot. As if this explained everything, which perhaps it did. The sandals had given me blisters anyway.

The following days I adapted. Early starts, coastal paths in the cool hours before nine. Then retreat to shade, to the terrace, to exploratory strolls through Arbus village itself with its narrow streets and unexpected craft workshops. The afternoons became for reading, for dozing, for watching lizards on warm stone walls. I found shorter loops, woodland paths where the canopy provided shelter, routes that ended at swimming spots rather than viewpoints.

There is something humbling about weather defeating your plans. Not dramatically, not worth complaining about to anyone back home, but quietly, persistently. The heat became a character in my holiday, something to negotiate with rather than overcome. I walked the coastal path to Scivu eventually, but starting at six in the morning, finishing by ten, spending the hot hours floating in water so clear it seemed to belong to another category of substance entirely.

My suitcase caught up with me eventually, delivered by an apologetic courier who seemed faintly amused by the whole affair. I put on my own sandals, my proper walking boots, my carefully chosen quick-dry trousers. They helped, certainly. But I kept Franco's fish t-shirt. It reminds me of something I keep needing to learn: that the best walks are sometimes the ones you abandon, the ones that turn into something else entirely, the ones where you end up sitting on a rock, laughing at yourself, letting the heat decide.