Oristano--a week.23--29.08.2015

So, if you want to plan a trip to Sardinia, I recommend basing yourself out of Oristano. There's a fair amount of hiking and ruins (e.g. Tharros) in addition to a variety of beaches.  In particular, I'd like to come back to the island at some point and do a tour of the Nuraghe.

Here's a map of the area to give you a sense of scale and direction (Torre Grande is labeled, which is where the beach of the first day to Oristano was):

Oristano and the area

Here's a nice link talking about the best beaches.

Compared to Cagliari, I found Oristano sleepier with pastels and peaches and muted tones to the buildings. It also felt a little more run down.

We passed by this quite a few times:

Huge Bouganvillea -- does it start on the ground or on the balcony?

The next picture shows well what I mean by pastels:

typical colors of typical row-houses

The routine this week has been:

• morning breakfast, walking (or taking the car) down to a Cafe, such as this one, by the statue of Eleonora d'Arborea, or an instance of Moka Efti. 
• (often) visit a beach (San Giovanni di Sinis or Mari'Ermi)
• (usually) come back for lunch 
• nap/explore/buy supplies
• whatever/dinner

On the first full day, we got a late start going to the beach in large part due to indecision about whether it'd be worth it, due to rough waves. We ended up at San Giovanni di Sinis. Here's a nice map (taken on a later date, from a different spot in the same larger "beach"):

The first two days we went to the beach (spiaggia) of San Giovanni di Sinis, in about the same stretch of beach. The water was super rough, but still fun.

I think this next one is my favorite beach pic:

Rough seas at San Giovanni

It's easier to sea the crashing waves in this next picture:

It was too rough to really swim properly, so there was a lot of walking in the water and letting the waves push me around.

Relevant words in Italian:
Spiaggia (beach), mare (sea), brutto (ugly -- used to describe this rough and choppy condition).

On Wednesday, we checked out a hot-springs spa halfway to Cagliari.

On Thursday,  back to the beach routine (and now with more guests around) we ended up going to Mari'Ermi, one of a family of beaches known for its awesome quartz-based "sand" (really, rice-sized pebbles). It's very long and very shallow and, due to not being sandy (or choppy weather), very clear. I got to try Stand Up Paddling (pretty hard, but fun) and snorkeled a bit.

I don't know any of these people, but it's a good sampling of what you see on the beach -- umbrellas (at least the one on the right clearly is lined from some SPF protectiong), tiny tents (for changing, shade, places for kiddoes to nap), bronzed people and a dog.

Now a picture of just the water. So clear! So shallow! so much white "sand"!

The "sand" didn't really behave like normal sand. For one, not quite as nice to walk on. Trade-off: really really easy to get off of you and out your bags/towels/whatnot.

Footsteps in the quartz pebble "sand"

I tried to take the classic close-up-on-some-sand picture (like this one) and failed. If you look at a bigger picture, the focus is a mess. So, here's a small one. It at least gives you a good sense of scale (keeping in mind that I have tiny hands):

After a morning at the beach,  I noticed that Is Arutas was only 2km away and I'd already looked up the bus schedule (almost no cell phone reception out there on the beach), so I opted to walk there and take the bus from there home.  I first ate at one of these "shacks" (Il Quarzto Blanco), an untoasted panini and a cola, then headed out, making good use of my (rain) umbrella to shade me from the post-noon sun.

The terrain away from the water is rough and mostly dry, scrub and hillocks. Which this picture doesn't show so much, but I liked the wall:

I took no good pictures at Is Arutas (I was feeling a bit self-conscious snapping pictures of the wall of humanity -- the crowd there was much denser than at Mari'Ermi, so ended up only with a garish seemingly-overexposed thing. Here's someone else's picture.  It shows the rock I was standing on. I decided to just give up and take the bus home in 20 minutes, since I was pretty tired. Also, because the next bus was in 5 hours and I had no umbrella and no shade to hide in.

On Friday, we went to San Giovanni di Sinis beach again, but a different part, past and down some rocks. It was much nicer and more interesting. Also, the water was very calm.

It's very shallow for a long ways. Every person-speck in this picture is standing or could be:

A calm day at Giovanni di Sinis

A closer picture of those rocks:

Looking towards the tower, this time from the beach. Again with the difficulty with lighting.

Here's a picture looking away from the tower -- all the people are again standing in the water:

In the far right of this picture is the staircase one has to clamber down to this beach. It's worth it

I wasn't willing to go too far into the water with my camera, so this is my only "no, really, it's so clear!" picture:

Outside of beaches, I did some small amount of lunch/dinner cooking (pasta fresca! amazing) and also went to have the "best Gelato in Oristano" (Caffeterria-Gelateria 38 on Plaza Marano). I had two scoops (due gusti). The flavors are blackberry(mora) and fig(fichi).

(Likely) my last Sardinia post, as my flight is tomorrow afternoon. So, ciao!