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!

Cagliaria.Sardinia.Italy.Day2

Yesterday I left my small suitcase at the B&B and headed out with the intent of going to the saltflat wildlife refuge thing. Only to be confronted by far-off storm clouds and a rising wind. Ok, change of plans. It's a good day to go to the ”Citadel of Museums", in particular, the Archaeological museum.  

I had planned to first swing by the Mercato San Benedetto, but had not taken into account the fact that it was Sunday, and apparently it is not open on Sundays. Thankfully, the museum(s) were near-ish, so I headed off that way.

Pictures from the walk up the hill, looking over Cagliari:

Looking towards the storm (in the general direction of Sant'Elia, where I was the day previous to swim in the afternoon):

The museum starts with some impressive Bronze-Age era (maybe earlier?) stone monuments, some 8,000 or so of which can be found all over Sardinia, called Nuraghe.

one Nuraghe model. I was surprised by how large they seemed to have been

Additionally, the "Giants' Tombs", which seemed more like your standard half-buried-in-a-hill kind of prehistoric monuments:

They also had a number of molds used for making (bronze) spearheads and so, which I hadn't seen in a museum before:

I find myself always impressed with how old pottery seems to hold up pretty well, even when not buried in mud or ash.

Assuming I understood the label, this was found near Olbia

Head jar.

There are a lot of  "statues of giants" with matching tiny metal sculptures, of four general sorts. The text that went with these basically said "we have no idea what their purpose was" but super duper long-winded, with weird poetic-seeming commentary. The small matching metal sculptures were somehow traded or something, they think. No complete sculpture has survived, which is surprising as there were so many of them. They have lots of partial ones.

Model of a Nuraghe on the left, and the boxer on the right (two types of the 4 statues of giants):

So, Sardinian timeline: Bronze age, time passes, ~750BC Punic settlement, ~250BC Roman settlement. Then we apparently stop caring (at least in this museum).

Some of the museum's contents were from graves, some from temples, some from shipwrecks off the coast, not so far from Sardinia itself, such as these Amphorae.

Niro, looking like a boss:

Some other dude; I really liked the period where Roman (burial) sculptures got very lifelike, to the point of even showing kind of grumpy people. Maybe he's supposed to look regal, but he looks grumpy to me.

I found the collection of odd hands kind of creepy.

This thing which I'd been describing as a flowering bush is in fact not. It looks a lot more like a tiny poinsettia. I'm told it's a Bougainvillea.

After the museum (and after the minor storm), I walked around the Castello district and took a few pictures.  There is a surprisingly useful Cagliari app (free!) which has suggested walking routes and sites. I was fighting hunger and a bit of exhaustion from all the walking, so didn't do everything I'd intended (e.g. the Tower of St. Pancras and the Elephant Tower remained unscaled by me).

view of Cagliari post-storm

In this next picture you can kind of half-see the wall/ramparts I was standing on:

you can tell here how much further down the rest of the city is

Nice view of the Devil's Saddle (seen from a different angle in the last post):

I walked to this square (sort of the south end of the Castello district), and almost ate lunch at the small cafe there, which primarily served beer and very small pastries.  That's a satue of St. Francis in the middle.

Facing sort of behind me at the same square. The church is on the list of things to go see, but it was full (being sunday).  Chiesa Santa Maria or so.

A future goal (for the trip back): Castello St. Michelle

Somewhere nearby was an elevator up to a nice viewing platform (elevator up from the lower part of the city, so not relevant for me, albeit a bit amusing.  That's what I'm standing on in this next picture (squinty proof I was here):

Walked a fair amount more. Ended up walking down the hill a bit and ducked into a passageway to check out a place called Marrakech. The owner knew at once I wasn't Italian-speaking and asked if I knew French, which we then used to communicate, choppily. Had Tajin (biggest chickpeas I'd ever had) and sardines.  If you ever want to be amused (or have your patience tested), eat bone-in fish with me. I am hopeless at it, to the point where the shop owner commented to me ("il pesce è difficile da mangiare", or a French-Italian mish-mash of that) and looked sympathetic.

It was adjacent to a Youth Hostel, and very cheap (pro tip: if looking for cheap grub, go looking for youth hostels and what's adjacent).

The rest of the afternoon was hot; I stopped for Gelato (fig&nut and lemon&basil) and then a coffee. Spent some quality time reading.  Wandered to my B&B to pick up my suitcase and caught the train to Oristano, where I met up with my friends and we headed to the beach for a drink and to unwind.

Cagliari.Sardinia.Italy.Day1.

Since Dubrovnik last year, I think I've been chasing that feeling of joy from swimming in the Mediterranean. I followed it to Zadar (not so much swimming, due to the weather) and Riomaggiore/Cinque Terre (which I owe pictures from, and some kind of narrative). Here I am again in the Mediterranean, and this time in Sardinia.

My first few days are in Cagliari (where my flight landed) and then I'm off to Oristano to visit friends, then back through Cagliari.  My flight got in late last night and my train leaves for Oristano tomorrow afternoon, so today was the only day it made sense to go to the beach(es) on, and I made quite a tour of it.

I had a surprisingly thorough breakfast today (a real gem of a B&B that I booked at the last minute) and, after more than an hour of planning and hemming and hawing, I paid the 15 euros for a week of data in Italy (to be able to plan bus routes, really), bought a day ticket (3 Euros) for the bus and headed out towards Poetto beach.

Deceptively un-peopled photo. Left of me was a private beach and right a long expanse of sunbathers

Poetto beach is about 6-9km long (the internet does not seem to agree on a length), with fine white sand near some salt flats, and full of anybody from Cagliari who wants a tan and a little bit of walking in water. It's super duper shallow and also very calm (it's a gulf, and reminded me of a lake in terms of how not-rough the water was). It's only really been a place where people have gone swimming/sunning for the last hundred years or so, but there's been some serious erosion with no solution in sight.

People in the water, Devil's Saddle in the background

The Devil's Saddle is in the background of that last picture. Given more temperate weather, I might've hiked up to it.

``[T]here is a legend that tells how the devils, led by Lucifer, were impressed by the beauty of the Gulf of Cagliari and tried to seize it.

Therefore, God sent his troops of angels commanded by the Archangel Michael to oust Lucifer, who, while fighting in the skies above the Gulf, was thrown from his horse and [his saddle] fell on the promontory giving it the current shape. While the stretch of sea [by] the Devil’s Saddle took the name of the Gulf of Angels"

Something I noticed today was, due to my glaringly white skin (outside of my sad sunburned toes), I stood out like a sore thumb. Everyone at the beach was bronze as bronze can be, from kiddoes to grandpas.

I walked around a bit, sat in some shade and read, ate a delicious ciabatta roll with prosciutto crudo and tasty cheese, walked to the end of the pier, and got in the water once.

I was too anxious about the crowds to leave my stuff unattended, so I gave up on the beach and decided to find another -- the one at Sant'Elia.

It's worth noting that I learned about this beach via GoogleMaps, as it does not really show up as a recommended beach online (probably due to being small and a bit out of the way).  The beach (spiaggia) is on the other side of the Devil's Saddle from Poetto, i.e. not in the Gulf, so the water is very choppy and not particularly clear.

The road quickly turned into a half-dirt path, not wide enough for two cars. I hauled out my umbrella to shade me from the sun but also with the hope of being more visible.

View along dirt road, looking back at Sant'Elia/Cagliari

This is clearly a route where parties happen -- one place in particular had a heap of discarded beer bottles. This is the view from that spot: 

View along Viale Santa'Elia, as I walked from the bus stop towards the beach

Once at the beach, I settled in for a few hours. Did a small amount of swimming. Some sitting where the sand was still semi-wet, in hopes of making it easier to wash off. The beach was small and remote enough that I felt I could leave my things semi-unattended, but the water was murky (fine sand + crashing waves) and had a fair amount of detritus brought in by said waves.

The very tiny beach of Santa'Elia

I packed up at about 17/17:30, after several families folded up their umbrellas and left (you can figure out where they had been because there's a big gap in umbrellas in this picture where they were).

Here's a view along the road heading back: 

This next view reminds me of every place I've been thus far along the Mediterranean, especially with the flowering bush, the scrubby vegetation, limestone, water.

After getting back from the beach, I hid in my room in the B&B and tried to plan where to eat.
I ventured out and walked around the historic part near-ish Bastion St. Remy and found this, which could be an oblique reference to Mannekin-Pis (although it's more Mannequin-number-2 than Mannequin-Piss):

Mannequin-Piss?

There was also a very short parade of Hare Krisnas nearby (didn't manage a picture), which made it more surreal. I got myself a dark chocolate Gelato to take the edge of my hungry so I could wander around more.
Here's what I saw:

probably Via Principe Amadeo

Another church

View down a side street of a museum

I settled on a dinner place near the Bastion St. Remy

View of Bastion St. Remy at Sunset

Dinner was at Corso Dodici. Effin delicious. The menu was bilingual,  interesting fish and meat dishes. I ended up with some kind of fish (as big as tuna -- the tuna was out, and the backup fish was described thusly) and had forgotten to order grilled veggies to go along with it. The fish was cooked to perfection, had a crust of poppy seeds or something and a sauce made of peas and mint and lime.

Had dessert instead, which was ``ricotta semifredo" (frozen ricotta) with a quince or something sauce (sweet-sour-ish) and mango pieces. Amazing.

Tomorrow, if the weather's not too hot, I hope to head to the Marine preserve (flamingos! Salt flats!) after hitting up the Mercato San Benedetto for delicious picnic supplies.