Day 4: Oristano

Today it was time to move to our second destination of the holiday: Oristano. We had picked Oristano because of its convenient location about halfway between Cagliari, where we started our holiday, and Alghero, where we are flying back from. It is easily accessible from Cagliari, via a train journey that takes just over an hour, so it seemed like an obvious choice. The guidebook wasn't very enthusiastic about it, however, describing Oristano as "a flat, unprepossessing place, its old walls mostly replaced by busy traffic arteries", so we weren't quite sure what we would find when we got there. Finding accommodation in the town had been quite problematic too, and we had ended up reserving a room in a B&B whose picture on booking.com gave it a worrying resemblance to a barn.

With the journey from Cagliari being so short, we arrived in Oristano just after midday. The map we had printed made the walk to our accommodation look rather long, but within five minutes we already seemed to have covered half the distance to our destination. Our first impressions were that Oristano appeared to be more attractive than the guidebook had given it credit for, with pretty colourful buildings and lots of palm trees.

In another five minutes we had arrived at the address on our reservation, although slightly disconcertingly there wasn't any sort of sign to indicate that this was tourist accommodation. Tim rang the doorbell and it was answered promptly, confirming that we were indeed in the correct place. Phew. There was some sort of commotion, however, as the owner was in the process of finding a knife so that another pair of guests could cut up a melon, and we stood around in confusion for several minutes until he had located the appropriate cutlery. When he showed us to our room it was perfectly pleasant though and the entire building looked much more promising than it had done on the Internet There was a communal fridge with free bottled water for guests to drink, which we appreciated helping ourselves to straight away as it was another scorching hot day. Our host then proposed that he go and get another melon for us to eat and enquired whether or not we had a knife. When Tim replied that we didn't he expressed something like horror that anyone would travel in Sardinia without a knife. We're hoping that was supposed to be a joke! The other guests intervened at this point and - much to our relief - succeeded in preventing him from fetching a second melon, saying that we could have the second half of theirs instead. Tim readily agreed and managed to eat a quarter of it, which seemed to resolve the situation to everyone's satisfaction.

It was after 1pm by this point so we headed out to explore Oristano and, most importantly, find somewhere to eat. After our experiences in Campobasso and Pescara last year, we have learned the hard way that it can be impossible to find food in Italy outside of scheduled meal times, with lunch ending promptly at 2pm. After strolling for a couple of minutes, we arrived in what appeared to be the town's main square.

We followed one of the roads branching off from there and eventually found a cafe which advertised a menu of pasta dishes. We sat down and chose what we wanted, only to find when the waiter came to our table that they only actually had two out of about ten items listed on the menu! I ended up with a four cheeses gnocchi, which was actually quite nice and not overpoweringly cheesy, and Tim had a schnitzel and chips which again was pleasant, but rather small. It was lovely sitting out in the sunshine though and when Tim went inside to pay the bill he realised that the cafe also had quite an impressive selection of cakes, so we treated ourselves to espresso and something chocolatey.

After lunch we walked back to the main square and spent some time admiring the pretta terracotta buildings. The statue in the centre of the square is of Eleanor of Arborea, a heroine of Sardinian history, who ruled most of the island during the fourteenth century and introduced a progressive system of laws.

Around the corner from there we found what is probably the most impressive site in Oristano, the cathedral with its beautiful onion-domed tower. Originally built in the twelfth century, it was restored in the nineteenth century in a Baroque style.

When you get up close we can see just how big the tower is.

We walked past the cathedral and unexpected found ourselves on some sort of ring road. The historical centre of the town really is very small and compact, and I guess this was what the guidebook was referring to when it said that the city walls had been replaced by traffic arteries! The advantage of finding the ring road, however, was that it enabled us to locate the main bus station and consult timetables for some of the surrounding towns and villages. We returned to our room to plan where we could go on an excursion to tomorrow

We headed out again when darkness fell to find an evening meal. As we left our accommodation, the owner was standing outside in the road chatting to one of his friends, and said hello to us. Tim asked him for directions to one of the restaurants he had recommended to us earlier and there followed a torrent of Italian which culminated in the decision that he, his friend and a dog called Berto were going to walk us to a restaurant. We didn't have a lot of choice but to agree, though I was slightly concerned about what would happen if we got to this restaurant and decided that we actually didn't want to eat there!

We all set off through the old town, though Berto wasn't too keen on the idea of walking to a restaurant and wanted to go and play with the mother of his puppies, who apparently lived en route. After a few minutes we arrived at what looked like a restaurant, although it didn't appear to have any other customers and we couldn't see a menu on the wall. Our host shouted to someone inside the restaurant that he'd found them some guests, told them that they had to look after us, and took his leave.

We were ushered into the restaurant by a slighty concerned looking waiter, who explained that they actually didn't open until 8pm (which was another fifteen minutes away). Tim said that we were happy to wait, so we sat drinking wine for a while and wondered what on earth we were going to end up with to eat given that we still couldn't see anything resembling a menu. A few minutes later a woman came into the restaurant, walked up to our table and asked in Italian whether we were English. Tim admitted that we were, somewhat confused about where this question had come from. It turned out that she was in charge of the restaurant and the guy from our guesthouse had phoned her to say that we were there!

She dismissed the waiter and asked us what we would like to eat. I understood the word "spaghetti" which seemed like a good start, and heard Tim trying to explain that we didn't want any fish in it. They seemed to settle on spaghetti ragu, which sounded fine. Further confusion ensued, however, when it transpired that this was going to be our first course and that it needed to be followed by a second course. Tim asked whether there was a menu, which there wasn't, but the woman produced some sort of flyer which explained that it was a first course and a second course for €10. The conversation degenerated into a bizarre mixture of languages, of which all I understood was that she kept saying the German word "Fleisch" and eventually it seemed to be established that our second course was going to consist of some sort of unknown meat.

We waited with some trepidation for the food to arrive. We needn't have worried, as we were soon presented with an enormous plate of spaghetti bolognaise and several slices of what was apparently traditional Sardinian bread, soaked in olive oil. The sauce on the pasta was absolutely gorgeous, but halfway through the meal we started to feel concerned that we weren't going to have any room for a second course, whatever it might be. We hoped we might at least get a breather to digest the bolognaise, but no sooner had we laid down our forks than our plates were whisked away and we were presented with the second course, which turned out to be a piece of steak accompanied, somewhat bizarrely, by three lumps of cauliflower!

Luckily the steak itself was very nice (and well-cooked) and the meat wasn't touching the cauliflower so it was possible to ignore them. We just about managed to get to the end, only to find that our plates were whisked away again and we were presented with a pudding that we didn't even know we were getting: four iced gingerbread biscuits which we were told were a Sardinian speciality but actually bore a striking resemblence to German Lebkuchen. They were delicious, but we were starting to wonder whether we could really be getting all this food for just €10 or whether there was some sort of catch.

When it was time to pay, we were presented with a bill for €25, which was €10 each for the food and €5 for the jug of house wine that we'd had. Tim explained to the waiter that he'd had a beer as well and that this was missing from the bill, but he just shrugged and said that it wasn't a problem. Seemed like the beer was free then! This seemed rather unusual, because Italy is a country where wine is normally very cheap and beer is normally very expensive. We began to feel slightly concerned that our guesthouse owner might actually be the local mafia, and left a tip equivalent to what we thought the beer should have cost!

It took a while for us to find our way back to guesthouse in the dark, though we did have a lovely tour around the old town in the moonlight and spotted a couple of churches and towers which we had missed during the day. As we were going back into our room we ran into our host again. "Did they treat you well?" he asked. "Oh yes", Tim assured him, "It was perfect".