We don't have any breakfast included at the accommodation in Oristano, so we headed out into the town again this morning in search of coffee and sustenance. Luckily there are more cafes in the town centre than anything else, so we didn't have to walk far before we found somewhere which looked promising. We ordered a croissant and two little savoury pastries which the girl in the cafe sold to us on the basis that they contained ham, although when we bit into them we found that they were actually cheese and tomato. We ate them anyway, grateful that at least they didn't contain fish, which had been one of the other options she had mentioned!
On the way back to our room we took the opportunity to walk round some of the bits of the old town we had seen last night while we were lost in the daylight. In particular, we found the Tower of Mariano II which was first built in 1290 and is the only real evidence remaining of the old city walls.
Our plan for the rest of the day was to travel to a small town called Torre Grande, which is a few miles outside Oristano and on the coast. We were intending to take the bus, but when Tim mentioned it to our host last night he announced that it wasn't very far and so he would drive us. We didn't want to impose so we thought that we'd probably take the bus anyway, but as we went to sneak out of the garden this morning he accosted us and said he'd be ready to take us in five minutes.It was very kind of him and I'm sure we got there faster than we would have done on the bus. He dropped us off in the centre of Torre Grande, gave us his phone number and told us to call him when we were ready to come back and he'd pick us up!
The main feature of Torre Grande is a large cylindrical tower, known as the Spanish Tower, which was built by the Spanish when they ruled Sardinia in the sixteenth century, as part of a complicated system of coastal defences which involved over a hundred towers along the Sardinian coast. We could see another tower situated further out to sea, which would have been able to signal to this one in the event of an emergency.
Our next stop was the beach, which was a beautifully sandy affair, almost devoid of other people.
We walked along the seashore for a while, until we started to get tired with walking on sand, and then headed inland to a pine forest which our host had told us about. It was lovely and shady underneath the trees.
We strolled through the forest for almost an hour. The most surprising thing was when we came across huge clumps of cactuses growing in the wild.
Eventually we had to turn around and head back into Torre Grande. We thought it would be straightforward to get lunch here, but most of the restaurants we passed appeared to be shut up, perhaps because the real holiday season is now over. Walking further into the town, we did in the end come across somewhere which was open and had a large sign proclaiming that it was a pizzeria. That sounded promising!
The restaurant had quite a large selection of pizzas, so we spent a while reading the menu and deciding what we wanted. When the waiter came to take our order, however, he explained that pizzas were only served in the evenings and all that was available at lunchtimes was pasta. That doesn't sound like it should be too much of a hardship, except for the fact that almost the entire pasta menu revolved around fish. The waiter recommended that we try the pasta of the day, which was spaghetti with calamari, and when Tim explained that we didn't like fish he recommended the seafood pasta instead. The rest of the menu featured various types of pasta with octopus, as well as spaghetti with sea urchins. Eeek! Tim re-emphasised the fact that we didn't want to eat fish and eventually we established that there was one fish-free dish on the menu: ravioli in tomato sauce. Phew.
When it came the ravioli was filled with some sort of cheese rather than meat, so it was perhaps the obligatory vegetarian option on the menu. It was tasty though and we were very grateful for it. Plus we couldn't really complain about anything when we had a view from our table like this.
After lunch we had another stroll, trying to locate the mouth of the local river which our host had told us that we could walk to. We didn't manage to find it, although we did have a nice walk through the countryside anyway. When we spoke to him later we found out that we had been walking in completely the wrong direction!
We were on the look out for bus stops as we headed back into the town, but although we spotted a few we couldn't actually find any timetables. In the end we decided we would have to do as our host had said and give him a call to pick us up, strange as it felt. He arrived improbably quickly and within less than fifteen minutes we were back in the nice cool darkness of our room We had a few hours to relax before going out again for an evening stroll which will hopefully culminate in finding a pizzeria that actually serves pizza. Tomorrow we are off to our final destination of the holiday: Alghero.
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