Friday 02 June Oristano - The Sinis Peninsula

Bells from the Duomo at 7:00. Delightful. The high vaulted, strangely pentagonal ceiling has apparently given sonority and echo to my nocturnal snores. We have breakfast in the room with the chipped off plaster to expose the ancient brick work, heavy brown bread, almost as good as my own, with eggs and copious coffee. We then saddle up and pedal off, buying cherries, flat peaches and apricots and a local Sardinian cheese and rolls on the way. It's a holiday today , so the roads are rather busy. We pass waterlogged fields of presumably arborio rice, and distant flamingoes in the flat water lagoons. We get to Is Asturas beach where we spend a few hours, surrounded by none but Italiians. We are worried that our pale English skin will burn readily in the Sardinian sun, so after not too long we head off to the ancient Phoenician city of Thassos. We stop at San Salvatore on the way, which has an ancient church, only open for 9 days a year, and surrounded by deserted pilgrims accommodation. The village has been used for 1970's spaghetti Westerns. Very soon however, 2 coach loads of garrulous Italians are disgorged into the town and the serenity disappears. After Thassos, and a trip up to the ancient tower, to protect the area from marauding Turks we head back to Oristano, for local beer near the Eleanora statute. She was apparently a local mediaeval Joan of Arc figure and she is depicted carrying her charter that established rights for the medieval Sardinians. Some wine in the garden of our b&b, accosted by cats, and then eel, grey mullet, anchovies octopus and squid with Sardinian white wine in El Salvatore nearby. Also fantastic thin crispy bread, a cross between a poppadum and a huge crisp, with salt, olive oil and rosemary.