Kiwi Roaming

Flamingos

On our first morning in Cagliari we joined a tour to visit the Flamingos. It’s fascinating they live here in such an urban setting really. The city has turned a former salt plant of 1600 hectares, which sits surrounded by the city – Molentargius – Saline Regional Park – into a reserve. The park still has the canal system, lots of the pump houses standing, and is littered with ruins of equipment and other buildings.

After a wee bit of stress to find the place we joined a group of 10 people on an electric safari vehicle and toured the park for 90 minutes with a guide who told us the history of the park and all about Flamingos. I won’t bore you with all of my newfound facts but suggest you read up here – Flamingo.

They spend about 12 hours a day with their heads in the water and do some amazing filtering of the salt out. It’s also breeding season so we saw the creche where fledglings are guarded (from Seagull’s and other predators) by older birds until they are ready to fly. This colony isn’t a huge one this year because there isn’t as much mud apparently due to a warmer winter and less rain. But there were still thousands of Flamingos to see through our binoculars and the guides telescope.

Trap for new bus users

There is a great bus system here in Cagliari but it got the better of us ticketing wise this morning. The bus stop signs say you can buy tickets from a Tabacchi (tobacco shop which sells lotto and SIM cards and things like that as well), from the driver or on their app. Steve installed the app and was unsuccessful in securing us a ticket so we walked to a Tabacchi who had a sign in the door saying they sold tickets – but no they don’t. Then we hopped onto a bus and tried the driver who sternly said “no tickets”. So I quickly installed the app and bought us 2 x 24 hour passes. Next challenge was to validate our tickets onboard. Nobody did anything when they boarded so I tried the machines, scanned the wrong barcode and eventually validated our tickets on the 3rd bus of the day about 5 hours later – which means we have until tomorrow afternoon to ride the buses.

Swimming

After a lunch break back in the apartment and an unsuccessful attempt to watch the MotoGP sprint race live – failure due to Three Now Live not working for sports – we headed to the beach.

The main beach in Cagliari is called Peotto Beach which stretches 10km long. Our apartment owner told us to travel half way along after the private operators thin out and more of the beach is public. So we did just this and found a spot amongst the hordes of people to park right by the sea. Everyone on the bus had their huge sun umbrellas with them, we just had our wee towels to sit on.

We were so spoiled up in Cannigione where the sea was calm and clear and simply wonderful. Here there is an afternoon wind that picks up – the Maestrale – which is why Luna Rossa is based here of course.

The sea here is so warm, it was 32C when we swam and the sea was warmer than the air temperature. However it is a bit rough, waves breaking kick up the sand and stones and make it dirty in the shallows. It was sandy underfoot other than a few rocks and once we got out 15m or so away from the breaking waves much calmer. We copped a bit much sun post swim though but enjoyed the experience.

Dinner of fresh pasta and veggies in the apartment, watched the delayed sprint race and then had an eventful night with a lone mosquito waking us on a regular basis.

Below – our apartment complex, the city bin system, so many Bougainvillea and footpath/cycleway/parked cars/bus stop/road.