In the context of Sardinian bandits, revenge is a dish best
served cold. At least, this is what our wonderful tour guide, Paola (better
known as “the viper”) informed us as we rode the bus to the heart of the island
for an overnight stay that included museums, shepherds, some incredible
graffiti, and (last but not least) a mini-cruise around the gulf of Orosei.
Our first stop was the Museo Enografico Sardo, where we saw
a plethora of beautiful costumes, jewelry, and textiles from different periods
of Sardinian history as well as some mannequins that depicted the Mamothone.
These eerily lifelike models were dressed from head to toe in black and even
had their faces obscured by masks or charcoal, which had the added effect of
making us unsure of whether or not one of them was actually a real person who
would scare us all half to death at any second…
From the museum, we went to the beautiful Church of
Solitude, which is where Sardinia’s most famous writer is buried, and walked
around a bit before moving on to the main event of the day: lunch with the Shepherds.
Here, we sat on logs and ate copious amounts of food, drank wine (which is
rumored to be what makes Sardinians live so much longer than the average human)
and enjoyed some song and dance with the shepherds as well as another even
bigger group of surprisingly drunk and surprisingly old tourists.
From lunch we moved on to our abode for the night, which was
situated in the mountains and took about a million narrow, windy, uphill turns
to get to. We went on a hike and enjoyed the view from the highest point that
we could get to, and arrived at dinner sweaty and ravenous. We ate rabbit (!)
among other fantastic foods, and then went out on the deck and looked at the
stars and all of the scenery- a great capper to a great day.
On Saturday, we spent the day on a “mini-cruise” of the Gulf
of Orosei which included some incredible stops. The first of these was the cave
of monk seals, which, contrary to its (rather misleading) name, hosted no seals
but did make for an incredible detour. After spelunking, we went to two
different yet equally beautiful beaches which were home to water that was so
blue it looked like kool-aid. It made for a great day, and both the boat and
bus rides back had a lot of satisfied, sunburnt, sleeping Americans.
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