We docked in the commercial port in Cagliari, not sure why but it meant we needed passes to leave and enter the port - just a minor inconvenience.
We could hear lots of shouting and horns blowing on the street running along the harbour (some distance across from where we were moored) as we were mooring. There were blue lights flashing from cop cars, clearly there were demonstrations going on. Suddenly we saw people running and blue smoke floating in the air and then heard loud bangs. The cops were shooting tear gas. This was quite the welcome. I never found out what the demonstrations were about, maybe changes to pension which people demonstrated against when we were in St. Malo.
When the Sardinians say Cagliari it sounds close to Calgary but not quite. The gl sound in Italian is apparently one we do not have.
Cagliari, the old part, has narrow streets and there are lots of restaurants, excellent food and good wine. On the first evening we somehow all ended up at he same restaurant, professional crew, teachers and Terry (the CEO of Class Afloat) was here and joined us as well. This was great for he payed the whole bill.
This was what is called a parent port and there were lots of parents who took their kids off and did things with them. This was actually somewhat disrupting but great for the kids with parents here I am sure.
We had two great port programs, a bicycle trip through town to a nature reserve with flamingos and to the base of a large hill by the sea where we went swimming and then hiked over this hill and saw and heard about earlier peoples and their constructions from the neolithic, to the romans and earlier.
The other port trip was an 18 km hike from a mountain where we drove, to an isolated beach. Some of the hike was through a cork forest where we could see where the cork had been harvested. The limestone mountains are fascinating with their interesting sculptured erosion including a hole right through one of them.
On he evening before we were to sail I took a taxi to the airport and picked up Pia. It was wonderful to see her and she will be sailing with us all the way to Trinidad and Tobago where my trip ends. Pia will be the cooks helper. I think I forgot to mention earlier that we have a new cook. Her name is Stephanie. She replaced David in Barcelona.
No comments:
Post a Comment