Visiting Caligiari, Sardinia

Our next port after the Amalfi Coast was Cagiliari, the capital of Sardinia. We arrived there on Tuesday morning. For this port, the boat actually docked, which meant we didn't have to take a small boat into port. We had signed up for a basic tour of the city.

Cagliari is a city of about 150,000 people, We learned that Sardinia has been populated by humans since ancient times. Sardinia is an "Autonomous Region" of Italy, which is not unlike a State within the U.S. Sardinia is a popular tourist destination for Europeans as it has some great beaches. The main beach in Cagliaria is called Poetto and we had a chance to see it from our bus tour.

One of the more interesting aspects of the tour was seeing Pink Flamingos. These flamingos spend their summers in Sardinia feasting on the tiny shrimp in the salt marshes. We learned that they become pink because of their diet of pink shrimp.

This is a view of the city looking up from the coast

Here you can see some of the Pink Flamingos with their heads in the water searching for shrimp

We drove around the city on a tour bus with our tour guide and looked at a few of the ancient churches up in the hills above the city. One aspect of Cagiliari that we didn't like was the presence of aggressive pan-handlers in the downtown area. Some of these are referred to as "Gypsies." As we walked down the street we were often accosted by these people asking for handouts or trying to sell us useless trinkets!

One other surprising thing we learned about Cagliari and Sardinia in general is that they have their own language. All of the inhabitants speak Italian AND Sardinian and our guide joked that they love to speak Sardinian and confuse the Italian visitors.

We didn't have enough time on our tour to have lunch in Cagliari -- and this was fine with us as the food on the ship is so good!