Disappointments

Just a short blog today… we travelled from Bona this morning up through Alghero (lunch) and eventually here to Porto Torres where we will stay for 3 nights. The coast road is wonderful - not that it is particularly spectacular, but it is 100% protected from any visible development whatsoever, for mile after mile after mile. The mountains and the sea look as they perhaps always have done. I even saw some of the last few griffon vultures riding the thermals over the peaks. This ‘natural’ landscape will become more and more precious, as the pressure for housing and for tourist development gets stronger, all round the world.

Alghero has revived its fortunes by courting tourists - and they’ve made a great job of it, with walks along the port, tons of restos and fairly classy bling shops, and nice architecture.  The end result is that you never want to walk along choosing your lunch place ever again.  What a grump I am.  Not helped by the waiters at our chosen place forgetting about us, so we had a huge wait (50 mins) between starter and main, a surprised response from the team when we said we hadn’t eaten our main dish yet (I think they were preparing our bill), and then the younger guy tipped my lemon sorbet all over our table…. giving the intact one (very ungallantly) to Andrew, and leaving me to wait yet again.  Other tables came and went before we had our main course. Grr. Grumps again.

Porto Torres makes few claims in the tourism sector - it’s a port/ferry town, buzzing and confident and needs no-one to tell it how to be. There’s a huge petro-chemical industrial sprawl out to the west, but luckily you can’t see it from the centro, nor smell it.  We are in a rather grand attic apartment in an hotel facing the port. There is a very noisy festival going on along the front, with various blokes revving their Ducati bikes as loudly as possible, till the motors backfire.  The starlings are shrieking from the rare trees, and the children are screaming and shouting as they play in gangs on the streets.   It’s fine.  The people here really do like a lot of noise. 

My last observation today is about the sad decline of both breads and salads in shops and restaurants. We used to come to the continent and rave about the taste of tomatoes, the fresh crisp salads and fruits…. but no more. The supermarket behemoth has taken over here too. The tomatoes are tasteless, whether bought from shops or served in restaurants. The salad leaves are exactly the same as we buy in England, no doubt washed in chemicals, then chopped and dried, and utterly timeless - not quite limp but sort-of dead. They could all be 100 days old, or 1000. Who knows? The breads look interesting, different names, lots of modern labelling (about gluten, soya, wholemeal or multigrain etc) but it all tastes just about the same - horrible, that unmistakable Tesco bread smell and taste.  In the six days we’ve been here, just one bread has had anything to recommend it, and we really have tried sampling a lot of them.  Tant pis.