Road Trip to Arbatax, Tortoli

We went to the unspoiled beaches / grotto this weekend, and it was glorious. The entire trip was actually very fun and relaxing, but making our way up there was a bit stressful...for Mimi. We found out in the middle of last week that the city of Nuoro is no where near Arbatax, which is the port that the boat leaves to takes us to these aforementioned beaches. So we chucked our previous itinerary out the window and decided to rent a car instead of taking an ARST bus up to Arbatax. We went  to a nearby Hertz station on Thursday and rented out probably their only automatic car they had, which was a cute Toyota IQ. We picked up the car on Friday night and took it to go to Marina Piccola, a small pier on Il Poetto, to go watch the free summer concerts on the beach! We saw some famous Italian singer (can't really recall the name right now). He was pretty good...he had a lot of classic rock and blues influence. Mimi and I came back from the concert at around 1am, and took our time resting and getting ready for Arbatax.

On the fine hour of 4am we left our apartment and embarked on our road trip. Mimi was wonderful and volunteered to drive the 2.5 hours to Arbatax on no sleep. I merely held the GPS system and told / pointed in the direction she had to go to while I passed in and out of sleep. You have to pass through several impressive Mediterranean hillcliffs to get to Arbatax, and as Mimi drove up in the morning we saw dawn with these impressive hills in the background. It was quite breathtaking! We arrive to Arbatax at around 6am and decided to sleep for an hour before we go to our boat, which left the port at around 8am. With some minor confusion as to where the boat was located, we finally board the ship and left Arbatax for the unspoiled beaches!!!!

The beaches were truly spectacular! These beaches were beside impressive limestone cliffs and had clear blue and green water everywhere. The only downfall to these beaches were that instead of sand they had pebbles. It kind of hurts to walk and lay out on them. Otherwise, we had fun swimming into small grottos, jumping off rocks into the water, looking for schools of fishes, and overall taking in the awesome environment. We also visited Grotto del Fico, which is one of the largest grottos in the area. It was a nice break from the humidity and it was great seeing the different rock formations, stalactites, and streams that went through this. We spent the whole day going to three different unspoiled beaches plus grotto. While in transit to another beach we would chat with this very nice German family or with our captain Sirgio. The crew was very friendly and helpful, and they even gave us a two course lunch + mirto + wine. Two thumbs up for them! Once the boat landed back into port we headed home. I drove this time, and we had a great time taking in the scenery that passed by us, since we didn't really get a chance to see it on our drive up here. Mimi went a little crazy with my camera and took a lot of pictures on the car ride back, but I'm glad she took them!

Here are some pictures that we took during the trip!