Spent the night in a tiny tiny village on a bay called Draga after riding the coast of Sibnik and Vodic and a Nature Preserve with a view of some great little islands during a melting orange sherbert sunset. Got a room with a view of the bay next to a group of Czechs who insisted that I try their Czech wine and then a Czech digestif – they had just arrived that day for a week long vacation “to sit here and do nothing by the sea,” said one. I was sorry to leave their laughter and hospitality but after the looks on their faces this morning I realized that they had been drinking far longer into the night than I had and it was probably better not to hang out too long!
After a swim I dressed and got ready to find an Internet cafe somewhere. I’m tired of big cities – they’re hot and busy and so I took a left to a big-small resort town, Biograd, hoping that there was something and indeed there is a Dive Shop/Internet Cafe run by a Dutchman, a Croatian woman, and a German man.
They don’t have DSL so I’m hooked into their ISDN which means I can’t FTP (Secure FTP) but I have been able to upload photos to my oFoto site and copy some of my dispatches onto this blog – gotta say that tech has come a long way since I was doing this in 1995.
My plan for today is to zip past Zadar, a big town that is supposed to be rather nice but I’ve seen Split and Trogir, which are fabulously wonderful old cities and I have to say (especially after Korcula and Hvar towns) I just need to skip it and get onto an island again. “Islands are what Croatia’s all about,” I was advised by a frequent visitor. “Going to Croatia without visiting some islands is like going to Rome without seeing the pope.”
I’m not Catholic but, while we’re on the topic, 90% of Croations are and there are cathedrals galore here. The young people are quite progressive so they must not agree with many of the strident policies of the pope…perhaps, like the French, they adapt it to live the way they want. Most young people speak English but the older people speak German and maybe Italian. They all look different – like Americans – there are light skinned blond blue eyed people and darker skinned green and brown-eyed people – later I will research ethnicities.
About the road – I read that the Makaraska Riviera had “the most dramatic coastline of all Croatia,” but I don’t agree. It’s dramatic, all right, with the white/gray rocky scrubby mountains coming right down to the sea, but it doesn’t have those long lovely stretches of road that the Dubrovnik Riviera has, and it’s got some ugly industrial areas, and lots and lots of tourist traffic. I was surprised at how empty the Dubrovnik Riviera was – I’d been told to expect lots of tour buses and trucks and crazy drivers – but I found then on the Makaraska Riviera instead. I really have preferred the south.
The region is a necessary evil because Split and Trogir are so special – great towns that deserve a longer look than I gave them. Heading northwest up the coast after Trogir things immediately got better, the road emptied, the islands of the Krk Nature preserve are sculped and wooded and absolutely float in the smooth blue water out to sea, and the road is good and I float on the Breva around curve after curve.
The Breva has been the perfect vehicle for this kind of trip – a varied terrain, road conditions from dirt of the Albania to super highways of Italy to the curving coast road of Croatia.
Now I’m off to the Pag Island/Peninsula where it’s said that the land is rocky, the water blue and clear, and strangely, it’s the lace-making capital of Croatia where old ladies tediously hand-make the stuff and sell it on the street in the mornings. My plan after that is to take a ferry to Rab Island a ride through it to Krk Island/Peninsula(7/1), then back to the mainland to Opaija and into Slovenia (7/2), the back into Croatia’s Istrian Peninsula and Italy/Triest (7/3) and head back to Lake Como (7/4), spend the night in Milan (airport, 7/5) and fly home (7/6).
Well…that’s the plan!
