Rijeka

On our last day in Croatia we got stranded in the industrial capital of the northwest, Rijeka.

After arriving via threeish hour ferry from Rab, our stomachs were sufficiently seasick. The ferry was huge, even carried cars, but harboured every single bump, wave and motion of the Adriatic that morning. So we got off the ferry and stumbled on sea-drunk legs in search of the bus station to take us away to Venice. twenty confused minutes and one long queue later, we learned that all tickets to venice were sold out for the day. earliest leaving time would be the next morning, monday, at 6am.

This presented several problems: 1. lonely planet was not forthcoming with accomodation possibilities and no-one held 'zimmer' signs up offering rooms for rent 2. it was sunday. everything closes on sunday at insanely Catholic Church hours.

we went to the train station.
we wept at the train station.
we've never seen a smaller, more defunct train station.

so we walked to the town centre and were rescued once again by the tourist information office that held the business card of a lady with rooms for rent. For 150KN/night we got put up in an apartment right on the main street with two lovely single beds, an eldery grandmother, her daughter and a large cup of apple juice upon check in. The place even came with advice:

"i like your hat. how old are you? because you should wear as many ridiculous things as you can before you turn 30. nobody cares now; be young and carefree while it lasts!" very few breaths in between. we bonded, me and this croatian woman called Marija Popovic.


being young and wearing something ridiculous


Korzo, the long pedestrian central street. lots of Austro Hungarian influence...




right next to our apartment and local watering hole


this trip has a dearth of sign photos


after exploring the five restaurants and bars that happened to be open on a beautiful sunday afternoon, jen and i went in search of several mythically coved beaches, for lack of anything better to do. we walked across the delightfully coventryesque concrete jungle of the outer regions of Rijeka, past the shipping docks and over a large roundabout meets motorway. Past that lies the youth hostel and several beautiful, beautiful hotels. That and hundreds of windy staircases that look private but lead to little gems of coved beaches frequented by locals. Seeing as Marija Popovic, advice giver, sent us this way, it made sense.


try to beat children with a lollipop?


reaching the concrete jungle bit

And so we descended a golden staircase into the crowded lewdness of families, friends and men soaking up the dying day.


with layers of hues of blue-green water


men in small swimsuits


and peace

until phone calls from home pierced our privacy once again. so we headed back to the centre, drowned the day in cocktails and laughed about nothing much in hopes to stave off a recurrance of hysteria.

In the end though, Croatia got ten out of four thumbs up from us. We're going back, staying longer and thinking that perhaps at a happier time in our lives the place might be even more beautiful, if that's even possible.

Rab

I cannot be certain if I fell in love with the isle of Rab more because of its beauty or simply because it was not Pag.

Upon arrival i quickly made friends with a croatian waiter, who let me camp out in his bathroom, and the tourist office lady who kindly told us that there were rooms to rent, and cheap, on this little croatian island. Between the hallucinations I think i may have hugged her.


our first glimpes of the island (the tables belong to my lovely waiter)

I retained digestive and psychological functions after napping in our lovely, huge, cheap room (110KN/night) in a lady's house near the west side of the marina, and then jen and i tromped out across medeival town centre of Rab. Um, small cobbled streets. narrow hilly routes. stunning views of local beaches below. I cannot remember much of much--what we ate, where we went, what I was thinking.

from the pictures it seems that perhaps we just walked:


Rab Town from our side of the island


water taxi! (with stops at the Lopar Peninsula and its 22 beaches, including the nudist colony--we didn't go, no time)


Church of St Justine


the power of yoga


around the Church of St John and its bell tower built (and last renovated based on the near death experience i had on the stairway) in the 13th century


impromtu beach underneath the lonely side of the tower





'its four instantly recognisable bell towers rise like exclamation points from a red huddle of stone buildings' (I am standing IN the fourth tower)...lonely planet was right for once.


happy times




one of the narrow, mazed streets


sickly sweet but cutely named cocktails on said street


tans and tangled hair (me, to the tangled hair i mean, not jen)



the tourist office played a mean trick and told us the wrong ferry departure time...hence we rocked up for the sunday ferry three hours early, were accosted by fishermen and ended up napping on several stones

Our island hopping ended with Rab, which Jen and I were sad to leave. We'd seen all of Rab Town, but the island is supposed to have stunning beaches, forests, etc that one day just doesn't do justice. Alas, we hopped back to the mainland via puke ferry to Rijeka (which lonely planet completely underplayed. am writing them a mean letter) and spent a day and night missing the bus to venice, mourning dead pets and eating pasta.

Pag

I'm certain that Pag is an island i'd chose not to visit again. Stunning, yes. Understated, slightly. Without beds to sleep in at high season on the weekends, definitely.

Our arrival started less than auspiciously when we pulled into a bus station next to a strip mall that resembled a tiki hut. No water in sight. This proved problematic considering we planned on ferrying away to another island the next morning. our lonely planet guide offered no practical advice on the matter. So we did what you do when you're in a foreign country--follow the girls with backpacks who seem more confident in where they're going. this proved useful in the end, and we hopped on a tiny, sweaty city bus through the town of Novalja and into Pag Town, right on the water.

we decamped and were greeted by no one--not a single sign up for a room for rent. so we went to the tourist office, asked for a cheap room for one night and were greeted with peals of laughter. high-pitched croatian peals that suggested 'look at these two western idiots who think they're going to find a room for under 80 euros for the night'.

this is when our 'good' idea was hatched. our ferry was scheduled to depart at 6 the next morning. and we (stupidly) consulted the lonely planet, which said: 'The island of Pag is quickly earning a reputation as a party destination from its increasingly bustling nightlife, a good deal of which is centered on Zrće beach.' cool. i know, let's save money, stay out all night clubbing and sleep on the beach.


my famous last words face, pre 11pm panic attacks



it went slightly downhill from there. we spent a few hours on the beach, which turned out to be strips of rocky, shelly bits sandwiched between the road and the sea. (jen's out there waving her flip flops).

We lasted on the beach roughly three hours before the sun got to be a bit too intense, and we set off, bags in hand, to have a series of diet cokes, margaritas and food. but the psychology of knowing that you're going to be wandering all night in a small island town that's not overly exciting leered over us, and we seemed to fill ourselves up on a margarita thus not wanting dinner.

So we walked the entirety of Pag Town in about ten minutes. Pretty, family friendly, with restaurants that close around 11 and one club that closes around 4. correction, one gay club that closes around 4 and one 'happening' club that closes never but is located on the opposite side of the island. happening night life, where?


we regrouped on another covey, slightly less shelly, beach


Pag Town from said beach


jen went for a near sunset swim whilst i tried to pull myself together


watching the sunset whilst still trying to pull myself together


sunset walk...last ditch attempt to do something before being forced to sit down in a restaurant and eat


um?


succumbing to wine, pasta and insanity


novelty shot of a night with emotions much deeper seeded than this

so we sat and sort of ate and sort of drank and sort of had coffee and milked sitting in an outdoor restaurant with toliet facilities for as long as possible, which happened to be until about midnight. we then got booted to the marina where i commenced psychological breakdown that turned into physical breakdown until about 1am when we moved my sorry carcass into the gay club until 4am and then got rebooted back to the marina.

6am took years to arrive. But we queued, bought our ferry tickets, and i commenced sickness until we reached lodging on the isle of Rab nearly four hours later. So Pag, you're lovely; however, thanks but no thanks.

Zadar

Somewhere between Plitvice and Zadar, but closer to Plitvice, our delightfully airconditioned coach full of loud Italians stopped at a place resembling an american rest stop/gas station. If only.

The front was cheerfully devoid of character and adorned with the bog standard sweets, coffee and crisps for sale. The middle was similarly mundane, with a cafeteria style restuarant. But then. Its claim to fame lurked somewhere near the toliets. Because this rest stop happened to have Croatia's.largest.collection.of.taxidermied.animals.

We were simultaneously appalled and transfixed. It was like staring at a train wreck--the vegetarians in us shrieked out in horror and yet, we still took photos.


strangely assembled into poker playing dead animals.


the last thing you need is a fox playing the accordian


there's a coin collection basket just left of the deer; apparently this takes a lot of money for upkeep. who knew?

Is it possible for anything to be as exciting as this ever again?

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We arrived into Zadar's bus station after our quirky rest stop and a long drive along the stunning Dalmation Coast. After declining offers to bungee jump off of ridiculous bridges, Jen and I opted to do something similarly dangerous and got into another stranger's rusting BMW. yes, this is possible. This time we were driven by an 70-year-old man to a house in the middle of nowhere. And yet again, the two girls who speak English, a bit of broken Spanish and some French between us, communicated in broken German, with the phrase "ein bisshen" thrown around quite a bit.



we ended up walking and walking towards the centre of Zadar looking for city walls that didn't seem to exist until we were walking through them. Our first glimpse of a city that used to be the capital of the Dalmatian region.


Cappy apple juice=brilliant! Jen and I arrived around siesta time and ended up sitting in the central square with juice under the shade of umbrellas.


Zadar feels very medeival meets modern with little cobbled streets and a completely pedestrian centre






St. Donatus church, built in the 9th century and a stone's throw away from the bluest, bluest sea


there's a lot of roman/italian influence in Zadar, as is evident in the food, architecture and general style of life


this looks like nothing special, but it's called the Sea Organ and is the most peacefully beautiful thing we found on the entire trip. It does what it says on the tin: there's a series of underwater polyethelene tubes located under marble steps of the sea wall, and as the waves rise and fall and hit the wall the pipes resonate and sound comes out. wave music!


Jen sitting by the sea organ



the adriatic


i was going for adventurous because i was tired of eating the same pasta with tomato sauce over and over again. thus, i opted to order spaghetti with cuttlefish. so food lesson number 1: cuttlefish is black. and squidgy like squid. on the upside, the restaurant had ten tiny tables right in the middle of a pedestrian side-street.

so jen and i were impressed and contemplated staying in Zadar for another morning/afternoon. but bus/ferry schedules permitted us not and we packed our things early the next morning for a journey to the illustrious isle of Pag.

Plitvice National Park

On our second Croatian day we boarded the early bus (which took three hours and cost us roughly 12 euros) and headed to Plitvice National Park in the mid-north part of the country. We were greeted with another bit of UNESCO loveliness that can barely be described and to which pictures do it little justice.

They will have to suffice.

There's history...apparently the park is where the breakup of Yugoslavia began, where a park guard was taken hostage and i suppose the rest is history. alas, I can't remember too much about this at the moment. But the park was acres and acres and acres long, wide and across. Plitvice's 16 lakes are joined and crisscrossed by wooden boardwalks that take tourists down, around and over various waterfalls, fish filled bogs and travertines. and the colours of the water range from azurey blue to grey to green depending on the life and crustiness below.

the park has its own tram system, cafe and ferry boat from one side to another. In August, it was rammed with tourists--mostly from eastern europe, which was a nice surprise compared to the usual loud english/american/australian tourists (of one which i count myself).


boardwalk, feet, tan!


fish!






on the way to the big waterfall












view from nearly the top


we started near the bottom

in total jen and i spent roughly six hours wandering through the park thirsting for diet coke and shade. at the end we picked up our bags from the strudel man who kindly held them in his strudel man stand and then went home with strudel man's wife to their strudelly house. for this i broke my mother's cardinal rule and got into a car with a stranger; it's the thing to do. people approach you holding signs that say 'zimmer', or room, in german (def not weird to be speaking german in croatia). then you go back to their rooms for rent/bed and breakfasts and spend a delightful night in a clean room with a big bed and a warm shower. for mega cheap too, something like 12 euros for the night.

so in the end, we spent a day in a beautiful national park and a night gesticulating bad german in a house full of croatians.


and waiting for the bus at the 'station' (read: half covered wooden shelter)with some french tourists the next morning we had the added bonus of decking ourselves in strudel, which would turn into the only foodification we'd receive until Zadar several hours later.

But oh the bus ride was worth it. coming up...how much fun you can have in a croatian rest stop!