Top Five Fave - Croatia (Hrvatska)

Before I dive into the Croatia stuff, I have some things that I've been thinking about and I'd love your thoughts on them as well...

 So, we’ve been doing a lot of traveling lately and we're about to be doing a heckuva lot more. So I’ve been thinking....why do we travel? I mean, obviously, we travel because we want to see the people, places and things that we can’t see in our back yard (shuh). So maybe it’s not so much, why?, but, what should we be getting out of it? It’s gotta be more than just checking the place off our list and collecting postcards. Right?

I recently read that travel was believed to “expand the mind, reduce prejudices, and cultivate taste.” Hmm...possibly a bit pretentious but I don’t think it’s completely off the mark. Maybe put another way....it’s important to allow the place to affect you...to change the way you think, the way you interact with the world, and the way you express yourself. Sometimes that’s easier said than done...especially as a tourist, where, no matter how hard you try to avoid it, everything seems packaged into little vignettes (the Eiffel Tower, the National Gallery, the this...the that...) and it all comes at you so fast. It takes time, many many breaths, for a place to burrow its way into your psyche. Without that time, and those breaths, it’s difficult to feel like we're really changed.

I don’t know where I’m going with this. I guess only to say that the opportunity that Floyd and I have been given, to travel like this, is the experience of a lifetime and I don’t want to blow it. You know? So anyway....

Top Five Fave...Croatia (AKA Hrvatska)!!!

Who’s idea was this Top Five thing anyway? Top Five was fine for cities, like London or Paris, but how can I pick a Top Five for an entire country? But, rules is rules (and goodness knows, I NEVER break the rules). So, first, let me start out by telling you where we went, because I can just hear somebody saying....”but what about Zagreb?”... but, you see, we didn’t go to Zagreb. We flew into Dubrovnik, in the south, took an all-day ferry through the islands up to Split. From Split we took a ferry out to Vis, a little island wayyy off the coast. Back to Split, then bussed it up to Plitvice National Park, and bussed it to Trieste, Italy, then flew home. Bam. (oh, yes, and there were a few breaths along the way as well) So what did I enjoy the most? ...not necessarily in any order...


 1. The Dalmatian Coast. Aha....I’ve found a way to cheat the Top Five Fave! Just lump a lot of places into one category. The Dalmatian Coast includes pretty much everything from Dubrovnik to Zadar and the mess of islands off the coast but there was just no way for me to narrow it down. In a perfect world, the small, laid-back, island of Vis would not be tossed into the same bucket as Split or Dubrovnik, but it’s the cutthroat world of the Top Five Fave. They’re all very different places. The walled city of Dubrovnik is an amazingly picturesque, little postcard of a place that seems to be almost untouched by time. Beautiful to look at...but you start to long for the soul that may only exist beyond the city walls. Split, on the other hand, has soul (and shoe shops) in spades. It’s hectic, loud, and not quite so pretty to look at...although “pretty” is relative in a region that is stunning at every turn. I must admit, though, that I was a bit overwhelmed by it all after my mind had been numbed by the ease of Dubrovnik and the 8-hour ferry ride to Split.

 Now Vis...I could live there. I realized again that island life has some pretty consistent characteristics, regardless of the pond or the hemisphere, and I found myself comparing it to small islands I’ve been to in the Caribbean or even in the San Juans. The people were very kind. The island was quiet, stunningly beautiful, and Mel.low (notice the capital M). We looked for ways to change our itinerary to allow a few more days here....but there comes a time in every vacation when you’ve got to move on.

Oh, let me mention one more thing. Out of all this water and sun and people...there was not one jet ski. What do you think that says?

2. The Feeling of Warm Sun on My Skin. Let me just start out by saying that I’ve been living in Ireland for over a year now. Yes, we have sun here. Sometimes good stretches of quite lovely sun. It’s just never warm enough to where I feel inspired to strip down to an embarrassingly small amount of clothing and soak it up. Conditions were delightfully different in Croatia. After the, sometimes, torrential rain our first few days there, the skies finally cleared and, once we made it out to the islands of Vis and Biševo, it was divine.

 This is a picture of The Blue Cave on the island of Biševo. When the sun is in the right position on the horizon, it shines off the limestone floor of the cave and lights up the water to an azure color that you can only see here. There used to be some sort of a sea creature that lived in the cave (because of the language gap we could only gather that it was something like a manatee) but all the people visiting the cave, sadly, made it swim away.

 Floyd and I spent two days straight just roasting ourselves like pigs on a spit. This is highly unusual behavior...especially for Floyd, who has probably never “laid out” in his life. He moves. He does things. But he has needs, just like any other man, and he NEEDED to park his ass on a beach and do nothing. Man that felt good. Only getting up to cool off in the crystal blue waters and float around a bit (and get stung by jellyfish!). It’s a wonder we didn’t get fried. Our first day on the beach a nut-brown old man actually laughed at us...or maybe he was just startled and squinting at our blinding whiteness. By the end of the two days we thought we were bronze...and perception is everything.

 3. Fresh Seafood. And we’re talking feeee-resh. Like some old guy just puttered up in his little skiff and the chef met him at the dock, fresh. We were sitting at one restaurant (on my 39th birthday thankyouverymuch) and we had to get out of the way as the fish guy ran through the patio towards the kitchen, carrying the days catch. Moments later, our waiter brought us a few of these unlucky soles (hehe get it?) on a platter to choose from. I made the wrong choice, but Floyd, dear Floyd, made the right choice and it was the best fish we have EVER had. Our waiter called it St. Peter, which, up until this moment we thought was the most exotic of fishes. Maybe only found along the Dalmatian Coast of the Adriatic? Turns out it’s tilapia. Not so exotic. But, they grilled that baby up just so perfectly...and I’ll stop now for the sake of the vegetarians. And there was no sign of big, commercial fishing vessels. The fishing industry appears to be relatively Mom and Pop...and that makes me feel good.

 4. The People. I’m not going to say that the Croatian people were warm. Because they weren’t. At least not to me. They were actually pretty gruff. At first we thought we had done something to offend....but then we realized they were this way, if not gruffer (I know it’s probably not a word, but I like it), with their friends, that gruff is just how they are. No sugar-coating. It’s just plain honest. And, bless them, they don’t seem to mind too terribly much (and they’re certainly not rude) when they have to speak English to convey an important point. I suppose it’s the result of having a very difficult language and realizing that tourism is your major industry...with maybe a bit of kindness and sympathy thrown in there for good measure. You'd love 'em too if you didn't have to learn how to say "urinary tract infection" in Croatian (it's a great story, involving the oldest pharmacy in Europe - in operation since 1317-remind me to tell you sometime).

 5. Plitvice National Park. This is what brought us to Croatia in the first place. A couple of years ago Floyd and I happened upon a PBS show about Plitvice. It was haunting. Croatia felt so far away at that point in our lives...but Plitvice kept coming up. In conversations. Articles. It was very strange. So, once we got over here, it was an obvious part of the itinerary.
 I don’t have the ability to describe it, but there’s something quite magical about the combination of a myriad waterfalls, the eerie blue and green waters, and the quiet beech and conifer forests. It was enchanting on the one hand, but it certainly felt dark and dangerous on the other...undoubtedly an effect of knowing that it was home to the Serbian forces in the Balkan War. We took a long, long walk, hoping to catch glimpses of the wolves or the bears, or even a woodpecker (Ireland doesn’t have any of those things), but such were few and far between that day. And such is life.

 So. There you have it. Pretty splendid I’d say. But you know what the best part was? Spending 10 whole, uninterrupted days with Floyd. Heaven on earth my friends. He’s a good man...and there’s so few of ‘em left.

Next trip? I'm going to the French Riviera at the beginning of October to visit a couple of American friends that are renting a place in Menton for a few weeks. Sans Floyd :( ...but looking forward to it nonetheless. I'll try to get in as many breaths there as I can.