Croatian Beach Life
And a couple of the costs
The great Italian summer beach holiday is an institution, not unlike the great New Zealand shutdown, except it’s in August of course and with the Ferragosto celebration slap bang in the middle it means it’s a peak period. Accommodation bookings are at a premium and so generally our family aims for a July or September break. It avoids the peak crush.
Covid. There goes any hope of certainty.
Leaving decisions a little late this year due to said uncertainty meant we chose to travel east to Croatia for a second time. It’s been over 8 years since we stayed on the island of Pag in Croatia. We learnt then that getting home was the toughest challenge involved and a hell of a way to end an otherwise very enjoyable stay.
I’ll never forget one motorway fiasco. Admittedly the motorway had wide strips of freshly laid asphalt and crisp painted lines but the €2 toll was almost criminal. Because in order to collect the totally acceptable toll, all cars exiting the country had to stop at a toll booth to swap coins for cellulose, which lead to another incarnation of the worlds greatest car parks, two lanes wide and kilometres long. It cost us more than 2 hours in a tiny non-airconditioned car in 30 degree heat breathing fumes and swapping lanes with folks clearly way more intelligent than us, to wryly smile as we tossed the clerks the coins. Buckets as honesty boxes would have been substantially quicker.
This year despite our better car we decided to cut down on the driving as much as humanly possible and located an affordable apartment just south of Pula on the south western tip of the Istrian Peninsular for a week. For any geographically challenged amongst us that’s heading east from Venice to Trieste, then heading down south along the Adriatic coast, into Slovenia, out of Slovenia, into Croatia.
Slovenia represents a mere 20km of our intended total 520km and predicted 6 hour journey, but crossing borders during these days of Covid and leaving the Euro zone as a multinational family etc is not without stress. Not least the motorway vignette, a windscreen sticker purchased as motorway toll, valid for a week it costs €15, but with a 7 day apartment rental we’d need 2 of them for €30, and of the total Slovenian leg of the journey, that’s for a distance of less than 5kms each way.
Unless somehow miraculously ordering a vignette online prior to departure (which I don’t believe is possible) it also means stopping at busy borders, finding a park, parking the car, masking up and mixing with lots of others and disinfecting when arriving and leaving. Sod that for a game of soldiers, so we ran the gauntlet. More on that later.
The northern Adriatic Sea surrounding the Istrian Peninsula appears on its western shores as a pristine blue and green saltwater paradise. In my experiences typical of Mediterranean waters it’s somewhat devoid of significant fish, not enough to satisfy your average pescatarian but enough to keep snorkellers interested and entertained. I put the lack of visible edible fish along the coast down to them being edible for such a long long time.
I proposed a challenge to the children to find a Mediterranean monk seal, because there are only an few hundred left on the planet and it might be our only ever opportunity in life to swim with one. There had been authenticated sightings around the Istrian coast between 2011 to 2014 so worth a crack.
The family friendly and recommended Croatian movie called ‘Luca’ probably best suggests why we failed to locate one, for starters fishermen don’t like sea monsters who like edible fish. But it was well worth our attempts as it led us to spectacular locations in our hunt for the elusive, earless and carnivorous mammal.
Sand is a rare thing in Istria. The rocky shores make access to the sea slightly problematic with some razor sharp shores and in places numerous sea urchins make shoes fairly mandatory for safe access. A cliff jumpers dream, the water clarity and deep blues and greens with exceptional visibility are extremely rewarding and the temperature makes time pass with ease.
We aimed for the cliffs and caves on the extreme southernmost tip of the Istrian Peninsular known as Cape Kamenjak and the Peninsula of Premantura. An area protected since 1996, the peninsular is said to be roughly six kilometres long averaging half a kilometre wide with over 30km of spectacular coastline to explore. With no camping or permanent inhabitants the park is open from 7am to 9pm daily and free to access on foot or bicycle or by vehicles for a small daily fee equal to €8.
The daily procession of cars in August, which mostly followed the 20km speed limit due to the rough and rutted rocky tracks, created a cloud of fine talc-like dust that gets everywhere and trees look like Xmas postcard scenes in the snow. A white-out in places. It’s kind of special in its own peculiar way and clearly marks where you spent your day. Heaven help the cyclists breathing that stuff in.
And it’s worth every second. Over a couple of days we visited and explored six splendid rocky coves and an expansive bay where locals and tourists from Spain, Germany, Austria, Italy and Hungary, mostly obese or simply overweight drank beer from big bottles and fried sausages by the potful in the sunshine. The car park number plates represented most of Europe in fact, and the huge range of yachts and maritime vessels flags were equally diverse.
The drinking culture was something to behold and on at least three occasions I saw folks necking beers well before 11am in the morning. Be they folks washing the dust off their cars in the mornings, a couple of ladies watching the kids on the bouncy castles in the sea or a German couple processing a shopping bag full of sardines or pilchards on the shoreline. Oh to be on holiday aye!
We enjoyed 5 days of spectacular blue sky sunshine and just a couple of rough days near the end of our stay. I saw a forecast that was predicting 67 km/hr winds and indeed the Bora did arrive in the night. The Bora is an infamous and often cold katabatic wind that blows north to north-easterly mainly in the winter from the mountain ranges to the north down to the Adriatic, suddenly, severely and occasionally destructively so we were lucky to experience a taste ourselves.
I woke in the night to the sound of the dishwasher going and it took some time for me to realise that our apartment didn’t have one. I got up to find chaos outside with rain flung horizontal at the walls and windows, pooling on the floor where windows were left ajar for ventilation and mosquito access in the night. It was mostly brief but the swirling clouds the next day were dynamic and full of energy and menace. It certainly cleared our bay of prudent yachtsmen and their boats for a day.
We spent the next day visiting the island of Brijuni by ferry, the summer home of Josip Broz Tito, President for Life of Yugoslavia but just ‘Tito’ to his many mates. It’s an eye opening thought provoking experience, from his preserved 1953, 7kms per litre V8 Cadillac Eldorado convertible, to the preserved remnants of his dead zoo animals and photos with dignitaries, from impressive tree lined avenues to the sick and dying salt ground water effected plants in the ‘Mediterranean’ garden, and from its beautiful fish filled coastal waters and golf course, to the immaculately dressed machine gun toting security guard at the villa gates. I may well have to write my own ‘Letter to Tito’ next time. Is anyone interested? Y/N?
But alas time flies when your having fun and soon enough I was making emergency cheese and pickle sandwiches and loading up the car for the return journey to Italy, desperately trying to palm off all the remaining Croatian Kuna currency in our possession, I’d sort of forgotten about that funny business. Bless the € and be damned to all the those ATM’s on the street corners.
We mistakenly thought traffic would be mild heading home on a Friday morning at 10am, but we soon joined the huge procession of gas guzzling European vehicles to crawl northward the 100 km to the Slovenian border crossing which took us 3 hours to complete. Then things got worse.
The vignette purchase was hotly debated in our car as we inched, crawled towards the start of the final 5 km of motorway out of Slovenia. It was a spit second decision at a roundabout and on-ramp where I just, just managed to change the Google Maps navigator to toll avoidance settings. It showed a mere 3 minute time difference, so we took the side roads. We got to stop at a bakery and fed everyone in the car for €5 while sitting in a grubby lay-by directly in front of the Slovenian/Italian border crossing, where we watched two officious policemen with binoculars pulling over and fining drivers without vignettes, less than 100m from the border.
For the record and any statisticians out there the 520 km return journey took us 10.5 hours in total. Respect to the children, the driver and the navigator.
But wait, there’s more! If you have read this far then I must be doing OK and thank you very much for your attention, it literally drives me to create more. If you would like more then below is a short video and slide-show with commentary. It features clouds, bugs, folks desperate for a pee and a touch of sarcasm…
…and the piano of AJ Hickling AKA "piano busker"
Ciao for now!