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The Great Croatian Adventure (Part III - The Good Bits)

Although the comedy of errors we endured in Croatia makes for a good yarn, Croatia also provided us with a great time and the much needed sunshine and relaxation we sought after.

The culture was a real eye-opener for an Australian lad who had never been to any part of Europe before. Everything was just so very different. Coffee was a thick drink served in a small cup and stuck to the side of it. After tasting a few I realised that I had not had a good coffee before - ever. Every time we got off a bus or ferry there was a gaggle of people trying to convince us to stay in their apartments. Tourist shops and stalls seemed to all sell Croatian soccer uniforms.

The landscape blew me away. I imagined all the world was much like Australia in that it was built on dirt and had things like trees and shrubs and grasses growing in it. The dirt would be arranged into hills and valleys and plains and a small strip of sand seperating the land from the sea. How wrong I was ! Croatia is not made of dirt but rather it is made of rocks. Generally fist-sized grey rocks but they also have larger models. The rocks are arranged not into hills and valleys and plains but rather into mountains. That's all - mountains. The coast road winds it's way out around the spits and into the bays because the average angle of the first 500 metres in from to coast is 30 degrees. The next 500 metres after that gets even steeper and from what I saw of inland Croatia, the whole country is like that.

The Croatian people have, over the centuries, arranged a large number of their rocks into walls approximately a metre high and a foot thick that seem to run almost at random around the countryside. Sometimes they bordered what seemed to be a field and sometimes they looked like they had once been the walls of a house but mostly I couldn't figure out just what these walls were for. There are also some islands just off the coast that are made of dirt but have no plants at all. Just bare dirt. Some of them also have wind farms that look to be very well situated.

The economy seemd to revolve around fishing and tourism. Everybody we met was either a fisherman, a tourist or a tourist-based business operator.

All in all, Croatia was just amazingly different from everything I was already familiar with.