Beautiful Croatia - we'll be back soon!

Croatia 2/6 – 10/6

We had another driving day ahead of us with our aim being to get to Croatia today. My navigation is terrible which makes me the driver and Mark the navigator. But with 7 ½ hours of driving ahead of us we knew it was going to be a big day - we had a lot of pod casts downloaded to listen to. I managed to get the van hooning along the motorways in Italy. Luckily my motorbiking in Vietnam had prepared me fairly well for Italian driving – a lot of merging and lane changing with very little indicating. [M- it's amazing how close the extremes of rule following and order in Munich are to the relative chaos of Italy -M]

Our four star camp site was always going to be a welcome stop but after such a long drive it was amazing. The camp site was immaculate and the toilets smelt beautiful. There was a pool, a restaurant, a beach bar and shady grounds. Although it doesn’t make for very exciting blogging we then spent a couple of days in full on relaxation mode. We would wander ten minutes through the campsite to the beach for a swim in the beautiful water and then nap in the heat of the day. Once it was a bit cooler – although still bloody hot - we would head back to the beach again for another swim. The water is just amazing and the clearest I have seen in my life. Apparently we were so relaxed there are zero photos of these few days and the beautiful camp site we stayed in.

[M- actually some of the nicest toilets I've seen in my life at this place, Polidor. We also had a young German family set up next to us, with their two young boys intrigued by our van, and unable to comprehend that we couldn't understand German, even when they repeated themselves! -M]

Having had two full days to rest it was time to move on. We headed into Porec, just down the road from the camp site and wandered the old town before going for a coffee in a castle, which had a view back over the port. We then drove about an hour south to Pula, towards the bottom of Istria. Although this camp site wasn’t as fancy as the previous one we did have a sea view that was awesome for the sunsets. 

Sea view camping in Pula

We caught the bus into Pula and explored the old town. The amphitheatre in Pula claims to be one of the six largest surviving amphitheatres in the world. We wandered around and tried to work out the mechanics of building such a massive building. We decided against renting a gladiator costume for photos (as great as that would have been for the blog). We also visited a castle fortress and the temple of Augustus. 

Gladiator in the amphitheatre

 

More old ruins

On our way home from wandering around Pula Mark came across some large tunnels in the hill. He went for a little explore but needed a torch to be able to explore more fully. After a bit of research he discovered they were air raid shelters from world war two. A large network of tunnels had been built under the city. The following day we returned to the tunnels, Mark with a number of torches so he was well prepared for the best possible exploring. I declined to join him. 

[M - on my first foray, I went 100 m or so down these 70 year old tunnels in surprisingly good shape, past various turn-offs and being careful not to knock tiny stalactites, and various crevices where the tunnels intersected a pre-existing ancient natural cave system. My cellphone torch with it's fast-fading battery was barely illuminating a few metres ahead of me, and I was trying to remember which series of turns I'd have to take to get out. Coming up to a four way intersection,I could hear a lot of water dripping off to the side leading further into the hillside, and under the pitter-patter of droplets, the long gusty noise of some enormous creature slowly breathing deeper inside the tunnels. After a few minutes trying unsuccessfully to convince myself that this sound had an innocent origin, I remembered I had something really important to do outside, and beat a hasty retreat.

Back in the sunshine, thoughts of dragons seemed ridiculous once more, so I decided to go and find out what the noise was the next day. Not having packed any magic swords, I contented myself with stuffing my pockets with every vaguely light-producing thing I could find, and went out to more fully explore the tunnels system. I found a well-preserved ancient air-raid shelter with remains of all the comforts necessary to house thousands of people, but someone wouldn't come with me so the true identity of the dragon will have to remain a mystery known only to myself. -M]

After the tunnel explorations we jumped in the van and headed towards Zagreb, the capital of Croatia. We are meeting Hayley and Ryan in Sophia, Bulgaria in a week so have decided to head east fairly swiftly to meet them and we will then circle back a bit more slowly and see more of Croatia after that.

Zagreb was a really cool city. There were heaps of parks, with fountains in the middle of town. One of the parks had music playing and a whole lot of deck chairs set up with heaps of people just relaxing and enjoying the sunshine. There were pedestrian only streets everywhere and the spaces were filled with tables from all the restaurants and cafes.

Flower, fountains and Frank - Zagreb is perfect.

We stopped for lunch at a local place in town. Mark was happy. A big meaty casserole type dish with not many vegetables and plenty of bread to mop up all the delicious sauces. After lunch we went to the museum of broken relationships. It’s a collection of random items donated by people from all over the world, with the joining thread being they are to do with a broken relationship – generally romantic relationships, but some parent–child relationships too. Each item has a description penned by the person who has donated the item to the museum. There were poems, angry diatribes, and bitter-sweet recollections of love celebrated and then lost. There were plenty of moist eyes among the other punters. This was a great foil for the people who went for the short and pithy descriptions and made you laugh out loud – a basketball singlet – “He was a player”, or a router – “We weren’t compatible”. It was an interesting concept and a second branch of the museum has just opened in Los Angeles. 

Some dudes in suits did something and this media scrum was super excited and filmed them when they walked across the town square into the government buildings - We just wanted to be part of it!

After leaving Zagreb we headed to Suza, a small town near Osijek, a Croatian city near border with Serbia. The camp ground was a small family run site with room for about two camping cars and five tents. There were lots of fruit trees all around the property and one morning, in a fit of enthusiasm, I collected a whole lot of mulberries and made a delicious berry sauce to have on French Toast for breakfast. The family running the camp site were lovely. They had a family vineyard so with the assistance of sign language, German (he spoke German but not really English) and some photos (thanks Mum and Dad) I think I gave them the message that I too had connections with a family vineyard. Although it was 10.30 in the morning the father insisted on a complimentary glass of the spirit that the family also made. Whoa. It was like firewater.

We went into Osijek for a bit of a walk. There was a fortress that contained the old town. While we were having our sandwiches we watched a wedding procession. Initially there was one family in the venue which contained the sounds of some truly terrible singing - we thought it was bad karaoke at first but then the same guy kept singing [M- And it was to Polka music! -M]. Then there was a whole lot of tooting and a number of cars pull up, full of people yelling and waving Croatian flags. As that second group entered the venue the other family welcomes them to the venue, plying them with drinks. Thankfully some much better singing started! Other than the wedding Osijek was actually pretty grim. It was a Saturday afternoon and the towns seem to close at lunchtime on a Saturday and not reopen again until Monday. It was like being back in Hawera when I was a child.

On our way back to the camp at Suza we went for a walk in the Kopački Rit nature park. There was a fairly extensive board walk with lots of information about the birds we were meant to see. Including the Great White Stork – we didn’t actually see any of these in the park but we had seen plenty of them as we drove around Croatia. At first we saw giant platforms at the top of the power poles as we drove through towns. Then we saw humongous bird nests at the top of the platforms. Finally, we saw the storks and stork babies in the giant nests.

After our walk around the nature park we attempted to find some castle ruins but after driving around for a bit we had no success. We headed back to the camp site – tomorrow we were off to Serbia.