S/V Tavarua

In one word: Yuck!

The town is overrun with tourists. They cleaned up the walled city so much that if feels like a polished Disneyland. From a cafe outside of the town (which ultimately was as nice as it gets), you can see about seven huge cruise ships at any given time. Ow, Ow, Ow! The quantity of white-haired tourists is just absurd!

On our first night here, we hunted down some dinner and ended up in the rain at an outdoor cafe with the worst surly old waitress that ever existed. The next day after a mighty unpalatable and unfortunate meal, I found the restaurant listed as a place to go. I was dumbfounded. This was the entry:

Shoppers from Gundulic Square’s daily vegetable market gather at Kamenice’s outdoor tables for uncomplicated fare such as raw oysters (kamenice means oyster), steamed mussels, tiny whole fried fish drizzled with lemon juice, and icy mugs of Karlovacko beer. The wait staff can be surly, but the prices are much kinder.

So, we did it completely wrong. We ordered pasta and salads, and the one thing that I ordered that didn’t arrive that night was the ‘tiny whole fried fish’. Ah, sometimes the travel gods are just not on your side. The rain did wash away the tourists that night, though. The town was fairly empty.

The only real oddness of our stay was where we decided to rent for the evening. We ended up renting private rooms from the tourist office, which turned out to be rooms in a not-yet-open hotel that a family of three grown-up daughters were helping set up. The hotel came with a great big German Shepherd that sort of spooked me but didn’t phase our friend who became fast friends with that dog. It is a weird feeling being in an unopened hotel with half the amenities in place (such as no soap and having to hunt for bedding) and an imposing dog in the hallways, I kept getting the feeling that I had walked into a movie script that might turn a bit cold. Alas, our stay was ultimately uneventful, but our two partners in travel did meet the hotel’s owner and stayed up with him until the wee hours of the morning.

We parted ways with out travel companions on the way out of Dubrovnik, as they headed back up to Amsterdam and Brussels. We had spent the day finding a cheap fare to Prague, as we found getting out of the very south of Croatia with a day’s notice was rather limiting.

Down to 4 travelers at this point, as parents and friends had flights to catch. The weather changed on us, so we ended up on a steamy, rainy bus ride, with glimpses of the turquoise Adriatic Sea at various times.

Croatia has been giving us mixed impressions as a country. It is booming from tourism and from people in the EU buying second homes along the ocean, but it still has an unpolished side. This was very evident while we waited for a ferry from the town of Ploce to Trpanj. Ploce was an eyesore, while Trpanj was cute. Ploce looked as if it had seen better days, and it probably had. It is a sea port for large cargo, but I just saw an article stating that Bosnia is trying to get access for shipping reinstated. That would potentially explain why it looked like it had been bigger and more bustling at one point (pre-war) and was more in a state of decay as of today.

We met our friend’s relatives who picked us up from the ferry. We were swept off to the town of Duba, 50 year round residents, mostly retirees. You couldn’t pick a prettier location to fall off the map, (but maybe in September you could pick a less rainy-more warm location). We were well taken care of there, we had a series of homemade meals (pork goulash over noodles, pickled onions, fresh baked rolls, fried calamari) and given a tour of the beaches, a broken up sailboat and some of the old buildings. Our favorite building was an old smokehouse, where proscuitto had been made in years past; the place was eerie and reeked of smokehouse smells. We were also provided with some homemade wine, that we have to admit, even tops Tar Schnapps as some of the most undrinkable liquid ever produced. Okay, so living a Vermont lifestyle of growing, milking, canning and trading for all of your own food has a downside, you have to be skilled at all of it.

It was an interesting visit to Duba. Everyone who comes out there, mostly for five to six months of the summer, spent their time to get away from it all. Whether to hunt and fish, or just chill out and take in the views and meddle in the other townsfolk’s business. Two of our friend’s relatives were living there permanently and driving their kids to school about 15 minutes away. I figure that is a great way to grow up with nature at your backdoor and on a working farm. On the downside of that lifestyle, they were the only three kids in town. When I’m in a town the size of Duba, a 15 minutes drive seems a million light years from anywhere, but when in San Francisco, 15 minutes would set a record to get anywhere. Maybe time depends on your pulse rate?

Ah, Croatia!

We took a train from Rimini to Anacona, then a high-speed 5 hour ferry ride over from Anacona to Split, then a bus ride from Split to Primosten. Whew, that was a long day. To top it off, when we arrived in Primosten, we encountered 2 more friends of our friends and suddenly sleeping arrangements were overburdened. We were up to 10 people at this point with only sleeping arrangements for 7. It was a long evening getting all settled, but it worked out, we ended up renting a place from our friend’s Aunt that was a fine, comfortable room.

Primosten is beautiful, small, jut of land, that is almost an island on the Adriatic Sea. We were there for six nights and took a daily swim in the ocean and watched the tourists and sailboats from the cafe tables. Derrell and I took to fantasizing about taking sailing lessons while we while we watched the boats. That goes to show just how perfect the weather was. (Sailing never sounds good in choppy or rainy weather.)

Of our beachtown travels, this was a favorite town. The water was beautiful, the beaches were free of sidewalks and umbrellas, and the townsfolk seemed overly happy. The town had just the right amount of laziness factor, and we could get a decent enough pizza out of a small restaurant with an ocean front view. Ah, a bit of heaven.