Tag Archives: Walking Holiday

Day 3 (II) – Down, Down

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After all the borderline excitement, it was time to get down to the serious business of getting hot, sweaty and tired the day’s walk. I was relieved when the tour bus drove quite considerably up into the hills, as this meant that it had done much of the uphill work and thus I wouldn’t have to. We turned off the coast road at a village called Tučepi, and I was a little surprised to arrive at Gornje Tučepi as the start point. Željko explained that most villages had an upper (older) part and a lower part by the coast, set up as people migrated downwards to serve the tourist industry. “Gornje” means “upper” in Croatian.

Željko decided that our group needed waking up after a sleepy bus journey, so he took us to visit an older couple he knows who produce wine and spirits from locally-grown produce. So we all had a slug of liqueur to help us on our way.

(the husband is the chap standing in the corner watching Željko explaining to us what we could sample – cherry, walnut, prožek or herby grappa. The cherry liqueur was the flavour that was favoured, largely. We also took a peek into the room where the couple produced other things as well – wine, dried fruit and more.

And then we were off! The walk went up for a little way (boo!) before starting a long descent. I prefer going down to going up, but I have to say that my knees, ankles and feet were fed up with the downhill by the time we reached our final destination, Makarska. Here’s a video showing the profile of the walk.

We were in the shadow of Biokovo, the region’s tallest mountain, which stretches for many miles and which towers over the scenery as you walk along. The landscape was largely typical of this area of Croatia – rocky and scrubby, with Aleppo pine as the dominant tree (planted originally by the coast to support tourism, but now aggressively invading up the mountainsides). We eventually reached an area where there had been a major forest fire the previous June. This, in and of itself, was unremarkable, as summer forest fires are common here. But by laying waste to the pines, this one revealed something that many people had forgotten, which is the extent to which the area had historically been farmed using terraces. In this photo, you can see the burnt remains of the pine trees, and also the terracing thus revealed, which went a lot higher than had been prevously recognised.

Later on, we passed through an area of terracing showing how the pines had taken over.

On and down we toiled, passing some old fortifications which had been created by rock hacked from the mountainside

until we caught sight of Makarska, our destination for the day. The group was clearly awe-struck by the view

as well as, one surmises, taking a bit of a breather from scrambling along and down the scree which you can see our path led through. It really was quite hard going, requiring concentration to keep one’s footing as well as taking its toll on knees, ankles and feet.

So we stumbled and slid our way down into Makarska, and I have to say that two large beers disappeared really quite swiftly before we had to board a ferry in the rather attractive Makarska harbour.

An hour on the ferry took us to the island of Brač, where we would be for the next couple of days. We arrived in Saumartin, which, like so many Croatian places, is very handsome.

And then we boarded a couple of taxis to take us to Bol and our hotel for our stay on the Island, the Villa Daniela. As ever, there was good and bad news. The good news is that we had a room with a balcony. The bad news? We had to climb to the third floor (four stories higher than street level, actually) to get to it. The exertion needed to get us and the suitcases up the narrow stairs to the room justified the swift gin-and-tonic we necked before Željko took us to a very unusual restaurant, one that isn’t in the normal tourist directories. It’s called Kito, and is actually the catering facility attached to a camping site. But we benefitted from Željko’s contacts as he was able to get us a table for 13 in order to eat a traditional local meal called “Peka”, a baked, mixed-meat dish prepared under coals in a barbecue.

(the peka is being prepared in the cooking pots under the coals on the left).

First, of course, we had to try a few more of the local home-made liqueurs, again with Željko as host.

(lemon getting the thumbs-up this time), following which the group obviously appreciated the chance to sample this local dish

and the surroundings there are very nice in the dark of the evening.

So that wrapped up activities at the end of a long, eventful day. Once again, we stumbled wearily back to bed, to hope that a few hours’ sleep would repair our bodies to face the rigours of the following day. Stay tuned to find out whether this was the case (spoiler: not really!)

Day 3 – Borderline exciting

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17th September meant a prompt start for us, as we had to leave Dubrovnik and head up the coast. To make the journey more pleasant, we took the coast road (slower than the main road, but much more scenic). The view over the Adriatic was lovely, and included some interesting sights, such as an old wall which was a fortification to seal off an area to protect the extraction of salt.

Then we encountered something which is typical of the complexities and conflicts in the region – a border! We had to enter Bosnia Hercegovina, a country created by the Balkan wars of the 1990s. A commonly-held idea is that a break in Croatia was created in order to give Bosnia access to the sea, but Željko disabused us of this notion, saying that the real reason is that Dubrovnik, which used to be a self-contained city state, insisted on retaining its separation (whilst still being part of Croatia, which was, of course, also a country created by the Balkan wars). So, now there’s a border, not only into a different country, but, of course, going out of the EU, which makes it a much bigger deal altogether.

Fortunately, the border guards were not on work-to-rule, as can happen sometimes, and so waved us through with just a few words with driver and guide.

We also saw another consequence of the aftermath of the Balkan wars, on local signposts. This part of the Balkan region has three languages and two alphabets; political correctness demands that these appear on signposts but local bitterness means that the alphabet not relevant to a part of the country tends to get unofficially painted over. Here’s a minor example, where someone objected to the Cyrillic script:

but whose stepladder didn’t seem to be tall enough to reach the top name! We saw other, more extreme examples of blacking out the Cyrillic script, as that is the Serbian alphabet, and this was southern Bosnia.

After a while, we reversed the border process and re-entered Croatia, whereupon the landscape changed dramatically as we entered a fertile plain, where many varieties of produce are grown.

Grapevines, watermelons and tangerines figure highly among what’s grown, and there are many roadside kiosks where one can stop and buy fresh samples.

We passed Ploče, of which you’ll have seen an aerial photo earlier, because you were paying attention, weren’t you? Anyway, here’s what it looked like from the ground.

Shortly after this, we swung off the coast road and up into the hills, to Gornji Tučepi, which was the start of the day’s (hot and sweaty) walk. You’ll have to wait for the next entry to read all about that. Stay tuned!

Day 1 – A Terminal Case

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September 15th, 2018

There were a couple of notable novelties in the first day of our Croatian holiday. One was a visit to Heathrow Terminal 2. This may not sound much, but in my Corporate youth I travelled a lot through Terminal 2 because it was the British Airways terminal that served European destinations. And it was ‘orrible – dark, dingy and with depressingly low ceilings in the check-in area which tended to start one’s journey off on the wrong foot. The old building was knocked down in 2009 and a new building re-opened in 2014. It’s much improved (not that the bar was set all that high), and we had serene journey from taxi to aircraft via (of course!) a nice champagne and smoked salmon breakfast.

The other novelty was the biggest incident of turbulence I have personally experienced. One thinks of turbulence as a steep drop or jump, whereas this felt more like going over a speed bump much too fast – a big thump, a jerk up and down and the obligatory shrieking from the nervous flyers. The captain came on the intercom to tell us that it we had crossed the wake of another aircraft that had been there a few minutes before. So congratulations to air traffic control for making sure it was just a bit of a thump and not something much, much worse.

Our journey to Croatia started with a flight to Dubrovnik, which had two legs – Heathrow to Munich and thence to Dubrovnik. The legroom in the second leg was negligible

and also betrayed my lack of experience at flights other than direct non-stop ones. Memo to self: next time, remember to check in and select seats on all elements of the journey in order to avoid being relegated to the rear of the plane.

Anyway, it all passed off uneventfully, and we got a couple of nice views of Croatia as we headed for Dubrovnik, including this one, which is of Ploče:

Our guide, Željko, who is an extremely affable, knowledgeable and well-organised chap, picked us up at the airport (eventually – we were just beginning to look nervously around at the diminishing crowd by the carousel when our bags turned up) and we met a few others in the group as we were transferred to our hotel in Dubrovnik, the Hotel Zagreb, a handsome building.

We met the rest as we went out to a local restaurant, Lapad, which, one can easily spot on entering, is a meat specialist place (it calls itself a “barbecue restaurant”) – and the food was good; I can recommend the local sausages on their menu.

But the astonishing thing was what was on the TV as we sat down at the table. With echoes of our South America trip, we were in a far land and the TV was showing Watford Football Club!

The rest of the evening passed off in the usual “get to know you” kind of conversations one has with total strangers, and was thus very interesting. Let’s see what tomorrow brings!