There has been a settlement on the site of the modern town of Starigrad (“Old Town”) since Roman times. Until the tourist boom of the 70’s it was a small village whose inhabitants decamped during the summer months with their sheep and goats to summer pastures in the mountains, travelling up in May and back in September or October, depending on the altitude of their pasture. Our walk today followed one such path – although calling it a path is pitching things a bit high
as it is only barely distinguishable from the surrounding rocks! We started early but still toiled upwards in direct sun
Our guide Zeljko had spent two summers as a shepherd in the mountains while he was at university 35 years ago, helping an elderly couple whose sons had taken conventional jobs, and he explained that everything needed was hauled up by mule or donkey, and people lived – and died – in the mountains. If somebody died a party of 6 men carried the body down the trail, since as devout Catholics the body had to be buried in consecrated ground with due ceremony; and church, priest and cemetery were in the village far below. The pall bearers were only allowed to put the body down to rest at certain spots (just one place on our route, about half way down) and the resting place of the body was marked with head – and foot – stones. Later flat slabs would be laid at the spot, and such “graves” can be found on various trails on the mountains.
Headstones would be marked with some arbitrary design or shape since the people were illiterate.
Up we toiled, rewarded with wonderful views,
scrambling over sharply eroded rocks
And encountering fierce wildlife
Until after about 3 hours we reached the first flat pastures
and a shaded spot for a well earned lunch
Just another 15 minutes led us to the highest point of our hike at 840m, known as the Doorstep, with amazing views and rock formations
And then it was (mostly) downhill to the pickup point where our driver was waiting.
Steve’s morning:
Drinking beer and bringing the blog up to date as far as September 20.
Our evening was spent with a final group meal in the hotel restaurant, doing the usual end-of-holiday stuff such as exchanging e-mail addresses before retiring for the night and some well-earned sleep before the excitement to come – getting back to Dubrovnik. Read all about that varied day in the next exciting instalment!
September 20th. I billed the start time of today as “relaxed” – 0830 – but things still seemed to be a bit rushed as we went for a (rather sparse) hotel breakfast and then dashed about getting ready, including me trying to remember which bits I needed to take with me in order to whizz the drone up at lunchtime and discard anything excess in the backpack (we’d been told that there was about a 300m ascent which, in the context of the week, isn’t much, but – still….) and so I wanted to carry the minimum I could.
So I discarded a heavy DSLR and a fairly heavy video camera, thinking, “Hah! that’ll make the backpack lighter!” However, there appears to be a discontinuity in the laws of physics around my backpack, which stubbornly insisted on being exactly as heavy as it had been all week with those things in it. Go figure.
Ominously, on this morning, we were transported by a pair of LandRovers instead of our usual comfy tour bus MPVs. Everything seemed OK for a few kilometres as we followed a (much more comfortable-looking) Mercedes people carrier and a couple of pickups up an (admittedly steep) road. I was beginning to think that the LandRovers were just theatre when all of a sudden we swung off a perfectly good road on to a narrow and rough gravel track – with passing places and potholes. Despite the best efforts of the lad driving our LandRover, all my teeth were just about still in place by the time we stopped and got out to start on our walk.
(in the photo above, you can see our high point – the lefter of the two saddles in the mountainsides).
So we started out, and entered – bliss! – shade for the uphill part of the walk.
The trees in the photo above are showing that they suffered some damage in the forest fires of June 2017, but not enough to kill them – though the hillsode was littered with the corpses of pines that didn’t make it; trees just cut down to make them safe and then abandoned because noone could figure out what to do with the trunks.
The track wound up
and up
enabling me to establish my place in the order of things, which is firmly at the back of any group going uphill. Every so often there was a decent view on offer.
and Željko explained some of the geography of the route. At one stage, he darted off the path and came back with a vast wild mushroom
which we actually ate later that day, over lunch (of which more later).
The walk wound down through some lovely beech forest (which, as well as being attractive
was in shade, so for a few short moments I actually enjoyed the walking instead of cursing uphill effort or downhill stones).
There were a few items of note on our way downhill to lunch. For example, evidence of some scientific experimentation being done to explore insect life which was beginning to affect the local pines,
some unusual rock formations,
which Željko referred to as “radiators”, because of the vertical grooves etched by erosion, and some mystery berries.
Željko referred to these as “Cornell berries” and offered them to people to taste. Jane had a bite and immediately condemned them as being too sharp, which meant that they would have turned my face inside-out, so I declined the opportunity. But it transpired that one can use them to make a liqueur, more of which later (again).
Nice as the woodland was, I beginning to get decidedly fed up with kilometer after kilometer of shambling downhill on an occasionally rocky track. So it was, on the face of it, wonderful when we stumbled across our lunch stop, which is a mountain hut called Ramića Dvori, run by a charming rogue chap called Mario, who specialises in serving a local-recipe bean soup. We knew about it, because we’d had to put in our orders the day before, and Željko asked us if anyone particularly wanted vegetarian bean soup. It didn’t take long for someone on the group to point out that bean soup should in and of itself just be vegetarian, and it turns out that this bean soup actually includes sausage and so is technically a stew. It is my hard and fast rule not to post photos of food, so you’ll have to imagine a kind of ragoût, ‘cos you won’t see a picture. It was delicious and by the time we got there, everyone was palpably starving.
I mentioned that I’d taken the drone with me, and I managed to get a couple of snaps of Mario and the terrace we were lunching on.
Mario was fascinated by the drone:
I mentioned “Cornell berries” earlier. Jane, having tasted (and spat out) one, thought that perhaps these were cornelian cherries. This thesis was confirmed as it turned out that Mario actually made some of the aforesaid liqueur (along with various other hooches of undoubtedly more suspicious provenance). On tasting, it seemed to be wonderful, so a few extra Kuna went Mario’s way so that we could buy a bottle of it. And the proof of the berries is on the label
It tastes lovely in the Croatian mountains – let’s hope the taste transfers seamlessly back to the UK, ‘cos otherwise that’s seven quid down the drain, or maybe saved for unwelcome guests.
Before we left, Mario insisted not only on singing us a song, accompanied by his accordion, but also dragged random passers-by into help him. Just goes to show what a charming rogue the man is.
And so we departed and continued the long road down back to the Starigrad entrance to the Paklenica National Park.
To paraphrase Hoffnung, on the journey down we met a donkey coming up. Well, actually, I think it’s a mule, but that’s got the wrong number of syllabs. OK, there were other donkeys as well, I just didn’t get the photo of them.
This underlines that the only way to get to and from this mountainside is on the track we were walking – no roads, no cars. So, for example, Mario has to walk two hours down the track at least once a week during the tourist season, and load up his donkey(s) with the supplies necessary to keep himself, his helpers and his restaurant going. There’s dedication for you.
On the way, we passed other places where we could have stopped for lunch or for refreshment, but Ramića Dvori made up in charm what it lacked in menu variety. And anyway, it had beer – there’s nothing more important that that!
As we headed to the park’s exit, we passed (and were subsequently passed by) a mountain rescue team who had been out on a practice session which, sadly, had ended badly. And it became clear that we were in serious mountain climbing territory. There’s a particular face, called “Anića Kuk”, which features some serious climbs, including one in the global top 10 most difficult. Looking at the rock face, one can imagine this is so.
and all around us there were people climbing and practising.
By this stage, we had walked some 13 kilometres and, given an 8-seater bus to take the twelve of us back to the hotel, were offered a choice, for those not lucky enough to get in the first shift: carry on walking; or wait 20 minutes for the bus to come back. Reader, there were those in our group insane enough to volunteer to walk. Aged and wise as I am, I sometimes struggle to understand my fellow mortal. You can be sure that my sharp elbows got me on the first bus home.
After a shower and a rest, Jane and I decided to go for a stroll to explore the fleshpots of Starigrad Paklenica. This turned out to be a swiftly-executed task – it’s not a big place – but did involve seeing a nice sunset,
which set us up nicely for a couple of G&Ts before taking a well-deserved early night.
During the long, long stumble down 1,000m vertical, I decided that I’d had enough of walking in this heat. Uphill, which I hate anyway, is torture for me in 30° heat, and downhill on uneven, lumpy, stony paths had taken their toll on my knees, ankles and goodwill. Knowing that the next day’s walking was going to involve a 600m ascent in unbroken sunshine enabled my subconscious to come up with an excuse to stay at home – these blogs don’t write themselves, you know, and I was two days behind. So I resolved to use Day 7 to catch up with this blog. So the one about Day 7 – the final day’s walking – will actually be photographed and written by Jane. That, if anything, should be the tempter you need in order to keep you reading…..
18th September – The tour buses came for us at 0830 and transported us to the start point of today’s walk. I was, as ever, grateful that they did the work to give us some altitude, as this meant I didn’t have to. As Željko had explained the day before, there would be a down side later, in the form of much walking down, but his view was that walking up 800 metres from Bol and then simply turning round and walking back down again was less interesting, particularly since that would be in full sunshine (and 30° heat) all the way. So instead we were dropped at somewhere in the middle of nowhere notionally called Gažul, which left us just a couple of hundred metres to climb before we had to make our way back down to our hotel in Bol.
Gažul was a slightly spooky place, practically a ghost village – a handful of derelict-looking buildings miles from anywhere. There were signs of returning population: the local rain-collecting cistern had been repaired and one or two buildings were showing signs of being brought back to a liveable state. Željko explained that the inhabitants would basically have abandoned the village and migrated to the coast to support the booming tourist industry. Now there was the possibility to repair the buildings, but most likely to rent to visitors rather than to live in.
The uphill part of the walk led, unusually, through woodland – and therefore shade!
Željko had described it as “basically flat”, and, after a little bit of climbing, it led gently up to Vidova Gora, the highest point on the island. A helpful sign set our expectations as to how long it would take to get there
and the route was, like all of the tracks we had followed in Croatia, very well-marked with waymarks in the trees and on the rocks.
Accordingly, after about an hour and twenty minutes, we arrived at the top. There used to be a restaurant here
but it was now closed (no beer for me, then!) and, in any case, Željko explained, despite it selling good, if simple, fare, the proprietor had been an eccentric veteran soldier with a short fuse and a shotgun. Probably best to press on to the penk itself, then:
where the view back towards Bol was spectacular, if somewhat hazy.
On the right-hand side of the photo, you can see the “famous” Zlatni Rat beach of Bol, with its little tip which sometimes points one way, sometimes the other. Vidova Gora has a sharp and steep drop over the edge – suitable for parasailing; we saw one chap turn up with a parachute and the sort of expression on his face that said he was going to use it – and various wags had decorated the preciptious edge with little rock cairns.
These serve no purpose other than to encourage other people to erect their own, apparently.
After a short break for lunch in the shade of a couple of trees it was time to head down to Bol – a long and rocky path which zigzagged its way down the side of the slope.
It was a long, hot and sweaty descent, tough, as the day before’s had been, on knees, ankles and feet (incredibly there was someone trying to negotiate this downslope on a bicycle!). But there were a couple of diverting moments on the way down, as the more eagle-eyed in our group spotted things worth stopping to look at, such as this praying mantis
and even a chance to see a cicada, which is a pretty rare thing (unlike hearing them, which is unavoidable).
When we finally got down to Bol, a process which took a couple of hours, Željjo pointed out a superb example of a 1960s Croation car called a Zastava, which had a back-end very similar to an old Fiat 500
although the front was different.
The company that made these was eventually taken over and made cars under the name Yugo, which people of my generation will recall as being alongside the old Škoda and Lada makers in terms of quality and reputation.
After the luxury of a well-earned shower, Jane and I set out on a mission to find pizza, which we found at an agreeable place called Skalinada. After that we went for a walk around Bol, which is small but beautifully formed.
and which has a small market
some strange mural work
and at least one unintentionally hilarious shop name.
There is a delightful promenade leading from the town to Zlatni Rat beach, pleasant and shady. We walked a little way along it until my need to get back to the hotel for a lie down imposed its imperative. A certain amount of drinking of gin and updating of blogs concluded the day’s activities, and we had to get to bed early because of a really early start the next day. You’ll have to read on to find out about that. My goodness, how the excitement mounts!
