Month: August 2004

We arrived back in Split at about 5pm, and headed away from all the SobeRoomSleeping? people waving their pieces of paper at us at the station (with me replying NoFerrySleepingHome each time) and straight over to the ferry ticket desk to see if we could somehow obtain a proper bed for the night. Despite having twice failed to book a cabin for the return journey prior to this, we were now told that there was indeed one available, but in some bizarre Kafka-esque ritual that I to this day still don’t quite understand, we couldn’t pay the extra money for it at the ticket desk, but only on the boat, and not in the currency of the country we were in, but only in Euros (and obtaining them proved to be comically difficult, considering the fact that at least one of the three exchange offices “didn’t exchange euros”–so what currencies do you exchange, exactly?) When we got onto the boat, and the Italian staff took Sally’s passport from us and told us we couldn’t pay for our cabin until after the boat had left port, I stopped even trying to work out why things were happening. But we got our cabin in the end, and slept blissfully all the way back to Italy.

As the flight home wasn’t until the evening, we planned to kill a few hours in Bologna on the way back to Venice, but it was mostly shut and full of awfully pricey bars charging extortionate cover charges (I can only wonder how much the two chubby Italian chaps at the table next to us who were drinking champagne and eating sandwiches at 11am were paying for the privilege, considering the price we paid for our two ice coffees). Sally was happy enough when the shops (almost entirely women’s clothes shops) opened in the afternoon, but I’m not sure I’d have bothered going to Bologna if I’d know what wasn’t there.

Later, much later, when we got back to Gatwick, I had the pleasure of my scruffy rucksack being the very first bag off. I don’t think that’s ever happened before, and I’m sure it never will again.

Dubrovnik turned out to be the absolute highlight of our trip, although we barely left the old town for the whole time we were there. On one of the evenings, we walked the city walls at sunset, which provided some stunning views, and partially explains the sheer volume of photographs we took (sample comment from someone who saw our photos: “Did you guys do anything else but take photographs while you were there?”). We also found time to stop for drinks while enjoying “The Most Beautiful View“, and ate some amazing fish during a lovely meal out on our last night (leaving my name earlier on in the day to reserve a table out on the terrace, the maitre’d said to me: “do you know who is it, Mr Armstrong?” “er, me?” “Like in the moon…”).

And, we even found time to watch some of the Olympics, which was always an amusing experience when any Croatians were involved–for example, we watched an Australian bloke win a men’s swimming race, but as the camera zoomed in on the winner, the commentator started yelling and shouting and generally going a bit crazy (imagine that classic bit of Norwegian commentary when they beat England in the early 80s–“Lord Nelson! Lord Beaverbrook! Sir Winston Churchill! Sir Anthony Eden! Clement Attlee! Henry Cooper! Lady Diana! Maggie Thatcher–can you hear me, Maggie Thatcher! Your boys took one hell of a beating”–but in Croatian). Of course it turned out that the Croatian had come in second for the silver medal. We also saw an amazing bronze-medal doubles tennis match that the Croatians eventually took by 16 games to 14 in the final set. And I lost count of the times I saw the replay of the Croatian men’s coxless pairs silver medal-winning rowing performance. A couple of days after the race, as the triumphant pair were being interviewed in the studio, I caught the briefest of brief glimpses of the British men’s coxless fours inching their way towards Matthew Pinsent’s fourth gold medal before they went back to talking to their two sporting heroes.

After that amazing fish dinner on our final night, we stopped in a bar for a quick drink with our friends from Hvar (who had themselves arrived in Dubrovnik by this point) in a small yellow bar that reminded me a little of Amsterdam (or perhaps that was just because of the naked woman painted onto the toilet door). As they tend to do, a quick drink quickly turned into 4 or 5, and even the barman bought us all one at one point (although maybe he was just happy to still have paying customers after the local police had been by to ask him to turn down the music and close his doors). We eventually stumbled up the steep steps of the old town and home to our appartment some time after 2, and decided it might be an idea to get some sleep considering we were starting the long journey home the next morning.

After two days in Hvar, it was time to move on again. We’d booked our travel on to Dubrovnik on another tourist excursion, taking a bunch of foolish tourists on a day trip from Hvar (a journey of almost 6 hours each way, and affording them only something like 5 hours actually in Dubrovnik). As we only wanted to go the one way, however, it was perfect for us, because it would get us to Dubrovnik around lunchtime, a distinct improvement on the scheduled ferry/public bus alternative via Korcula that would have taken another 4 or 5 hours, and after the hassles of Hvar we wanted to be in Dubrovnik as early as possible.

After a short bus ride and a fast chartered ferry to the mainland (which somehow took us back to Bol first to collect more tourists), we connected with a comfortable and roomy bus to travel the rest of the way (we’d been divided onto three separate buses on a language basis for tourist-excursion commentary purposes, which partly felt like the basis for some interesting queueing strategy-based social experiment, but mainly meant that the predominantly French and Italian tour groups filled the other two buses and left us with plenty of room to spread out on the combined English-German bus). The commentary was an unexpected and interesting bonus. It explained, for example, why we had to pass through Bosnia before reaching Dubrovnik (not, as I’d expected, due to recent events, but in fact a result of the independent city state of Dubrovnik’s reluctance to share a border with their Venetian enemies when they acquired the rest of the Dalmatian coast in the 15th century, and the fact that they solved this problem by giving 9km of Adriatic coastline to the Turks occupying Bosnia at the time). Approaching Bosnia on a bus is perhaps not a great time to choose to read the following sentence in your guidebook: “EU, US and Canadian citizens do not require a visa to visit Bosnia. Australian citizens should apply in person at the Bosnian embassy in Canberra…” but luckily it turns out that the requirement is waived when in transit through the small section of coastline, and we made it to Dubrovnik with no problems.

And finding accommodation actually turned out to be as simple as wandering into the nearest travel agency, waiting for the woman behind the counter to flick through her book and make a phone call, and wandering into the old town to take the lovely appartment up in the top corner of the old town that would be our home for the rest of our holiday.

In the end, I’m not sure Hvar Town was really worth the bother. Despite its pretty harbour, and the fantastic views that we found when we climbed up to the citadel above the city, the town’s charm is nothing compared to Bol or Dubrovnik (our next destination). Hvar is also rather lacking in beaches, and we had to make do with a quick swim off the rocks to the left of the harbour, as assorted ferries and expensive yachts passed us just further out on their way in and out of town.

Hvar’s real attraction, of course, (and the reason why it’s the most popular Croatian resort amongst Croatians themselves), is people watching. As such, we spent most of our time sitting around in the bars around the square and the harbour taking in the surroundings, from the endless stream of people passing our table, to the rich folks eating dinner on their flashy yachts (including one chap, slumped on a chair at the table at the back of his sleek boat who bore an almost uncanny resemblence to the eponymous protagonist of Weekend at Bernie’s).

By far Hvar’s strangest bar, and the real place to see and be seen, is Carpe Diem, which sits at the very end of the harbour. In the early evening it gets completely packed for a loud, heavy, dance DJ set as the sun goes down, before emptying at about 7pm when the music stops, and then slowly building up to a second wind later in the evening. We popped in for a quick beer (bottled, and several times the price of every other bar in town, natch) much later in the evening, somehow scraping in just before some kind of strict name’s-not-down door policy came into effect and the guys at the door started turning people away. So we sat on the steps nursing our one beer bottle each feeling every so slightly underdressed, holding our just-purchased next-day’s-breakfast in plastic supermarket carrier bags and watching the beautiful (and no so beautiful) people, like the middle aged guy wearing blue combat trousers sitting over in the other corner surrounded by a table of 20-somthing women hanging on his every word. Presumably it wasn’t his fashion sense they were interested in. Later, we were joined by a couple of hilariously drunk Irish blokes (who had somehow also cracked the door policy) drinking cocktails from impossibly large jugs and generally being amusingly drunk.

We ended up staying in Bol for two nights, which allowed us just enough time to spend a very relaxing day lounging around on the beautiful Zlatni Rat beach that jutted out dramatically into the sea at the opposite end of Bol, where we somehow managed to secure a couple of sun loungers just inches from the warm, clear sea. There was also plenty of time for us to waste sitting around in the bar beside our hotel (and later on the balcony of the hotel room we moved into on the second night, which overlooked said bar, thus enabling us to drink beer from the supermarket at half the price while maintaining a air of superiority over the punters below). Sitting in the bar on the first night, we also gained an interesting insight into the state of Serbo-Croatian relations by watching the (Croatian) bar staff jump in unison with joy at the moment when Argentina scored a last-second winner in their Olympic basketball game against Serbia-Montenegro. I suppose it’s not really any different to watching the Scottish delight at an England football defeat, but given the recent history of the Balkans, you can’t help but attach slightly more sinister overtones.

But soon, it was time to leave and travel on to Hvar. To avoid having to travel back north to Split, in order to go south to Hvar, we had booked our next leg of ferry travel on a small tourist boat taking day-trippers over to Hvar and on to a fish picnic on one of the small uninhabited islands. As such, the journey was slightly different to our previous boat trips. The overnight ferry hadn’t at any point stopped to allow whichever passengers felt like it to jump off the top of the boat and go for a bit of a swim, for example, and I don’t recall any of our previous journeys coming to a sudden halt to avoid colliding with the Stari Grad car ferry (several times our size).

But we made it to Hvar in one piece in the end, and ended up stumbling off the boat slightly seasick around noon. Gathering our breath and stomachs on the quayside, we watched an interesting argument develop between the captain of the boat and a couple of windsurfers who’d travelled over with us who were trying to persuade him to let them store their board on top of his boat. He wasn’t having any of this and ended up yelling at them to take it off his boat and giving them their money back. Later on, as we wandered around Hvar, we bumped into these windsurfers trying to offload their board in various other locations around town, including the roof of the state ferry operator’s booking office. We could only assume that they ultimately managed to get rid of it somewhere judging by the fact that the last time we saw them, they were climbing up to the Citadel above the city. Without their board.

At this point, we wandered off to locate a private agency that the Rough Guide claimed to be the best place to find a room for the night. After two circuits in the overpowering midday heat of the area around the harbour where the book claimed it to be, with me struggling under the weight of the backpack, and asking in a number of shops to a selection of confused blank looks, we had to assume that it might have closed down, and headed for the tourist office instead. Continuing the tradition of the people in Bol, the tourist office went out of their way to be helpful.

Us: We were wondering if you have any rooms for the night…?
Her: No. They are all full.
Us: Oh… Ok.

This did not bode well. Ah well, we thought, that can’t really all be full, so we tried some of the other agencies, who confirmed that in fact all their rooms were full too.

And all the nice looking hotel rooms were full.

And the horrible ones.

Eventually, we stumbled into the shabbiest hotel of the lot, at the far end of the harbour, and asked after rooms. “Yes, we have”, said the lady behind the counter (great!), “but not in the hotel” (oh), “in the private rooms”, (oh, ok, great!), “but it has just been taken”, (oh), “but we have another one” (great!) “it is three kilometers away” (oh).

We decided to take a look at it anyway, and trundled off back to the bus station where the chap with the room would pick us up in his car. At this point, we were prepared to take just about anything, and thought that although 3km wasn’t great, it was at least a walkable, if far distance. The alarm bells started ringing around the point when we realised that 3km away meant 3km uphill along windy mountain roads with no walkable path or street lights, but when it transpired that 3km away in fact meant about 7 or 8 km along a completely unwalkable route, and in fact meant staying in a tiny, dusty, mountain village with no redeeming features, past a rubbish tip and at the mercy of a middle-aged Croatian man who spoke only German and drove stupidly fast along windy, narrow, roads with no clear line of sight, and wanted to charge us 100Kn round trip every time we wanted to go back to Hvar, we decided pretty quickly to make our excuses and leave, taking our chances back in the old town.

It was now some 3 hours or so after we had first arrived in Hvar. When we found ourselves back in the old town, we still had nowhere to stay, and were rapidly running out of options. Wandering back to the harbour, we noticed there was an agency we hadn’t tried before, and Sal went in to ask, while I stayed outside with the bag. I was just about to follow her in when a tall sweaty chap in wrap around shades popped up, and seemed to be trying to ask me something. It took me a while to work out that this affable Irishman was actually saying “excuse me, do you speak English?”. “Yes”, I replied, “but I don’t think I can help you”.

But, in fact, I could. And even better than that, he could help us, because Sal and I could take the other room in the 4 person apartment that he had just been offered. As there was just him and his girlfriend travelling, and not wanting to lose a precious room, he had set off into the town to find a couple to fill the other room. Not only did the room turn out to be fine, close to the town, and cheaper than the room-in-the-middle-of-nowhere, but our new friends turned out to be lovely people (and she was from North London as well, just up the road from us. I mean who’d have thunk it?)

It was going to take a while to recover from that little adventure, so we decided to stay in Hvar for a couple of nights…

After what seemed an interminable delay following our arrival, Adriatica, the shipping company, and the Croatia immigration authorities in Split finally decided to let us and the rest of the passengers off the boat, and we were in Croatia. We’d heard that Split itself wasn’t up to much, so we’d already decided to try and get out and on to one of the islands as soon as possible. Fighting our way past the touts offering their rooms to us, we headed for the ferry ticket desk, and bought tickets to Supetar on the island of Brac, although not before chatting to a friendly tout–he was quite happy to accept that we weren’t staying now, but we took his card anyway in case we wanted to stay in Split on the way back. Rather amusingly, it wasn’t actually his card at all, but instead the card of one of the large hotels in Split (he just crossed out the details on the front, and wrote his on the back). He also told us how to say “thank you” in Croatian, which according to the guide book is something like hvala, but which seemed to my ears to be pronounced koala (or at least that was what I would go on to increasingly self-consciously say to everyone I encountered for the next week).

The ferry ride was short and smooth, and when I wasn’t falling asleep, I spent the journey flicking through the guide book to read about Brac, and specifically Bol, where we were planning to stay. My recollections of reading about Croatia in the Rough Guide back home were that it said things to the effect that it was a place that never seemed crowded, and where you could always escape the people, but somehow in the time between us leaving the UK and arriving in Split someone had rewritten the book so that it now said things like “only go to Bol if you can travel there in the off season, or if you don’t mind crowds”. Oh dear, I wondered, where were we heading?

When we arrived in Supetar we caught a crowded bus over to Bol, and headed for the tourist office to try to find a room for the night. If I didn’t know what was going to happen over the next few days, I might have said that the staff at the tourist office in Bol were perhaps the least helpful in Croatia. The conversation went something like this:

Us: Hi, we were looking for a room for tonight, could you help us with that? Do you know if this hotel (pointing to name of hotel in book) would have any rooms?

Her: [In voice that suggests she has no idea whatsoever] Er… I think they have rooms.
Us: Could you call them for us to check?
Her: No. You have to go there.
Us: Ok… and if they don’t, do you have any other suggestions, maybe a private room?
Her: We have some rooms with shared bath, in this area [points to map]… but they are full.
Us: Oh… Ok.

And with that, we left and made our way to the hotel, which luckily turned out to have a room for us. And it was lovely–from our window we could see the small harbour, the crystal clear blue sea, and the beautiful sunny day outside. Tired from the journey, we decided to rest for a while, before venturing outside, so unfortunately I have to confess that the first proper thing I did on arriving in Croatia was to sit in an air-conditioned hotel room watching A Hard Day’s Night with Croatian subtitles on TV.

But eventually we did venture out, and Bol was lovely, and not nearly as crowded as the Rough Guide implied. In fact the only negative point about the place was the awful music being played in all the restaurants. We ended up eating our dinner in the least worst option–an acoustic guitar duo massacring popular classics like The Man Who Sole The Worle and Californiaa Dreamin.

Ah, but we were here…

In the end, of course, Sally’s passport arrived back with a day to spare, and we were able to go on our holiday after all. Rather unusually, you might think, for a holiday in Croatia, ours began in Venice. Nevertheless, owing to the vagaries of late-availability flight deals to non-cheap-flight accessible countries, we arrived there late on Friday night. I’d been to Venice only once before, on a rainy couple of days in August nine years ago, while inter-railing my way around Europe. I remembered it as being a mostly rainy place, full of pigeons and tourists with umbrellas at my eye level (although only the tourists had umbrellas, obviously), but this time it was just full of tourists. We mostly managed to keep away from the crowds, though, and I rather enjoyed wandering off along quiet side streets and over bridges, admiring the beauty of the city and failing to be pursued through the streets by a small red-cloaked dwarf, although I began to appreciate this slightly less when we realised we were in fact hopelessly lost and had to get back to the train station soon in time to catch our train down to Ancona, from where we were catching the overnight ferry across to Split in Croatia.

Luckily we made the train, and even more luckily, we had a cabin reserved on the boat when we arrived there, so we were able to retreat to our own space and try to get some sleep during the 9 hour journey across the Adriatic. Before I could get to sleep, however, I did take note of the sign pinned to the side of the cabin in four languages informing us that the management would not be responsible for any of my values anywhere on the ship, so I resolved to recklessly abandon mine for the rest of the evening.

…are turned off at the moment, sorry. For some reason the comments have just stopped working. I have no idea why, but it was working fine the other day. Oh well, as I don’t have time to fix them at the moment, I’ve had to turn them off altogether. I’ll try to sort it out as soon as possible. Sorry.

Sometimes life is just too exciting. Today I’m waiting in for the postman in the vain hope that he might be able to deliver Sal’s passport, which is on its way back from the home office with a shiny new visa sellotaped to the inside. Will the trusty postie turn up before noon? Will he fail to ring the bell and just leave one of those cards that says “we couldn’t be arsed to deliver your post at a time when normal people are in, so please come to the depot in the middle of nowhere between 11:50 and 12 next wednesday”? Will we, ultimately, be able to go on holiday with said passport? Who knows… If my life was an episode of a shabby American reality TV series they’d be playing the same bits of interview footage repeatedly, with some building dramatic music in the background, and then they’d pop off to a shifty commerical break right about now…

In other news, for reasons known only to him, Dave would like it known that this chap is a charmless fuck. Happy to help, mate.

Returning home from a thoroughly pleasant work leaving dinner at a sadly fairly celebrity-free The Ivy last night, I discovered that we’ve finally received our very own copy of the cracking Preparing For Propaganda booklet, about three weeks after everyone else (“oh, is that what that is” says a disinterested Sal, who hadn’t even bothered to pick it up from the floor next to the front door–surely the actions of a potential terrorist, if ever I saw them. Perhaps I should phone the Blunket’s informant line Anti-Terrorism Hotline and report this “suspicious behaviour”…)

Given that everyone else has had a three week head start in stopping global terrorism, however, I felt it my civic duty to read the advice carefully. Essentially it appears to be telling us to go inside and watch telly, which seems fine to me. In that case I’m fighting global terror on a daily basis. Other selected advice includes such grammatically awkward gems as “try to avoid as much movement as possible”, and “loosen tight clothing”, which is just general good sense, really.