Dreaming In Shades of Blue

Author’s note:  This post covers the day of July 25^th.  I wrote it that night while in the hotel.

This morning had an early and quick start.  We set an alarm for 7 AM, packed quickly, grabbed our hostel breakfast of a glass of milk, a slice of bread, and a small container of off-brand Nutella, and we were out the door.

We got up early so we could try to make it out to Plitvice Lakes National Park before the crowds got heavy.  The drive took longer than expected, and we got to Plitvice around 10.  Bought tickets and some pastries to tide us over until lunch and headed in.

Plitvice is a series of lakes that are all interconnected by waterfalls or passages that flow either above or below ground.  Thick forests of a variety of trees grow around the lakes, while amongst them sprout a plethora of water loving plants that I wouldn’t begin to be able to name.  Moss and what they call travertine grows everywhere.  Wooden plank walkways are constructed over and around the lakes and waterfalls to allow you to explore them.

We explored the lower lakes first, and the upper lakes second.  The water is so beautiful that it is hard to put into words.  Most of the time the water is a brilliant turqoise, but then at times it’s a deep cerulean blue, while in the shallow parts near the shore the water is so clear that it’s nothing but a viewing pane for the fish that you can see swimming past.  And if you can see the shoreline from up above, you get to see the changing shades of the water as it gets deeper and deeper.

The waterfalls are certainly impressive, some are tall, some are powerful, some are small, some are rocky, some are mossy. 

We continued walking around Plitvice until around 3.  Then, we grabbed some food (sausage, fries, and a porter) and ate it by the water before heading back to our car.  I do want to mention that the sausage was quite good and tasted like it was filled with a corned beef type of meat.

We then drove to Zadar, arriving about 6.  It took us a little while to find our hotel, the Venera Guest House, but we found it.  We then walked back to our car to grab cameras and whatnot, when Smith discovered that we needed to pay for our parking spot (which, if I may say, I absolutely nailed first time parallel parking with the pressure of people backed up behind me).  But the machines only take coins, and nobody in Croatia wants to give you coins.  If you have exact change, they take it, if you don’t, they tend to round to the nearest 10 kuna so they only have to give you bills.  They hoard coins here.  So Smith had to go get change, then the machine we tried to pay at was broken, but finally we paid, and headed to the waterfront at about 7.

We came to Zadar mostly for the waterfront.  To see the Sun Salutation and hear the Sea Organ, two creations of local architect/artist Nikola Basic.  The Sun Salutation has solar panels that store electricity to then produce a light show at night meant to represent the solar system.  I think the Sea Organ is much cooler; it has a series of slits cut into the side of the wall at the waterfront and pipes underneath, such that incoming waves flow into the slits and vibrate the pipes, making music come out of slits in the concrete walkway up above.  It is an incredibly relaxing place to rest.  The water here is also incredibly blue, but a deeper shade than at Plitvice.

We listened to the Sea Organ for a while, then ate an amazing dinner at a Lonely Planet recommended restaurant on the water.  Bottle of white wine from a vineyard near Zadar, black risotto with cuttlefish, gnocchi with shrimp and scallops, tuna steak with green peppercorns and swiss chard, and sea bass filet with truffle sauce and gnocchi, and it all cost $100.  Croatia is awesome!  This was the first meal in several days that we could completely and totally relax.  We had no place to be afterwards, nothing to see until sundown, already had put our stuff in our hotel room.  It felt really nice to sip that last glass of wine and just let the stress (fun stress, but stress nonetheless) of the past few days fall away.

After dinner we checked out the light show from the Sun Salutation and walked along the waterfront to come back to our hotel.  Then I started writing, and writing, and writing to try to catch up on my blog.

A Day Made for the GoPro

Author’s note:  This post covers the day of July 24^th.  I wrote it the afternoon of July 27^th while relaxing on the terrace of the house we are staying at in Zaton.

July 24^th was made for the GoPro, from beginning to end.  We slept in, well until 8, because we still wanted to get a lot of stuff in that day.  The breakfast at the hotel was good and free, bread, jam, omelette, coffee, juice.

We threw our stuff in the car and headed further south to the very tip of Istria and a park called Kamenjak.  We took a wrong turn in the town of Premantura, and another once we were inside the park (which has far more roads than the map showed), but we finally found our way to Colombarica Beach.  There we finally got to do some swimming, explored some small caves, and jumped off the rocks into the water.  I then relaxed in the sun for a bit while Smith did some more beach exploration.  Once I felt rested I chased him down, and in the process found a much higher ledge that some people were jumping off.

I felt I just had to do it.  The first time was certainly a little nervous, but I mustered up the courage.  I then jumped it twice more to get it from different angles with the GoPro.  The second time I was almost as nervous as the first, but the third time was easy.

After that we grabbed a drink at the very cool bar just above the beach.  It’s called Safari Bar and is a series of “rooms” created by naturally growing trees and palm fronds stacked up.  The ceiling is at about my head height everywhere, so it makes a nice shaded, cozy space.  Some rooms even had playground equipment like slides and swings for the kids.  We drank watermelon-canteloupe sangria before heading out of the park.

From the park we went back to Pula for lunch.  Smith really enjoyed his seafood platter, most everything lightly fried.  My dish was okay, stuffed peppers, but the Malvazija wine was once again very good.

After that we drove straight north through the middle of Istria to get to Pazin to see Pazin’s Chasm, a natural phenomenon that inspired some of Jules Verne’s writings despite the fact that he never actually went there.  We started on one side of the chasm, walked down through it and out the other side.

We had originally planned on walking through the town around the chasm to get back to our car, but there was a zip line across the chasm.  So of course we took it.  GoPro captured that ride too as we flew across the chasm and got off the line about 20 yards from our car.

After Pazin we tried to drive through a park that was said to have great views.  We got incredibly lost in the park though and ended up driving all over these mountains of gravel roads.  We asked a local how to get to the highest mountain, but it seems he sent us the wrong way because if we got to a point that if we had gone down that slope, I don’t think we would have ever gotten back up it.  So we turned around, and while in reverse the car started making a scraping noise.  We both figured something had gotten stuck and would come loose when we started going forward, but it continued.  We got out of the car and found a decent sized stick about the width of a quarter and a couple feet long.  The stick had somehow found its way over a hose and then twisted around so that the hose was in danger of being torqued out of its connections.  It took some work but we got the stick out.

We continued for a bit hunting around the gravel roads of the mountainside but never found our way to the rocky valley we were searching for.  Although we did run into a flock of sheep with one lone shepherd watching over them, and probably wondering what the hell we were doing there.  So, we gave up on the gravel roads and found our way back to the asphalt.  We were going to just drive to Rijeka, but we saw signs for the highest peak in the park, so we took that 7km ride up to the top where we could see for miles and miles.  This whole time in the park we never saw a single other tourist until we started to leave the peak, we saw one other car.

So, we finally got back on the road headed to Rijeka.  We got in late, just as the sun was beginning to set, and checked into our hostel.  At this point it was dark, I was tired and very hungry in yet another new place, and stressed from another day of driving and getting lost.  So, you can imagine my reaction when the car behind me parked incredibly close to me, and I bumped them trying to get out of my incredibly tight parallel parking space.  I was pissed, and the owner was just coming out to the car too.  But there was no damage, and we asked them to back up so we could get out.

Dinner that night was at some Croatian fast food place called Food City, but they were advertising Bampy brand food, I don’t know.  It was a crappy sandwich, but we just needed to eat.  After that we grabbed fries and McFlurries at McDonald’s because I just needed something to go down easy.  We returned to our hostel without incident and went to sleep.

The day ended stressful and a little unhappy, but there was a whole lot of fun and excitement the rest of the day, so I can’t look back on it as a bad day at all.

The Beginning of the End

Author’s note: This post covers the day of July 23rd. I wrote it while relaxing on the terrace overlooking the Zaton Bay on the morning of the 27th.

On Monday morning, we again got up at 7. Again we were tired. Again we were waking up in a new place. But at least Matteo’s parents’ house is beautiful.

We met Matteo’s mother who made us breakfast of “brioche” (the Italian word for croissant), coffee, and juice. We also met Matteo’s father briefly before getting in the car to leave.

Matteo drove ahead of us until we reached the highway, and after that we were on our own again. We drove through Italy first, making a wrong turn that led us into the heart of Trieste rather than into Slovenia, but that was easily fixed with a quick u-turn once we got off the highway. We passed through Slovenia without incident. Entering Croatia was easy, they just waved us on through, but going the opposite direction was backed up for a looooooooong way. Border security is a much bigger issue when you’re an EU member nation.

So we entered Croatia, the last leg of the tour. Once we got into Croatia, everything was quick and easy, because Istria is so small an area. We drove down to Porec first. We had an amazing lunch, probably the best meal we’ve had yet. We had a sampler with three different types of homemade pasta, one with olive oil and Istrian ham, one with a tomato-pork sauce, and a linguine with truffle-cream sauce. Then Smith had squids cooked in wine, and I had a similar dish with pork. The wine was great, a Malvazija from Istria.

After lunch we saw the local church, renowned for its, I wanna say 6^th century, mosaics.  We also climbed up to the bell tower for some great views of the city.

We then headed back to the car for a quick drive to Pula.  On the way we stopped off at the Limska Draga Fjord.  It was pretty, but rather uneventful.  Although I am pretty sure that I recognize this as a spot that Anthony Bourdain went to on his Croatia show.

 

We had to go buy tickets to see the Roman Amphitheater there to get change to pay the parking meter (this would be a recurring problem).  We toured the amphitheater that they were setting up to screen a movie.  Pula is having a film festival now with movies being shown at multiple outdoor venues around the city.  Most of the films are low budget, independent, but the following night they were going to show the new Spiderman movie in the amphitheater.  It would have been really awesome to experience that, but it wasn’t quite worth staying a whole other day.

After touring the amphitheater, we walked around the city to see some more Roman and Venetian ruins.  Then we settled down to trying to find a place to sleep, because we still had not booked a hotel room.  The tourist information office was incredibly unhelpful.  All they did was give us a list of hotels and tell us to call them to find out if they had space.  But we couldn’t figure out how to make a Croatian phone call on Smith’s phone, so we just walked to a somewhat nearby hotel that was listed in Lonely Planet as the best budget option.

Fortunately they had one room left, so we dropped our things and walked off in search of dinner.  But unfortunately, the place we wanted to go closes at 5 (not mentioned in Lonely Planet), so we headed back to the city center and went to a pizza place with solid pizza (I got peppers and about 4 kinds of pig meat on mine, Smith got a spinach and something else) and a great atmosphere on a very cool terrace.

We grabbed ice cream on the way back to our hotel room and went to sleep at around midnight, our earliest night in a long time.  We were able to catch up on sleep, a little bit.

Expectations

Author’s note:  This post covers the day of July 22^nd.  I wrote it in our sobe (the room we’re staying in) on the morning of July 27^th.

When we woke up at 8:30 on the 22^nd after a second consecutive night of only 5 hours sleep, we didn’t know exactly what to expect.  Matteo had lured us to Italy with the concert, and had persuaded us to stay an extra day with the promise of a party in the beachside town of Lignone later that night.  So we anticipated having a great night, but weren’t sure what the morning would hold.  Matteo suggested renting bikes and riding along a trail to go get lunch, which sounded fine.

We had breakfast downstairs at the hotel and then tossed our bags in the car.  We went to pick up our bikes, and while we were waiting for a fourth guy to join us, Matteo’s friend Simone, I grabbed some Gatorade from a supermarket.

We started riding, and it was beautiful.  We rode in between the mountains and along a river.  I was temporarily saddened by the thought that this could have been our weather the day before as we were driving over Grossglockner, but such is life.  The mountains were gorgeous, the weather was perfect for riding, just a little cool so that you don’t sweat at all; the only difficulty was our navigation skills.  We completely rode past the town we were aiming for, and ended up going much further than we anticipated.

The food at the “cacciatore” we ate at was great.  The “frica” (spelling?) was awesome, some kind of cheese and potato cake.  We also had polenta and a goat stew.  The ride back saw more amazing weather, but now we were riding both uphill and against the wind, so it was a little more difficult.  But Simone is not an athlete like Brian, myself, or, as I learned, Matteo, so the three of us could ride pretty easy and take breaks to relax as we waited for Simone to catch up.  I spent some time relaxing in the sun, and another time I washed my face in an Alpine stream.

I really don’t have any pictures of the day, because I was GoProing much of the time rather than stopping to take pictures every minute or so.

By the time we got back, we had ridden a nearly 40km “Giro di Tarvisio” and it was already 5 PM.  So we hopped in our cars and grabbed gas before heading down to the coast.  Matteo dropped off Simone, then we continued to a train station where Matteo’s girlfriend, and also friends with Smith, Martina, met us.  We all piled into Matteo’s car to drive to Lignone, but on the way we stopped off at a roadside outdoor bar.  This is a special kind of bar (I forget the name) that is only allowed to operate during certain months of the year, and is only allowed to sell wine that is made on site.  Basically, we were drinking and being served small snacks in someone’s frontyard, while their backyard was a vineyard.  The wine wasn’t great, but you couldn’t beat the atmosphere.  Old men and neighbors milled around drinking, talking, and laughing.  The oyster shell ashtrays let you know that this place was simple and traditional.

After a few glasses of wine we headed off to Lignone.  Getting there was easy, but the parking situation was terrible.  We probably spent 20 minutes looking for a parking spot, but we found one, and walked down to the street one away from the water.  It was Matteo and Martina’s friend’s birthday, but not until midnight.  We were introduced to everyone, but it became apparent pretty quickly that we didn’t fit in here.  The bar was very pop, cool, a place to be seen.  And we were tired from lack of sleep, exhausted from bike riding, and wearing clothes meant to be traveled in, not fit for the club scene.

Matteo’s friends were very generous, paying for drinks and food for everyone that came to attend the party, even ones like us that they didn’t really know.  But this was not the exciting party I was expecting.  We couldn’t understand a word of the conversation.  I tried talking with a girl from Barcelona, to practice my Spanish as much as anything, but she wanted to talk with her friends, fair enough.  It was funny that Matteo didn’t really seem to fit this crowd either.  He’s very easygoing and knew many of the people, so he could certainly talk with them, but this kind of bar didn’t really fit any of us.  So, we hopped down to the beach for a bit, then later we left to grab a drink (and a seat) at another bar.  I felt bad because Matteo’s friends were being so generous, but I was beat, and needed to sit down and relax.

Actually, I needed to sleep, but we couldn’t leave yet.  We were waiting for midnight.  Midnight struck, we sang happy birthday, well, the Italian version, and said our goodbyes.  Matteo drove back to the train station, then we got in our car to follow him to his house where we would spend the night.

It was all going fine until we reached a tollbooth.  We had to stop and pay, while Matteo drove through the electronic pass.  We didn’t see him when we left, drove for a while, called him, he said he catch up with us, but we never saw him.  So we followed the signs for Pordenone, where he said he lived.  We got off in Pordenone and tried to call him, but Smith’s phone had no reception.  I was getting cranky.  We were lost.  In a small town in Italy.  It was past 1 AM.  We had no cell phone.  I was tired.  I had to just keep driving around until Smith got reception again.  He called and Matteo met us at the exit we had gotten off at, and we followed him to his house.

There, we tiptoed around the house to avoid waking his parents, I showered, and gloriously fell asleep.

So the day ended in far less exciting fashion than I had expected, but the morning was awesome.  Goes to show you how expectations can be dashed when you’re traveling.