Croatia

Split, Šolta, Hvar, Vis

Posted by Mark Sullivan on July 19, 2022
Posted in: Croatia, Europe. 1 comment

We spent one night in Split before joining up with the bike tour there. Had dinner at a fun restaurant with funky design and great food.

A wonderful lunch within the narrow walls inside of Diocletian’s palace in Split

Looking up from lunch

We are not generally fans of organized group travel, though we love to see places by bicycle, and biking often works better in organized group travel. We are also not generally fans of cruises, and yet here we are on a two-week organized boat and bike tour of Dalmatia.

Our friend Ethyl had signed up for this tour last year and urged us to check it out. We met Ethyl biking in Japan about five years ago. And we see each other a couple times a year in New York. She mostly lives in California but spends the winter in New York, where she is a conductor for the Christmas Spectacular at Radio City Music Hall. We love Ethyl, love biking, and love Croatia, so we actually ended up planning this whole eight-week summer getaway around this particular tour.

A few days into it, the tour comes with the expected annoyances. Our quarters are of quite minimal comfort, groups can be annoying, and we are subject to more talks and waiting for people than our low tolerance level ordinarily permits. No surprises there.

On the plus side, we’re getting to see a lot of beautiful Mediterranean landscapes, and there is something wonderful about the way you encounter those places from a bicycle.

We’ve so far completed 3 of 12 of our bicycling days. And by day 3, those have fallen into a pretty nice rhythm. Mediterranean islands are anything but flat. When you start and finish from a boat, that means you start each tour from a lovely harbor and begin with a lot of hard climbing. Then you ride between charming villages, along vineyards, between low stone walls. You get many glimpses of the turquoise waters in the distance. And the ride eventually ends with a long descent to another (or sometimes the same) beautiful harbor — often followed by a cooling swim in that turquoise water. Not a bad routine at all.

As for those initial climbs, they are a little easier for me than for Jim. When he signed us up for this trip, he signed me up for an e-bike, which I’ve never used before. Jim himself remains too purist for that, but I’ll admit, I really love the e-bike. I can set it to give me a nice little boost when I’m climbing these tough hills. Im still peddling and getting my share of exercise, but there’s no more dreading the long steep climbs. Makes the biking a pure joy.

Lots more islands to explore!

Day 3 started from the stunning harbor of Vis on the island of the same name

From Vis we rode across the island to the lovely harbor town of Komiža

Looking down on Komiža as we climb back up to the center

Great to see Ethyl again!

Guess which island we are on

Plitvice Lakes

Posted by Jim St. George on July 14, 2022
Posted in: Croatia, Europe, UNESCO World Heritage Site. Leave a Comment

Here we are early in the hike around the lakes. Pretty nice water, huh?

We made a two-day stop in Plitvice Lakes National Park, what the guidebook calls Croatia’s “Adriatic hinterland,” about a hundred miles southeast of Opatija. We’d wanted to go there way back in 2013 when we first came here on our big adventure but it’s really hard to get here without a car. So part of the calculation in deciding to rent a car for this leg of our Slovenia/Croatia trip was to get to Plitvice.

The whole reason one comes to the area is this series of cascading lakes and waterfalls, surrounded by lush forests. It isn’t cheap – it’s about $40 per person, plus $10 for parking – but for a day-long outdoor experience it’s hard to beat. I mean, it’s been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since the 1970s. Oh, and one historic note worth mentioning. When Croatia declared independence from Yugoslavia in 1991, the Yugoslav (i.e., Serbian) army’s first point of attack was Plitvice. They held the park through the duration of the war and in fact it is thought that some remote parts of the park – not anywhere close to where tourists go – may still have Serbian landmines. Yuck.

As Lonely Planet puts it, “It’s as though Croatia decided to gather all its waterfalls in one place and charge admission to see them.”

So what’s going on here? The basic idea is that the geology of the area is loaded with limestone. As all the water flows along it picks up limestone and drops chalk sediment all over. That creates ideal growing conditions for moss and algae which constantly reroute the flow of water. The result is an ever-changing landscape of waterfalls cascading to lower lakes, over and over, all in stunning turquoise. And apparently it’s been going on for a long time, as in since the last great ice age.

And that was it. Though shorter routes are available, including lovely tour boats that glide across the biggest lakes as significant shortcuts, the full route around the major lakes in the park is about 12 miles. Which of course I had to do. Admittedly, I was sore the next days but the views were spectacular and definitely worth it.

Now it’s down to the ancient city of Split on the coast and off on a 14-day bike trip!

We were there quite early, before the crowds and when everything was very still

During the early part of the hike the boardwalk was often right over flowing water. We were amused by the lack of safety provisions; I can’t imagine you could have something like this without guard rails in the U.S.

More waterfalls

On the trail

While most of the trail was immediately next to the lakes, sometimes it went high up into the forest

From high up you would get views like this

And this

Opatija

Posted by Mark Sullivan on July 12, 2022
Posted in: Croatia, Europe. Leave a Comment

The Franz Joseph I Promenade runs 12 km along the sea, linking Opatija with neighboring towns Volosko to the north and Lovran to the south

Opatija is packed with grand old hotels in beautiful condition

I was intrigued by this Fixer Upper

Nothing says ‘Mediterranean’ like a plate of fresh anchovies

From Trieste, we cut back across a corner of Slovenia to get to our first stop in Croatia. Opatija sits on the Kvarner Gulf, the northern-most stretch of Croatia’s spectacular Adriatic coast.

Arriving here — and while planning this trip — I am struck by the sheer amount of tourism and related infrastructure that lines this coast. From the Kvarner Gulf in the north to the Dalmatian Coast in the south, I’m astounded by the number of resort towns that line Croatia’s coast and its many islands. And I’m pretty excited about seeing a lot more of these spots.

One of my favorite resources for travel planning is the UK newspaper The Guardian. They publish really good lists of “best hotels” in particular countries or regions. They list and describe hotels at various price levels that combine exceptional quality lodging, food, location, service, and value. For me it’s a great way to find places in a country that has plenty of good infrastructure, as well as to locate good value in each place. I couldn’t believe how many hotels in how many locations they listed for Croatia. It was hard to process it all.

This list helped me settle on Opatija as a good starting point for this trip. Now I had never even previously heard of Opatija, but once we arrived I just can’t believe how lovely it is — and how much tourism there is here alone. The town stretches along a pretty cobble-stone promenade running for miles along the coast. And many of the hotels occupy grand historic buildings that look like they have been lovingly renovated.

Though we’ve been to Croatia a couple times before, we’re excited to start a new journey down this beautiful coast. We feel like we’ve seen so little of what it has to offer. And since we’ll spend two weeks on a boat, biking in new destinations every day, we hope to get a good taste of a lot of new destinations. From what I’ve seen in just this first stop, it’s the Mediterranean we love — beautiful blue water, stunning landscapes, lovely architecture, good food. Why go anywhere else?

I never get tired of seats like this

A lively, rustic-yet-sleek dinner spot with great food. Earliest we could get a dinner reservation was 10 pm. It was worth the wait.

Our favorite lunch spot, seconds from our hotel

One of Jim’s favorite poses