Croatia – First Impressions

Catching the overnight ferry from Bari to Dubrovnik was no fun.  I won't go into detail here, but suffice to say the Bari Port Authorities don't appear to have ever run a port before, and the reclining seats on the ship are about as comfortable to sleep on as bicycle seats.  If we'd been travelling without a dog we'd have been able to take a cabin, which presumably would have been much better, but also more expensive.  We ended up spending the night dozing fitfully on the quivering carpet tiles of the passenger lounge; another passenger lay on a metal shelf and tried to sleep there.



After that, arriving in Croatia was like returning to civilisation.  The customs and immigration people gave us a quick check over and a warm welcome.  Scooby  (“Stari pas”) got his ears rubbed by a burly border guard and we were on our way.  We stopped near the ferry port to get cash and catch our breath, and found the sleepy early Sunday morning town to be so inviting we spent a couple of hours walking around the coastal path.  After that, we drove about ten kilometres down the coast to a tiny welcoming campsite at Srebreno (Autocamp Matkovika) and settled in for a lazy first day.  The following day we visited Dubrovnik's old town, then Cavtat, and today we had another look around Dubrovnik and then drove a little way north to the Pelješac peninsular.

It was startling after southern Italy to suddenly find ourselves in this orderly, clean, prosperous, spick and span place.  No litter, no graffiti, people obey the traffic laws, park in the designated bays, stop to let you cross on pedestrian crossings and don't ride their scooters on the pedestrianised streets.  Even the port area is clean, tidy and well maintained – how many towns can say that?

The area is as incredibly beautiful as everyone told us.  Grey limestone crags, speckled with sparse herbs and trees, tower over the coast.  The sea is impossibly blue and clear, and strewn with wooded islands.  The buildings of Dubrovnik and nearby towns are quite unlike those of Italy just across the Adriatic.  They have a homely central European air, a whif of gingerbread and fairy tales.  Parts reminded us of old Prague, but like a cleaned up Prague with blue sky, turquoise sea, fresh fish, lemon trees and warm sunshine.



Our guide book's summary of the area's history started off with a warning that it's complicated, and so it is.  Dubrovnik was a trading town that made its fortune by managing to remain on good terms with both the Ottoman empire and the Europeans, so had a virtual monopoly on trade between the two.  It was effectively independent until the nineteenth century, and developed a complex cultural mix of Italian and Slav, with Latin speaking Roman Catholicism and strong links to Austria and Hungary.  Today's Dubrovnik is cheerfully Slav (to a foreigner the language sounds very like Czech  and there is plenty of pickled cabbage in the supermarket), but it's Slav with sunglasses, speedboats and a good selection of Italian recipes.

But of course there's been a serpent in paradise. It was a shock for us when we walked from our campsite down to the bay and found, behind the cool coffee bars, a series of gutted and shell pocked concrete hotels.  A pretty nineteenth century house on the waterfront was peppered with bullet holes, roofless and abandoned.  In the next bay a huge complex of what had clearly been smart hotels with landscaped gardens stood wrecked, desolate and overgrown.



We expected to see evidence of the war at some point during our visit, but not to see prime beachfront property in such a beautiful location still untouched after two decades.  We found out that this part of the coast had been occupied in 1991 by a Serb, Montenegrin and Bosnian army, who used it to shell Dubrovnik.  They smashed everything they could before being driven out by a Croatian counter attack the following year.  The density of the bullet holes bears witness to the intensity of the fighting.  The repair work has just been too big a job, and the old hotels have naturally been in the back of the queue behind homes, bridges and roads.

That's the sad explanation for why so much of this area looks so spick and span.  Much of it has had to be rebuilt and repaired over the last two decades, and there's still work to do.



From Dubrovnik's ancient city walls the city looks perfect at first glance.  It's only when you notice a mossy old terracotta tiled roof you realise that around nine tenths of the roofs of this mediaeval city are brand new.  You notice other things; a carved monument that looks far too fresh to be mediaeval, a wall dotted with patches of not quite perfectly matched mortar, an old shop above which the upstairs rooms are lined with bare plasterboard, and everywhere the star shaped indentations of shrapnel in stone.



Neither of us saw the area before the breakup of Yugoslavia, so we've had to get a sense of it from indirect sources.  In the late nineteenth century Dubrovnik and the coast around it was a popular holiday destination for wealthy people from the Austro Hungarian empire.  It had smart hotels and spas.  Rebecca West described it as “Too perfect and self satisfied”.  This has clearly been an orderly, prosperous, comfortable place for many years. 

Apparently it didn't have ethnic conflict, and wasn't militarily significant, so it didn't expect to be drawn into the conflict.  The shock seems to have been something like the shock people would feel if arguments over Scottish devolution led to a series of events that somehow led to the city of Bath being shelled by Welsh artillery.

We remember being shocked when we saw it on the news at the time, and it shocked us again now to be reminded how close we can be to chaos as we go about the familiar routines of our lives.

That's a misleadingly gloomy note to end on.  It's certainly no reason not to visit.  This is a beautiful, comfortable and welcoming place.  Maybe all the more reason to visit, as it's quite inspiring to see what the Croatians have built for themselves in twenty years.  Not just repairing so much of the war damage, but building all the services and facilities of a modern independent state.

Also, everyone we have met here so far has been unfailingly polite and helpful (and has spoken good English, which is a relief as we haven't got very far with learning Croatian) In fact the owner of our first campsite was so kind that she drove us the 10 km into Dubrovnik, then returned later to pick us up because Scooby wasn't allowed on the bus.

All in all, it's early days but we're loving it so far!

Home thoughts from abroad

Today we visited Punta Ristola, the most southerly point in Puglia.

We've still got a long way to go, a lot of time and a lot of miles, but from now on it's all more or less north.  We need to be back in the UK by the end of May, and we think it might be a bit of a shock.

As an exercise in optimism, we've set ourselves the task of listing ten things we miss about Britain.  It's odd that a lot of them turn out to be things that we grumble about in Britain, but during our travels we've found that compared to other places Britain isn't really that bad.

1. Friends and family.  We often used to neglect them when we were living in the UK, but it was good to know they were there.  We must remember to spend more time with friends in the future, if they still remember us when we get back.
2. Being able to speak to people using the past and future tenses, and understanding roughly how things work, or roughly how to find out how things work.  In Italy for example we don't even know how many police forces they have (we've seen Carabineri, Polizia Municipale, Polizia  Locale, Polizia Nazionale, Guardia di Finanzia, Polizia Penitenciaria, Polizia Forestale...), let alone which one we'd go to for help with a particular problem.
3. Road infrastucture.  Before we left Cardiff we used to grumble about the roadsigns in the Vale of Glamorgan, but places like Spain and Italy make even Vale of Glam look good.  Sometimes its caused by a lack of resources, but often doing it the UK way wouldn't have cost any more, it's just mystifying.  They must be working to other rules we don't understand.    Just three examples;
• two signs at a junction saying the same thing, pointing the same way.  That extra moment it takes to read them both, double take and re-read to check they really are identical, means missing the junction
• Numerous signs saying things like 'Motorhome parking this way' that lead you off into the Genoa one way system and then run out.  "Ha ha! Over to you now sucker!"
• Arrows painted on the lanes of dual carriageways that seem to mean nothing or to mean 'If you're in this lane, you might want to continue straight ahead or you might want to change lanes, it's up to you'.  One favourite, seen several times in Spain but never photographed (for obvious reasons), had the left hand lane marked as being for going straight on or turning right, and the right hand lane marked as being for going straight on or turning left.
4. Access to the countryside.  A source of much grumbling and campaigning in Britain, but compared to Italy the UK system of rights of way is brilliant.  At least in the UK you can spot a roadside footpath or bridleway sign and be pretty sure it's a place you can stroll with your dog for half an hour.  The bits of Italy we've visited have been nothing like as well supplied with country parks and marked walking paths.  In Italy (and parts of Spain and France) it's common for stretches of beach to be private.  That's not something we expect in the UK.  Bless the Crown Estate (which owns almost all the beaches and leaves them open to strollers).
5. Food.  Britain has a deservedly terrible reputation for food, but there are a few genuinely distinctive indigenous traditions we can be proud of and miss.  Specifically; pies (Spain has its empanadas, Italy its Calzone, but it's not the same as a hot meat pie, or even fruit pie), sausages (maybe we're missing our own sausage machine as much as anything), good mature cheddar, sweet pickles, rice pudding, salty Welsh butter and the variety of food from all over the world (particularly Asia) that you can get in Britain
6. Hikers' pubs.  Hard to find even in much of Britain, but the sort of place in the Peak District or Devon that serves bitter and pies (see above) to a crowd of walkers steaming infront of an open fire, firelight shining in those three bottles of single malt behind the bar that no-one ever seems to drink.
7. The BBC.  Before we left the UK the most value we got from our license fee was from their web site and 6 Music, but the output overall contains some really high quality material and it's all at least competently produced.  Italian telly makes you realise how high standards are in Britain.  In one place we had over 50 digital TV channels, but the only ones that weren't encrypted for subscriber-only access were poorly dubbed American B-movies, gameshows and poorly produced news programmes.  They often get their foreign news from American cable channels, broadcast unaltered with an Italian voice over.  Their news announcers struggle to read their autocue while gazing at the wrong camera.
8. Pavements.  In most of the places we've visited pedestrians, scooters, prams, street vendors, cars and trucks all have to share the road.  When there is a pavement, nobody knows what it's for, so scooters scoot on it, cars park on it and pedestrians amble about in the traffic.
9. The familiar people we've come to rely on and trust to help us out in a crisis; St Davids Veterinary Centre, our dentists, Rumney Hill Surgery, the physiotherapists at the DTR Clinic. Fortunately we haven't had any significant emergencies, but it just compounds the stress when you're having to look for help from strangers.
10. Scooby says he misses squirrels, cats that follow the rules and run away, and mud.

Arrivederci Bella Sicilia

It's very odd that Sicily has such a bad image in Britain.  If you mention that you're going there, the first things most people seem to think of are gangsters, then poverty and vendettas.  They'd have to think hard before they think of great wine, acres of fragrant citrus orchards, huddled clifftop towns, smartly dressed courteous people going out of their way to help visitors, blue and white wooden fishing boats pulled up on a sandy beach, Norman cathedrals decorated by Saracens,  gorgeous Greek and Roman remains, almond cakes and all things nice.

We'd heard enough good about Sicily to be really keen to get there, but were ready for it to be a bit of an intense and maybe scary experience.  The reality was warm and welcoming.  If we hadn't had other places to go to I think the only thing that would have made us leave would have been the summer heat.

There's something ridiculously thrilling about looking across the Straits of Messina from Reggio Di Calabria; such a famous stretch of water, so beautiful, and with so many other famous names on the other side.  When we saw it it was calm (no sign of the notorious whirlpool that nearly ended the Odyssey, although it's still there), blue, busy with ships (full of life and bustle and glittering wakes) with Messina glinting in the background and a clear view of Mount Etna off to the left (a perfect cone like a text book volcano, topped with snow).

We travelled clockwise around the whole island, sticking mainly to the coast but with a detour inland to Piazza Armerina and Enna.  We regretfully missed out the mountains as Stella's knee was objecting and the roads inland were hard work for a 3.5 tonne van.

A few highlights:

• Doric temples of astounding antiquity in astonishingly good condition.  It's an architectural style that is so well known and so often imitated that when first catching sight of one my first fleeting thought tended to be that a Victorian municipal library had been teleported to an uncharacteristically dramatic location.  Sicily has so many it's easy to get overwhelmed, but the group at Agrigento are as good as they get.  These date back to when Sicily was inhabited by Greek colonists, around 600 BC, and they're in better condition than the Messina to Syracuse motorway.

• Everywhere we went we came across frothy Baroque architecture.  The most famous sites (UNESCO World Heritage Sites) are the towns in the Noto valley which had to be rebuilt in the 17th century after an earthquake.  However, it's obvious that during the 17th and 18th century a lot of money was being spent all over Sicily building and refurbishing in the latest fashion.  I thought Baroque architecture was one of my least favourite styles, but it's grown on me.

• A group of eleventh century Norman mercenaries had the good fortune to find themselves in charge of Sicily. They built cathedrals and employed artists to decorate them with mosaics, most notably Capella Paletina and Monreale in Palermo.  The whole interior is full of saints, biblical scenes and geometric decorations.  Viewed close up, an astonishing variety of mosaic tiles have been used including many colours of glazed ceramic, glass and gilt.  With this, the artists have achieved amazingly subtle detail and tones, as well as a mass of shining gold around Jesus above the altar.  Some of the artists were local, some travelled in from Byzantium and some had a distinctly Arab style.  They were drawing on an ancient tradition – a Roman villa uncovered in Piazza Armerina has top quality mosaic floors from a thousand years earlier.

• Downtown Palermo.  A maze of romantically crumbling streets with mediaeval and baroque details peeking out everywhere.  A riot of life, trade and fun but with none of the feeling of danger we had in Naples, Marseille, or even Newbridge.
• And its natural heritage, a wonderful coastline.  All around the south and west coast there are sea cliffs and beautiful sandy beaches (no dog bans!)  In the northwest corner massive rock outcrops (actually marble mountains) loom over deserted grassy plains, rich in wild flowers – lovely poppies at this time of year - which merge into dunes and more sandy beaches. I'm sure their mountains are also wonderful, but not for this visit or this vehicle.

General impressions:

• Contrary to our preconceptions it seemed prosperous.  Apparently the Norman kingdom was the richest in Europe, and there was certainly plenty of money available in the 17th century to rebuild the towns of the Noto Valley (it clearly wasn't done on the cheap).  After Calabria the towns seemed well built and well maintained,  the people comfortable and the shops well stocked.
• It seemed friendly.  Everyone was polite and helpful.  People would go out of their way to help us with directions, advice, directing the van, even when we didn't need help. 
• With a few exceptions (driving, rubbish collection) it seemed well organised and orderly. Streets were swept, there was little graffitti, no beggars, no visible junkies or drunks, no jostling.  It wasn't obvious that anyone was enforcing any rules (but see below), people just seemed to be behaving themselves.
• Its culture is a wonderful cheerful mixture of influences from all over the Mediterranean and Europe.  A typical Sicilian town will have been a Greek colony with some Phonecian settlers, conquered by Rome, adopted by Byzantium, conquered by the Saracens who were ultimately expelled by the Normans, who ruled it until the Swabians took over, followed by the French, Spanish, British, French again, the Italians under Garibaldi, Germans for a short time, Americans for a while, then back to Italy.
• While Britons are a bit scared of Sicily, for some reason Germans have no such fear.  German is certainly the second language in the tourist trade.  We saw many many German registered vehicles during our visit, plus a fair few Scandinavians and Dutch, but only two from the UK in the whole trip.

But what about the gangsters? 

They're real, and they're still there, but they are serious professional criminals, busy people who have much more serious things to do than bother tourists. If anything the 'Mafia Peace' makes it a safer place to visit. Organised crime doesn't tolerate disorganised crime if it disrupts their own profitable activities.

The campsite we stayed at near Palermo was a few hundred metres from the memorial marking the place where Giovane Falcone, his wife and bodyguards were blown up by the Mafia in the 1990s.  According to some, the Italian state has made good progress disrupting the Mafia and weakening it (the bombers are in prison, businesses in Catania openly refuse to pay protection money).  It is also possible that the Mafia has changed its strategy, decided a war with the state is too much trouble and decided to take a lower profile.

"Don't pay preotection money" - poster campaign in Catania

Sicily knows it's known overseas for the Mafia, and the tourist shops are full of Mafia themed figurines and t-shirts.  Most of it seemed rather affectionate and romanticised, and in rather poor taste given the bloodshed.  I wondered if it really does come from affection, if it's just tourist shops giving tourists what they want or if someone's working a subtle public relations exercise behind the scenes.

These days the Calabrian gangs have an even more vicious reputation than their Sicilian counterparts, but it turns out that even they are not as bad as we thought.  When we crossed the Straits of Messina back to Reggio we called again at the post office and were delighted to find all our parcels were waiting.  The mafia gave us back our trousers!

Sicily is a wonderful island, we were sorry to leave and hope we'll be able to return one day.