Rebounding down an iffy coast road on the spur of Peljesac, I peek at the lustrous Adriatic and catch sight of the island of Mljet.
Many Croatian place names look like typographical errors : Losinj, Krk, Pag, Unije, Hvar. Call for a new proofreader!
Such names, with their emphatic, truculent consonants, are one of the charms of foreign travel. Strange languages, weird peoples, missing vowels and missing teeth, too , if this pot-holed, rubble-strewn road continues much longer.
The crickets aren’t just singing, they’re shouting. Sunlight beats down and a bleating goat suddenly breaks cover from the bushes.
Below us, at the end of this steep trail which looks hardly wide enough for a pregnant goat shimmers a tiny inlet where we are hoping to get a bar and a tiny pebble beach.
Gripping the steering wheel, I develop a critical thirst for a cold pivo (beer) and a chaser of one of those pelinkovac fire waters.
Another Croatian day, another excitement. This Dalmatian coast feels like Spain in the Seventies ; many towns unsignposted and little more than two farmhouses.
I enjoy the roughness, the otherness of Croatia. There’s love in its gnarled old farmers, in its tumbled outhouses, in the simpleness of its facilities. Paradoxically, its poverty may be a tremendous asset for the tourism trade.
We’ve had three of our past 4 summer vacations in Croatia, doing battle with our Serbo-Croat phrasebook (Bok! We cry in greeting to locals, frequently to be met with faintly suspicious stares) and negotiating the enchantments of cevapcici sausages and peceno odojce (suckling pig).
2 of our vacations were in the Croatian north-west, in Istria, across the water from Venice.
Istria could have been Shakespeare’s Illyria. Strolling its coastal towns at dusk, you can imagine yourself running love errands for Duke Orsino in 12th Night. Istria is Italianate, but doesn’t have the Latins’ swagger, meaning it is more quiet.
Last Aug, we attempted the south of Croatia, flying cheapo to Dubrovnik, then getting a automobile from a chaotic outfit at the airfield (tip : avoid the guys of Kompas automobile rentals) before driving 2 hours north to Peljesac.
After we turned left on to the peninsula, the drive became enchanting : empty mountain views, a level full of vineyards and then our fishing town, Trstenik. First sight of pretty Trstenik was from the high road its harbor wall, ruined roof tiles and compact setting under the wooded hillside.
This essentially brought cries of ‘Wow!’ from the mutinous teenagers in the back. After we reached the town we found it had a dozy, dusty charm, dogs wandering the street and sleepy waiters sitting by their all-day cafeterias.
Peljesac makes Istria look thrusting. Croatia charms because it is not like busy, over-populated, globalised Europe. It does not gush modernity.
It doesn’t primp itself or sashay down the promenade, showing off its energy. We found no disco in Trstenik, thank heavens.
The teens (only fourteen and thirteen) did not mind. They spent their time jumping off the harbor wall into the blue water and eating pizzas as huge as Mercedes hubcaps. We took a rough small ship out one day and they all giggled when I made a rubbish of the navigation.
Though it was summer season, the place wasn’t packed. Croatia ambles along, the service slow, the prices lower than Britain. The superstore in Trstenik wasn’t much of a place, but we could buy cheese from an ancient farmer under the town tree.
The adults’ faces here have a lean quality wary, non-public. There’s a lot of current history in Croatia. Perhaps it’s my imagination, but I look at the middle-aged men and wonder what they did in Croatia’s ‘Homeland War’ in the early Nineties, when the Croats fought to escape from Serbian-controlled Yugoslavia.
If there’s gravity in these Peljesac men, who can blame them? Miro owns the Villa Silencia we have leased (and true to its name it’s pretty silent, save when the student cruise boats moor on a couple of nights).
He’s a former engineer who got sacked in the industrial mess after the war. Each morning, tar-throated Miro silently considers the seafront, watching the lobster pots being emptied. He unobtrusively brings our child a large cake on her 13th birthday, then softens into the shadows.
With a few delicate, retreating words he supplies us with grapes from his vine and the juiciest figs I’ve ever eaten. His son takes us out in his speedboat. Miro lives upstairs, sitting in his eyrie and watching the tiny Mljet ferries chug in and out of Trstenik.
We do the two hour journey to Mljet one day in an oily 12-seater which we christen HMS Sickbucket.
It is skippered by a Tom Conti lookalike who fought in the war and talks up the other halves. Mljet is surprisingly quiet. Odysseus holed up here for some time. You envisage to meet him round every pine tree.
Dalmatia is almost virgin coast for scores of miles. Much of the housing appears Napoleonic, though ugly bungalows have sprouted in Orebic, half-an-hour north, where you catch an auto ferry to Korcula.
When such a lot of continental Europe’s shore has been wrecked by moneymen, it seems a miracle that the bulldozers and multinational hoteliers have not grabbed this beautiful place and ripped out its guts.
Croatia has been saved by its political inheritance of commie isolation in the Tito years and then the violent struggle against the Serbs. Might that soon change? Having won their autonomy, the Croats might be about to surrender it again, this time to Brussels.
Depending on a vote, Croatia could join the ECU in 2013. Croatia’s currency is the kuna, but the euro is accepted by some small firms (our boat-hire man quoted his price in euros, but took kunas).
Even without the euro, Croatia’s face is changing. Since 2009, all EU citizens have been able to acquire real estate in Croatia on the same basis as Croats. Before then, foreign buyers had to get permission from the Ministry of Justice a technique that took anywhere from one or two months to a few years.
As foreign buyers move in, architectural styles are changing. The place is being tarted up, dollified, its specific identity blunted. The same is occurring agriculturally. With wine production now subsidised by the Croatian state in an EU-related policy, small-holdings are vanishing and the farmyard goats are yielding to something more effective, less sundry.
Black new highways are being built, as well , smashing through the country. We must experience the rubble-strewn tracks while we can , writes tagza.com.
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