Most people who head on holiday to Croatia go straight to the coastline and Adriatic islands, which are dramatic and beautiful with their pebble beaches and shimmering turquoise waters. However, to get a true feel for the country you must head inland. There, we found a very different country; a forlorn, arid, half-abandoned place where the grasping thorns are steadily pulling down the many ruined towns, abandoned olive groves, and lonely churches.
CROATIAN ISTRIA
We entered Croatia after a short cycle south of Piran, where we immediately encountered a hellish border crossing (not very Schengen of you, Croatia, by the way). Traffic was gridlocked in both directions, and after winding our way to the front of the queue and being waved through after a cursory look at our passports we faced a steep climb in the roiling midday heat, along a road that was too narrow for cars to pass us. This meant that a queue of impatient Croatians formed behind us, some deciding to lean on their horns and kindly let us know we were delaying them, some deciding to barge past anyway, forcing us to essentially fling ourselves into the thorny underbrush at the side of the road. We finally reached the top of the hill and pulled over, exhausted, at a crappy service station to catch our breath.
The Croatian part of Istria beckoned. One of the most commercialised parts of the Adriatic coast, Istria is incredibly popular with Italian holidaymakers who come in such droves it's clear they didn't get the memo about being ejected from the region 50 years ago. Inland, it is a different story, with green rolling hills and small stone towns set amidst wild forests and pastures.
We headed inland first, to the hill fort town of Groznjan. Istria has a number of these fortified hill towns, which were occupied by rich Italians until they were ejected after the Second World War. For many years, they lay abandoned, until populations of local artists began using the town buildings for art studios. Still half-empty, Groznjan is a sleepy town with small shops selling art, olive oil, and horrendously overpriced local wine, with the village commanding spectacular views of the Istrian countryside beyond. Covered in vines, half-ruined, and almost totally silent outside the main centre, Groznjan is wild and beautiful and well worth a visit.
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| Streets of Groznjan |
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| Abandoned path leading out of the town, where the silence was palpable |
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| Local wildlife |
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| I can't be arsed to rotate these, just tilt your head, uploading the buggers is enough of a painstaking nightmare |
After camping in a forest on the side of the hill, we cycled to another hill fort town, the more well-known Motovun. It's bigger, higher, and more occupied than Groznjan, which sadly means that it is much more popular with groups of nasal American tourists. As always, the number of signs advertising an "authentic experience" were in inverse proportion to the number of authentic experiences actually on offer, and there were many such signs outside the many overpriced cafes and restaurants dotting the centre. Disappointed, we descended the hill and camped in a lovely field of sweet heather, livid wildflowers, and butterflies, weathering out a spectacular thunderstorm that raged all night.
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| Looking up at Motovun |
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| A local pooch |
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| Istrian landscape |
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| A wailing Scottish policeman was inside |
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| Inside abandoned guesthouse, foot of Motovun hill |
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| A sweet wild camping spot |
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| One of the area's many shrines |
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| Even more impressive than my watch mark: the face that we managed to camp at a 90 degree angle |
We cycled back to Istria's west coast along an almost silent landscape of waving low stony hills and vineyards with rich burgundy soil. We spent two nights in a decent enough guesthouse near the entirely forgettable coastal resort of Novigrad (meaning "New Town" in Slavic, so they couldn't even be bothered to give it a proper name), where we planned the next stage of the trip and ran various errands.
Next, we headed to Porec, an Istrian coastal town which boasted of winding medieval streets and Islamic architecture. What we found was a town populated by Italian teenagers wearing stupid hats, squalling babies, and yappy dogs. At ground level, the streets were full of identikit shops peddling shutter shades and Minecraft shirts and restaurants with garish laminated signs covered in repugnant pictures of vomitous pizza and brown kebabs. It was such a shithole that we completely abandoned our plan to work our way down the Istrian coast and left the town after just 45 minutes with a new plan to cut inland towards the ferry port of Breznova.
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| In place of a picture of Porec, I give you Venus: £1.70 for a litre of semi-sweet, sexy, Macedonian goodness |
Two days' inland cycle later, we reached Breznova, a tiny ferry terminal with regular 15-minute hops to the island of Cres, and managed to get on said ferry with no drama. Cres itself is one of the least developed islands in the Adriatic, a high stony ridge of land rising sheer out of the water covered in sharp stones and twisted trees. We spent our first night bivvying under the stars in a field off the island's only main road, disturbed in the night by a wandering sheep, which stood confused in the darkness like a fat white ghost as I tried to shoo it away. The road continued the next day, clinging spectacularly to the side of the ridge as it climbs steadily up and then sharply down, and we enjoyed jaw-dropping views of the shimmering Adriatic as we flew down it towards the port town of Cres itself.
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| Towards Cres |
CRES
Cres is a charming little port with maze-like streets and an appealingly sleepy feel and I bought a baseball cap to mark the occasion, as well as investing in a mask and snorkel.
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| Cres town |
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| It's just as geographically accurate this way round |
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| The stony ridge of Cres |
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| Replenishing water in one of Cres town's taps |
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| More glorious cycling on Cres |
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| The cycle towards Cres town |
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| Diagonal bivvying in Cres' stony embrace |
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| The "no stress" cap has now been through a number of stressful situations and is permanently stained with sweat. Nice! |
The second purchase was a particularly astute one; Croatia's island beaches are almost all pebbles rather than sand, meaning the waters are incredibly clear and excellent for snorkelling. We climbed up, then down, to a sheltered beach surrounded by cliffs at the foot of a steep path. It was very crowded - Cres has a lack of beaches - but we managed to find a place to set up the tent for shade and spent the entire day drinking dirt-cheap Macedonian wine, cooling off with frequent snorkel trips around the bay, and eating an excellent haul of unctuously sweet soft wild figs picked from the roadside. One by one, the other beachgoers departed, and by 7pm we were the only ones left. We cooked our dinner under the stars and slept in the tent with the doors open, lulled to sleep by the lapping Mediterranean.
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| Picking wild figs |
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| Pleased with the haul |
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| The end result: a salad of local prosciutto, mozzarella, and sweet sweet figs which was so good it's making me angry that I can't experience it again right now |
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| A crowded beach |
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| More sexy, sexy Venus wine |
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| Wait long enough, and you have it to yourself |
Rejoining the road, we cycled to the southern island of Lonsinj, a forested and less sheer island connected to Cres by a laughably small bridge. Mali Lonsinj is the main town on the island and - crucially - was large enough to contain a seedy sports bar which agreed to show the United game for me. One hard-fought 1-0 win over Hull later, we hopped over to Sveti Martin beach on the other side of the island to bivvy, again, under the stars.
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| Sveti Martin by night |
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| A morning swim |
We spent the entire next day and night on this beach, which had everything we needed - a pine forest at the water's edge for shade (and discretion when it came to camping), warm turquoise waters with bright fish, and a bar at the end where we could replenish our water bottles. We left thoroughly relaxed to board the five-hour, gloriously air-conditioned, ferry to Zadar back on the Croatian mainland.
ZADAR to SPLIT
Zadar was a nice surprise, being perhaps the least well-known of the three Adriatic ports on the Croatian mainland (the other two being Split and Dubrovnik). The surrounding suburbs have a hipsterish down-at-heel feel to them and the historic centre, on a jutting peninsula, has Roman ruins and a decent market selling local produce. Having purchased a bag of dried figs in honey from said market, we spent a few hours next to the sea. A local artist has produced a sound installation where microphones pick up the sound of waves and converts them to strange moaning sounds; producing a kind of endless, organic ambient music. Pretty cool.
Most cycle tourists we met had attempted the coastal road from Zadar to Split to resume the island-hopping on the Dalmation islands to the south of Split. Most had returned with horror stories about endless seediness, bad roads, and roaring traffic, so I planned a route that took us inland down the Eurovelo 8 Mediterranean route.
This route was very quiet indeed and we were often the only two people around. We cycled through a landscape dominated by looming bare mountains on one side and hills covered in olive trees and dense, thorny underbrush. Many of the buildings were in ruins, with rotted doors hanging open and collapsed roofs, and the ones that seemed occupied seemed in a permanent state of suspended construction, with unrendered walls, unfinished upper stories, and rusted cement mixers in the front yard.
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| Ghost towns in mainland Croatia |
At the end of the first day we arrived at Skradin, the town at the edge of Krka national park, and cycled a 4km dirt track running down a steep lush valley to the edge of the national park itself. Sadly, they wanted 30 quid each just for entry, and we only had an hour to spare, so we decided against going in and found a great camping spot in what seemed to be an old, long-forgotten walking trail at the top of a hill overlooking the valley. It was only later that we learned that much of the countryside in this region is unused because of the many landmines that still lie hidden as a legacy of the Yugoslav Wars. Whoops!
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| Looking down on Skradin |
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| The cycle towards the national park |
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| Isn't your neck getting a good workout from all this? |
The next day, many arduous hills later, we arrived at the bay of Split, heading first to the handsome port of Trogir on the other end of the bay. This required us to take a section of the nightmarish coastal road, which we found to be almost worse than the horror stories; Croatians are not used to cyclists, and we were routinely cut up and pushed to the side of the road by an endless stream of honking buses, campervans and cars. Some of the more gormless individuals would stick shaven, ugly heads out the window and yell Croatian obscenities at us as they went past in their shite little cars, which was certainly very big and clever of them.
And that's all I have time for: tune in next update for our experience in Split (or, as I have taken to calling it, "Splithole"), some more island-hopping, and a visit to Dubrovnik, before we braved the southern Balkan countries and had a very goaty experience indeed.
