After 3 months of traveling through countries where the sun is worshipped fervently because it only makes an appearance rarely, I arrived in Croatia, a Mediterranean Sun Kissed land blessed with miles of beaches and over a thousand islands.
Having only heard about the country recently (embarrassingly enough), I tried to remedy by ignorance by learning a bit about it. Here are some interesting tidbits I learned.
Itsy Bitsy History
As far as countries go, it’s brand new, having been formed only in the 90s when Yugoslavia split up in a Civil war.
Yugoslavia and it’s Republics. Image courtesy of www.ciee.org
Prior to that, it existed as a Republic of Yugoslavia. It seems that Croatia got the lions share of the coastal land from the other republics when it was formed, almost as if the Croat king secretly told its people “All right, all of you quickly go and stand along the coast. Now!” That ended up nearly locking out their southern Neighbor, Bosnia, from having any coastline at all. But they weren’t having any of that. Somewhere in 1699 they laid claim to a town called Neum, squat on the coastline that Croatia was trying to get. So now the southern most coast of Croatia, which has the famous (and annoyingly touristic) town of Dubrovnik, was cut off from the rest of Croatia. In fact if you’re driving along the coastline of Croatia to Dubrovnik, you have to cross the border twice! Once into Bosnian territory and then out.
For Jodee and I, Croatia was supposed to be a quick stopping point towards the end of the European leg my trip where I’d meet up with friends, and then have Jodee join me from Chicago before moving on. As it happened, my knee started to hurt pretty bad and it turned out I needed a minor surgery to get back full mobility. It’s tough be a wanderer hopping on one leg. So we ended up staying back and taking in Croatia while I underwent my surgery and did a bunch of physical therapy. You can read about that here (blog coming soon…)
The good side is that we got to spend a month and a half in a beautiful country, make some new friends, and learn some Croatian.
The Beginning
I arrived in Croatia by taking a bus from Munich, through Slovenia, and ending up in the Island of Pag.
The Pag coastline as we drive onto it from the mainland
The island of Pag, to put a broad stroke of generalization on it, is the less glamorous and cheaper cousin of Hvar, the Mediterranean partying and Yachting hotspot. We visited Hvar on a yachting trip from Dubrovnik to Split. More on that later.
Pag is known for 3 things:
- The Cheese. Known locally as “Paški Sir”. They come in a lot of varieties from 6 months old to a few years. Needless to say, there’s a lot of cheesy foods there. In fact the only thing cheese was missing from was their sense of humor, which I found quite dry.
- The Lamb. Which supposedly has meat that is naturally salted, a side effect of them drinking salt water throughout their life. This supposedly results in Lamb Meat that is evenly salted and is claimed to be quite tasty. This might have been the case, but I felt their cooking process left much to be desired, and the end result was lamb that was pretty mediocre.
- The beach parties. Specifically, Zrče Beach Parties. It’s referred by some as the Croatian Ibiza.
Though Croatia is supposed to be cheaper than the rest of Europe, I found prices here still pretty high. I soon learned that the tourist season in Pag is essentially for 3 months. During those 3 months, the locals make enough money to last them 12! No wonder then!
Pag was a beautiful place to hangout with friends. We spent a good 2 weeks here taking in the sun and the DJs that flew in to perform. Or at least, we spent 1 week doing all that. During the second week, as I found out, the country of Italy had a national holiday. And so we had an Italian invasion as bus after bus of loud, drunk Italians swarmed the entire island, yelling phrases in Italian to each other.
After spending the next 5 days pushing through throngs of drunk Italians to get from A to B, we happily left and went on to our different destinations.
I took a bus to Zagreb where I spent the next week recovering, prepping for Surgery, and getting disappointed with Croatian Food. I’ve written more on our experiences with food in Croatia in my next blog.
After my surgery, Jodee and I spent the next couple weeks taking a sailing trip from Dubrovnik to Split, followed by a road trip up the coast, back to Zagreb. More details on that coming as well!
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