A couple of weeks back, one of my oldest friends and I, Jen,
took a jaunt to beautiful Croatia on a trip which ultimately changed the way I
think about travel and how I like to spend my holidays.
To give you a bit of background, I haven’t been on a hot
summer holiday for three years, as evidenced by my stark white complexion and
deep jealousy of everyone I know as they return to the office with glorious
olive skin. My lack of travel has been down to a combo of skintness, singleness
and all-around lack of time.
So last year, Jen and I decided enough is enough and that we
would get our asses on a plane this September and widen our horizons. Everyone
had been raving about how spectacular Croatia is so we booked tickets and (kind
of) planned a route through the islands from Split to Dubrovnik.
So we packed our backpacks (which I would deffo recommend
over a suitcase) and headed to Gatwick at 3.30am on a sleepy Tuesday morning.
We decided to head early so that we left ourselves enough time – turns out we
got there an hour before we could even check our bags in at the self service
Easyjet bag check with our e-tickets. Besides feeling very high tech and
hyper-organised, the rest of the journey to Spilt was pretty uneventful.
When we arrived in Croatia, we took the bus down to the
centre of Split, which was very straightforward and super-cheap. It was then
that we encountered our first problem. The only accommodation pre-booking we
made was an Airbnb, which we assumed from the description was in Split itself.
It was not. It was about 25 minutes taxi drive away in a completely different
town called Podstrana. When our taxi driver informed us that it would cost 150
Kuna, I had a minor heart attack – as it turned out, this actually worked out
at about £15 each, but at this point I hadn’t wrapped my head around the
exchange rate.
The apartment was up a steep hill in a housing development,
miles from Split. It was very cheap, costing about £17 for the night, so we weren’t
expecting 5* luxury. However, it had a dodgy front door and didn’t feel particularly
safe and had no bin in the entire flat. It’s not somewhere I would recommend
and what we learned from this is that you need to be very careful when you book
apartments like this.
Once we had worked out the simple and cheap bus system, we headed into
Split itself. We visited into the Diocletian's Palace where traders have set up craft and
jewellery stalls and wandered around the streets, Lonely Planet book in hand.
Although there wasn’t a huge amount to do in Split, one
thing I would totally recommend is finding a place to admire the view from (I
do love a good view. It’s how I know I’m getting on a bit). We stumbled across
a bell tower that you could pay 30KN (about £3) to climb. The exhausting trek
to the top was fully worth it for the dramatic view over the whole of the city.
We then wandered around for a bit, getting momentarily discombobulated and a smidge lost, found ourselves again and rewarded ourselves with a cocktail and then dinner, our
first taste of Croatian cuisine. I will be putting up a separate post all about
the food lights of our trip – keep your eyes peeled!
After being accosted by a couple of brightly dressed
pub-crawl reps offering a neon-themed drink fest, which sounded about as
appealing as having someone stroke my foot for an hour (for those who know me,
you will know just how cringe that is) we went up to Cafe Bar Vidilica on the
hill on the west side of the city. This involved a lot of walking, which became
an on-going theme of this trip. Again though, it was fully worth it for the
view from the top.
We then headed back on the bus to our wilderness apartment,
unfortunately missing the stop entirely and having to take a route back through
a silent housing estate. After a disconcerting incident where a car slowed down
to our speed and some men shouted at us out of the window in Croatian, we
hurried back to the flat and went to bed. Apart from a loud and slightly
aggressive man on the bus to the ferry the next morning, this was the only
unpleasantness we experienced on the entire trip and on the whole, the locals were
really friendly and welcoming.
I have to say, I should have heeded the warnings about Spilt
– although it was very pretty, there wasn’t much to do and we ended up
sitting around drinking cocktails for a large chunk of time. Although that’s
far from a bad thing. It was a nice start, however, to what turned out to be an
amazing trip... read in next week to find out where we went next!
