Why did you wait so long? Why is it worth the wait? Because friends this place is a gem! If you can go, go! If it's too much effort, you're not thinking of the same place.
We crossed into Croatia with an overnight ferry from Ancona, Italy. Thankfully we encountered a good samaritan who sneeked us into his cabin and let us use a couple of spare beds. This guy, Phil ended up forming part of our Croatia family and we spent the rest of the time here with this bloke and a couple of aussie girls.
We arrived with a beautiful sunrise in Split. This place is hardly talked up in the guidebooks but is amazing. The centre of the town is a unesco world heritage summer retreat for a roman emporer and we stayed here with the local fish market cranking up every morning with the latest catch of the day. The food and people here are fantastic! We left Split feeling seriously optomistic about our time in this country.
Boarding a ferry a few days later we met the rest of our Croatia family, sophie and Lucy, who by chance had been hagning out with Phil and it was set. We landed on Hvar Island and moved into a couple of apartments less than half the price of a dirty room in Europe and got comfortable. As a group we hired a boat and headed off around some of the smaller islands with plenty of beers and yummy grub. Spending the day diving off your boat into crystal clear waters( crystal clear!) playing music and lapping up the sun while the rest of Europe was getting flooded was good medicine.
After Hvar we ferried it to Korcula Island and traced Lorren's ancestry. Again we settled into an apartment in the middle of the old town, a stunning series of old buildings connected only by small alleys. Whilst here we celebrated halloween with a less than convincing costumes. We headed out to a tiny little village, called Putnap, in the middle of the Island and tracked down Lorren's extended family. After asking at the local olive merchant we were introduced to a different Ciprian family before being piled into a car and driven up to the true family.
Walking in unanounced with a bottle of the local red, we were welcomed completely and sat down to a meal of freshly caught fish, baked bread and homemade wine follwed up by desert. It was like they new we were coming... We met almost the whole family and were even updated on the state of the local billiards team!
We moved on to Dubrovnic, cruise ship capital and another unesco site. Seriously worth the time to get there because it was stunning. The walk around the old town walls, 30 metres thick, is breath taking as you look out into the bottom of the Adriatic and appreciate the little green islands sitting in the placid waters.
From here, we broke our family for a while and together we headed far up north, well past Spilt and took on the immense, again unesco, Plitvice National Park. A series of green (due to huge calcium deposits) lakes connected by hundreds of waterfalls and inhabited by the most curious fish. It was freezing here (snow on the groud when we arrived) and we hardly had the gear for it but worth every bit of effort. After treking around the park for 2 days we headed back to Split and took a ferry to Italy so that we could fly on to Egypt!
Unfortunately most of our croatia photos are unavailable to us because of hardware malfunctions but we will included the Plitvice photos and a few of the other places.