Croatia

I don't know whether the differences a traveler perceives when crossing a border are real or merely a product of his desire to see differences, but Croatia looked different to me. It was nicer than Montenegro. It had the same white or off-white colored houses and the same orange-tiled roofs, but the homes were larger and had more land. Many featured tidy walled gardens in front and rows of fruit trees or other plantings banking down the sides from the high ground of the house. Green spires of cypress trees dotted the rolling fields of long gold grass that flattened when the breeze blew and righted when it passed.

I would end up kind of fucking up this country. Apparently the place to be in Croatia are the islands that run up the whole coastline. But I never made it to them. I didn't have a set itinerary and by the time I decided to go to Hvar, one of the main attraction islands, all the good hostels were booked up. Same thing for the second island I was shooting for, Pag. This time I didn't procrastinate - there was a music festival I didn't know about and all the accommodation was booked solid. I'd also never planned on going to Montenegro at all and ended up staying five days, and that time was Croatia time. All these factors conspired to keep me on the mainland.

My first stop was Dubrovnik, the 'pearl of the Adriatic' as Byron dubbed it. Dubrovnik had been an independent city-state made wealthy by maritime trade, in the vein of Venice and Genoa. With its walled, medieval Old Town it was like a larger, more touristy version of Kotor, but admittedly more beautiful. It was like an outdoor museum. Pristine churches and palaces in the Venetian style and promenades of white stone polished by centuries of walkers to the smoothness of marble. You could slide down the street as over ice with just your socks on.

It was a lovely place, but it was expensive and crowded, and after a day and a night I was ready to move on. My next stop was Split, the site of the summer palace of the Roman emperor Diocletian. As a Classics major I was keen to see it and it proved cool enough. The people of Split have built their town into the actual ruins of the palace. This was novel, but the place would be better off as a museum. The halls and sanctums were full of cheap souvenir shops and I felt the Roman ghosts had been long ago expelled.

With the islands no longer a possibility I had one stop left: Zadar. Zadar was supposedly the least built up of the major coastal towns. I lucked out with a good hostel and my stay in this place ended up being the highlight of my visit to Croatia.

The music festival on Pag island I mentioned was called Hideout. It was a dance/house/electronic festival and apparently the partying was really hard. I'd been meeting refugees from it for a few days now on my way up the coast and my second night in Zadar I went with four of them who were at my hostel into the old town for drinks. We had a fine time and one of them, a kid from London of Mauritian descent, suggested an expedition to these famous lakes they have at Krka National Park. We all agreed to go and would leave early the next morning.

Our first bus left Zadar at 8 AM and two hours and two buses later we were at the park. The natural phenomenon contained there is called a karst, which is a formation of limestone ravines through which a river descends via a series of sinks and waterfalls. We hiked down a steep trail to the pools at the bottom where we could go swimming. Our crew was the people I'd gone out with the night before - two guys and one girl from England plus an Australian guy - along with a Belgian girl my age who'd been a tennis prodigy and had played in college in Alabama and with the most incredible long body for it.

We reached the bottom and changed into our swim clothes and scrambled down the roots of trees and the dirt banks (there was no beach) into the water. The lagoon was fed by a shelf of waterfalls twenty feet high and a hundred feet wide. The day was warm with the sun shining and the forested hills rose up above us and let me tell you it was quite a setting. After we swam for a while we made a picnic in a nearby park and then I laid down on my back to read while my new friends slept.

Where we transferred at some random town to get our bus back to Zadar we took leave of the guy who'd come up with the whole idea. He was going to Dubrovnik where he had a flight back home to London. It was a sad parting because we'd all gotten along well and had a fun couple of days together. The bus station was even playing some melancholy song - Everybody Hurts by REM I think it was - which was hilarious but also poignant. Croatia was ending.

That night the girls went to the local market and made fried sausages and boiled potatoes and salad for dinner. We ate this meal and drank wine at a picnic table in the front yard of the hostel in the gathering twilight of the day we'd made together. After dinner I made my plan to leave the country the next morning.

Slovenia was next, a stopover before I went to Venice to visit the old friend I had managed to get through to. I was leaving the coast - Central Europe lay ahead.