Croatia Round Three, where I stay longer than two days, practice my flexible backpacking skills, strengthen and form friendships, inspire myself to keep going, and, of course, eat

This morning, after consuming one last homemade cookie, I said goodbye to Matea, my several-time couchsurfing host. Matea and her kids Jackson and Kaya first hosted me last September when I was bopping through former Yugoslavia the first time. This goodbye was bittersweet, as I am not sure when I will return to Croatia. As I gave Matea a final big hug, I had the feeling this would not be the last time we saw each other, so I have that hope propelling me forward.

Let me back up. In mid-April I had recently booked a ticket to Minneapolis for two and a half weeks, but before my flight in early May I headed to Croatia from Slovenia. My original plan (sans Minne-break) was to spend a few days in Zagreb, then head to the Plitvice Lakes National Park, then Bosnia, Montenegro etc, etc. But with my flight to Minneapolis being on May 2 from Zagreb, I decided to take the time to do some more visiting in Croatia, specifically along the coast.

After a few days in Zagreb repeat-surfing with Matea, Kaya, and Jackson, I took a day trip to the Plitvice (pronounced plit-veets-ka) (I think) National Park, a UNESCO-protected site and one of the most visited destinations in Croatia.

After a failed early start (I somehow ended up on the wrong bus; fortunately they checked tickets beforehand!) and a 2 ½ hour bus ride, I made it to the park, and befriended three American backpackers on the way down. They were from St. Louis, and I seemingly always put Midwest travels in my good book. We set off on different paths at the beginning of the park, but kept running into each other until we finally decided to finish off the last leg of the park together.

Plitvice is divided into the upper and lower lakes and is famous for its waterfalls, which are really hard to describe but fortunately I took a lot of pictures. It was a perfect, sunny day in the low seventies, and there weren’t a zillion tourists, so it made for a really pleasant day.

I said goodbye to the St. Louis girls since they had scheduled an earlier bus, and stopped at a restaurant outside of the the park, where I ordered the cheapest salad and a local beer, which turned out to be the perfect meal after a day of hiking and walking through this insane natural phenomenon.

I spent the weekend at Matea’s and helped her cook and bake. Since I last visited, Matea stopped translating for a living and has since taken up a small lunch catering business, which I was happy to help out with. She put me to work chopping vegetables, slicing bread, and divying up portions for her customers. It was a lot of fun, and really comforting to be hanging out in a kitchen again and learning about new recipes and tasting all the cool ingredients Matea has procured, like homemade pumpkin seed oil and fig jam made from the figs on her family’s seaside property.

Matea’s family is a bunch of meat eaters, but she did her best to accomodate me while I was staying with them. One of my favorite dishes she made was a sauteed cabbage and onion with pasta dish. (Note to self: still need recipe). Last fall, she asked me if I had a good brownie recipe, and I gave her my grandmother’s failsafe recipe. She’s been using it for her lunch customers, and calls them “Brownies a la Sophie.” Before I left for Minneapolis I had the pleasure of making them for her lunches the next day. All in all an amazing food/family experience.

The week before I went to Minneapolis, I decided to do some traveling along the Adriatic Coast. I had visited Dubrovnik last winter, which on the far south end of the country, but I had yet to visit any other cities. I decided to take a five hour bus down to Split, and then work my way up to Zagreb via Zadar, which Matea recommended to me as one of her favorites (plus an ice cream shop!)

Encountered at a bus stop en route to Split

I put up Couchsurfing requests for both Split and Zadar, and found up backup hostels if neither of them worked out. Fortunately a few days prior to leaving I got an offer from Ieva, a Latvian digital nomad who was basing herself in Split for the time being-how cool is that? I arrived in Split in the late afternoon and walked the thirty minutes it took to get to Ieva’s apartment from the bus station. I left my giant backpack at Matea’s and was just sporting a normal-sized backpack and a purse. It was so freeing to have such a small amount of stuff!

Ieva was one of the kindest, sweetest surfers I’ve come across. Given, I haven’t stayed with a lot of single female CS hosts, so maybe I was a little biased. This was Ieva’s first time hosting in Split, so she went a little overboard and had invited me and another two girls to stay with her- her roommate had left a few weeks earlier so she had plenty of space. The Argnetinian girl was there for only one night, and the Brazilian girl, Carol, was there the same amount of time as I would be. I can’t remember the last time I hung out with more than one woman without any men around. I think the other girls felt the same way. It was really refreshing, and we had a lot of fun cooking dinners together.

Carol and I went to the Island of Brac on the day that promised the nicest weather. We took about an hourlong ferry (after running to catch it, we thought we were buying our tickets 15 minutes in advance but it turns out the ferry was leaving within a minute). I can’t really even begin to describe how nice it was. I don’t know if I had ever been on an island before, and this visit definitely exceeded my expectations, whatever those were. The town was quiet and humming with construction workers getting ready for tourist season. Carol and I took a long walk along the beach to gaze in amazement at the clear water and the mountains in the distance.

Why am I here?

We had already eaten lunch before we arrived, so we stopped at a rooftop cafe at a hotel because they were advertising coffee and cake for 20 Kn (about $3). They attemped to make me an iced coffee, and the chocolate cake was fair, but the view of the town and the sea was unbelievable. For someone on a pretty tight budget, it didn’t feel as though I belonged in such a pretty, resort-like place. However, I just rolled with it, and enjoyed in the best I could.

The old town of Split was quite beautiful. It’s an old Roman walled city and was fun to walk through and explore all the back passageways. I was on the hunt to find Soparnik, a pastry baked like a covered pie with spinach and onions, and then sliced into pie pieces. Split is supposed to be famous for Soparnik, but I had a hard time finding it until I finally stumbled across a bakery that seemed to be frequented by locals and construction workers- always a good sign. I got my slice for 10kn ($1.50) and served to me on a piece of cardboard. It was greasy but adequately stuffed with spinach so I enjoyed it immensely.

On the outskirts of the walled city, Split had an amazing open market. I wandered through several times over the course of three days, buying fresh strawberries and dried fruit. Oh, the figs! The prunes! I have to confess, I’ve become pretty obsessed with dried fruit since I’ve been in Europe. Ever since Rodo in Bulgaria bought me some dried prunes, they’ve been a staple of my travel diet, though I only usually buy them in markets. Grocery stores are usually too expensive. When I got to Turkey, I stocked up on dried apricots and figs, and now anytime I see a good opportunity to buy dried fruit I take it. (As I write this, I wonder if this is why my backpack felt so heavy this morning.)

Boardwalk

After my third day in Split, I packed up my backpack and purse (along with a double-bagged hoard of prunes and figs) and headed to the bus station to take a three-hour bus along the coast north to Zadar. It was a beautiful ride, and I had the foresight to sit on the left side of the bus in order to see the coastal towns and sea much clearer.

#snapsfromthebus

No dice on a host in Zadar, so I booked a night at the Lazy Monkey Hostel (as opposed to the Drunken Monkey, their sister hostel) with the option to extend another night if I felt like it. I arrived at the hostel late afternoon, and there weren’t many people around, though there was plenty of daylight left, so I decided to head into the old town, similar to Split’s. It was a nice city center, but I could tell there wasn’t a lot to do, so I had half made up my mind to do a little more exploring the next morning and then head back to Zagreb.

It’s kind of weird to think that I’ve been in Europe over 10 months and this was the only other hostel I’ve stayed in while traveling solo. The first was last October in Veliko Tarnovo, Bulgaria, and I stayed in a couple of hostels in Kosovo with Michael, but I don’t really count those because I was traveling with another person. All the other times have been Couchsurfing and farmstays. This way of traveling has definitely kept my costs way down and my interactions with locals way up, but it has also kept me from meeting a lot of other travelers besides the ones I meet on buses, trains, in the streets, etc.

Outside of the walled city in Zadar

Enter the Lazy Monkey. Within an hour of returning to the hostel, I was sitting at the kitchen table with Tomas, an Argentinian and Josh, an Australian, watching a French man cook dinner with some provisions they had picked up from the supermarket. Romain was sauteeing garlic and onion before adding water, carrots, cabbage, potatoes, and some large hunk of bacon-like pork. I had already omnomed my dinner of oatmeal, peanut butter, and apple (hostels = budget meals, plus I had spent way too much on dried fruit :P) and at that point was on my first beer, which the guys had picked up at the store for me so I could avoid the triply-priced hostel offerings.

After a while of chatting and letting the aroma of Romain’s soup waft over us, Jason, an American, walked in to start making his meal. Wine was shared around the table, and we made ourselves a nice little family as we ate dinner. I had a little bit of Romain’s soup, mostly veg, because since becoming a vegetarian I’ve learned that any meat stock greatly upsets my stomach. Everyone was very friendly, and Josh and I practiced our French with Romain. Everyone had different reasons for being in Zadar, and we spoke almost as though we were old friends. It was a rare experience, and gave me a feeling not unlike what I had with the girls in Split, albeit for different reasons. Humanity amazes me, and it still surprises me how easily community can be formed among strangers. At that point I decided that I would stay another night instead of rushing back to Zagreb the next day.

The next morning, Jason and I decided to head into town together. The hostel was about a twenty minute walk from the old town, which increased to thirty minutes if you opted for the route along the beach. Umm, yes. So we made our way along the coast towards the city and ended up having a great conversation about traveling, life, ambition, all those things is brought out by a combination of mutual vulnerability set against the ridiculous background of the sea. After wandering the city a bit, we made it to the Sea Organ, which is a bunch of stone steps set into the sea. When the water rushes into the steps, some technology turns the waves into sound that increases its depth and tone with the intensity of the waves. Sooooo cool. We decided to hang out there for a while before heading back into the old town, and it was one of the most soothing places I have visited so far on this trip.

Later that night, after a break at the hostel, we headed back into town with Lindy, another traveler, to watch the sunset while sitting on the organ steps. It was pretty damn cool. There aren’t a lot of words to describe it. It was so beautiful.

So I guess these are the types of experiences I was looking for when I did this quick trip to the coast. It didn’t need to be completely planned out, as I was wont to do early on in my backpacking trip. Since then, I’ve become much more flexible with my time.  I had a healthy mix of Couchsurfing and hostelling experiences, and made some great friends, whom I hope to visit/have visit me sometime in the future. It also gave me a chance to clear my head before coming back to Minneapolis for a couple of weeks, and to give myself some fresh travel experiences to get myself excited about returning to Europe and forging through another six months.

Me, Jason, & Lindy