Sailing Through Croatian History

Croatia, Dalmatian Coast, July 2011

So here I am on the bow, left holding the handle of the boat hook, while the boat hook chose to separate from the handle just as I was picking up the buoy mooring line and is now floating away past the boat. What is one to do?

Oh, I know, I jump in the engineless dinghy, rescue the boat hook, paddle back to the boat now circling the windy anchorage… windy being the meaningful word, as I and the dinghy are swept downwind, hanging for dear life on the mooring line of a neighbouring catamaran. As I wonder what my next step should be, I notice the boat hook gingerly floating by within my reach and Kuno with the boat just positioned downwind between me and the town quay doing his best not to run aground. I let go, landing on the boat, the boat engine spewing cooling water into the dinghy and all over me, but victoriously holding the errant boat hook. Welcome to the land of crazy mooring ways, furious unexpected winds and lightning storms, regular VHF radio marine weather forecasts that may or may not happen and may or may not be accurate, deep blue water, history that reaches thousands of years back and the most picturesque villages and towns that I have seen in my travels. Croatia.
 

Croatia is a land of memories for me, and Kuno and I visit many places where I used to go on vacation with my family as a kid. I don’t remember the particular places other than by names, but I vividly remember the smells and sounds – the warm wind on the ocean smelling of pine needles even half a mile off land, the cicadas that create a racket in anchorages, the smell of lavender and grilled fish as we walk along the town quays. We pick up our 37ft sailboat in Dubrovnik and wind our way through the central Dalmatian coast, visiting the islands of Mljet, Korcula, Hvar and towns like Trogir and Split on the mainland. Our friends Peter and Serap hop over from Turkey and join us for the first week. Having three weeks is a luxury with distances between anchorages being relatively short. We spend most of the time exploring the incredibly beautiful villages and hiking the trails (or sometimes lack of) up the mountains for the next best view. Geocaching keeps us honest (if there is one in the neighbourhood, we have to find it) and we generally have to climb at least one hill a day. Kuno insists on taking shortcuts and our legs are full of scratches as we bushwack our way through the islands. I am beginning to understand why our daughter chose to go to school instead. Occasionally we rent a car, moped or bikes and buzz around to see more of the area. The countryside here is full of abandoned forts and palaces, remainders of bygone era, now overgrown by wild vegetation. Grape and olive groves planted in endless amount of perfect ancient stone walls (we are trying to decide if Croatia has more than Ireland) neglected, growing wild, but still producing. We also find sad reminders of the wars of not so distant past; second world war and the independence war of the nineties.  The history of Croatia is rich, with remnants of Illyrian and later Greek and Roman presence evident everywhere, and most impressively related to the time of the marine merchant Republic of Dubrovnik, one of the most powerful republics on the Adriatic, competing only with Venice. Within our short trip, we visit three Unesco heritage sites – Dubrovnik, Trogir old town and the Diocletian Palace in Split. We leisurely sip an espresso while sitting on Roman steps, investigate the precise construction of stone church towers that belies their age, try to figure out the timing sequence of a church being built from a Roman mausoleum that was built on top of an Illyrian temple, admire the streets of white stones so polished by centuries of use that one has to take care not to slip. I have a fleeting comparative thought to the Haida Gwaii culture and history that we explored just a few weeks ago, separated by so much more than miles from the history here. Just like in all places around the world that we like, we hypothesize about having a property here. Perhaps getting into a bed and breakfast business, or olive oil and wine production, having a little mechanical repair shop, restoring an old mansion…?

Our evenings are my most favourite time. On the heels of the afternoon siesta, the heat of the day subsides and the towns come alive. Every little seaside town is full of konobas (restaurants) set up along the water, in abandoned gardens or within the walled perimeter of what used to be, a long time ago, a house. Tables are set up in every nook and crany and sometimes it is not obvious where the actual restaurant kitchen is. When we sit down it is not clear where the waiter will appear from and sometimes we see them walk from around the corner or for a block or two to bring us our drinks. That makes it challenging when trying to figure out where the washroom could possibly be. But everyone is very nice here and their English is impressive. I can read and understand much of the Croatian language, being of Slavic origin as my own language, Czech.

Markets and grocery stores stay open late into the night and we often can’t resist and return to our boat loaded with goodies. Kuno, true to his boating motto “You don’t want to run low on diesel and chocolate” investigates as many kinds of chocolate as possible, while I can’t get enough of the fresh bread. The vegetables here taste much more real than at home – all much firmer and tastier (tomatoes and carrots are to die for here) but some also more bitter (cucumbers).

Sailing here is interesting by the variability of the wind. We are surprised by the fierce nature of sudden winds that can arrive at any time – they even have names: bura, tramontana, jugo, mistral and sirocco, depending on the direction they come from. We try to listen to weather forecasts but they are unreliable or inconclusive. We try to find the safest anchorages for all possibilities, limiting our options. In some way, we expected to find more secluded, safe harbours. We encounter clouds so

sudden and dark that we call them Dementors (as in Harry Potter…), rain squalls so fierce that we don’t see the boats anchored next to us and lightning is so frequent that after a while it is almost a non-event. Anchoring and mooring is an adventure in itself and I have yet to execute a mooring job without some calamity or other. Kuno seems to take it in stride; by now he is used to me tying the line to the cleat on the wrong side of the stanchions, throwing a line to the person on the quay too early so that it lands in the water instead, and, of course, the infamous boat hook episode (that was only partially my fault). Most anchorages are too tight to swing around, so it

 is either a stern tie, picking up a lazy line from a restaurant or town quay, or tying between two buoys in the middle of the bay. Or, if you are on the island of Lastovo, tying up inside an abandoned submarine tunnel – I am not kidding, very James Bondish. Initially we are puzzled by people hanging their fenders when on anchor, but after some time it becomes obvious that this is not a bad practice, as anchorages are packed really tight and many boaters don’t seem to have a clue about anchoring properly. And so we too, on occasions, put out our fenders at night. Our sailing dignity, however, does not allow us to sail with fenders out, although even that seems to be a common practice here.

We are on our last few days in Croatia before picking Tatiana up from Oxford and continuing to Italy. We have saved the candy for last – the walled city of Dubrovnik, which we will explore in the next 3 days. Tatiana is having a great time in her school, making lots of friends and loving her school work. So great in fact, that she frequently forgets to text us and if she texts, it is very cryptic. That is a good sign, although we do feel a bit neglected. On the other hand, it is wonderful to just hang out together as a couple. We remind ourselves how in sync we can be and how easy and relaxing life is when one gets out of the crazy routine. What a happy time for all three of us, in our own way.

London in a week

1 - 9 July 2011

“Please turn off all your electronic devices, as they can interfere with the plane’s communication systems during landing” announces the captain. I think about the logic of my little e-reader causing an aborted landing, but acknowledge that perhaps this is not the time to debate the ridiculousness of this statement. I obey the request and we safely land in the amazing, fantastic, incredible city of London. While we wait the four long hours before we can check into our apartment, we take a hop on-off bus tour of the city. Tatiana snoozes through much of it, as it now is 4 am for us, but I take in the sights that I only vaguely remember from almost thirty years ago when I was here last. Not much has changed – Lord Nelson still stands on Trafalgar Square and the changing of the guard in front of Buckingham Palace still attracts gazillions of people. The Tower Bridge guards the city as it has for centuries, but a new bridge is of interest to us, die hard Harry Potter fans. After all, every decent Harry Potter fan would recognize the Millenium Bridge in their sleep, expecting the Dementors to swoop in any minute. Our week long visit in fact ends up revolving around the Harry Potter theme. Not only do we get to visit all the London sites where the movies were filmed, the timing of our visit could not have been better, as the red carpet premiere of the last movie in the series is happening this week. Fans start staking good viewing spots in Trafalgar Square on Monday - for a

premiere that is happening on Thursday! It is cold and drizzling but the fans are obviously dedicated. By 6 pm on the day of the premiere, walking through Trafalgar Square is almost impossible. Tatiana is besides herself with excitement and gets a lift on Kuno’s shoulders. She can just make out Emma Watson on the red carpet via a giant screen in the middle of the square. I wonder what Lord Nelson thinks about all of this, watching from high above.

Tatiana is somewhat dismayed with us, calling us “tourists”, as we immerse ourselves into the hoopla of summer London and visit all the possible attractions a typical tourist would. She calls herself a “world traveler” and obviously visiting attractions is beneath the world traveler class. However, that doesn’t stop her to immensely enjoy Madame Tussauds wax museum, taking pictures with, who else, Daniel Radcliffe aka Harry Potter, Lady Gaga, Enstein, and, OMG, Justin Bieber. She likes the visit to Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre and loves the giant 3 storey M&M store on Leicester Square. Her favourite restaurant ends up being the (original) Hard Rock Cafe. Who is the tourist now? We make a trip to Greenwich and spend some time investigating the intricacies of solving the challenge of determining the longitude (I suspect that Tatiana grasps the concept way better than I do), take an evening ride on the London Eye, have fun transporting ourselves through the history of British music in the Music Museum (wow, it makes you realize how much good music originated from British bands and also how old we are, clearly enjoying the memories of the eighties, seventies, sixties … , you get the drift, music, while Tatiana can only relate to the last section of the exhibit), attempt to shop on Oxford Street and Covent Garden (with neither one of us being a very good shopper, we come out empty handed and exhausted). Tatiana and I have a great time exploring Harrods, noting that they have a big sale on. We visit the shoe department and try on numerous shoes off the sale rack – with prices down to 1,000 pounds from original 3,000+. A girl just loves a bargain! For the first time in my life I put a Loboutin shoe on my foot, expecting nirvana, but to be honest, it is not much more comfortable than my regular shoes. The three inch heel doesn’t help. We wonder if the elephants that Harrods sells are currently on sale too? The performance of Wicked one evening is outstanding.

Time flies by and soon it is time to take Tatiana to Oxford and part our ways for the next few weeks. While Tatiana is ecstatic about ditching her parents and hanging out with her age group for a change, we are getting more nervous as time passes. On a rainy Friday we take Tatiana and her enormous bag on the train to Oxford and check her into the Oxbridge Prep program. For the next three and half weeks Tatiana will be roaming the ancient Corpus Christi College at Oxford University, taking Creative Writing as major and Speech and Debate as minor (do we really need a child that debates even better in the future?), and do who knows what in her free time. We spend our last two hours together shopping for posters to decorate Tatiana’s bare dorm room and by the time we are finished we can

tell that she now wants us gone. Reluctantly we leave, but not before extorting a few hugs and kisses and leaving a plethora of rules, surely to be broken. Before leaving Oxford altogether, Kuno and I visit the Bodleian Library, site of yet another Harry Potter movie scene, but more importantly one of the largest university libraries in the world, with documents dating back to Gutenberg and beyond. The rule is that a copy of anything printed in Britain, book or magazine, is given to the Bodleian library and so every day the collection grows. We return back to London in the evening, feeling strangely unsettled, a part of us missing, left in Oxford.

On our last day in London we recover and take advantage of being able to do
the things that a teenager would not enjoy (well, at least not our teenager). We visit the Cabinet War Rooms and Winston Churchill museum and in the late afternoon, attend the crowning glory of our visit – an Evensong service at the Westminster Abbey. We sit in the nave under Shakespeare’s memorial, our feet resting on Lawrence Olivier’s stone, memories of other famous people surrounding us. The music is beautiful and as I sit here, I let the words slip past me, not trying to understand; I feel the awe that comes with being present in a place like this, the organ and choir creating the backdrop for a strange feeling of elation and happiness, sense of being light and peaceful. My eyes are drawn along the columns to the high arches and stained glass windows. I notice that lifting up is the natural thing to do, but as I try to run my eyes down the columns, I feel resistance. How strange… On our way out, we light a candle with a wish to keep Tatiana safe and happy. Tomorrow we leave for Dubrovnik, Croatia.