I can't get enough of the sun on my skin. I don't care if I'm leathery and cancerous in thirty years. The feeling of spending all day in the sunshine is so worth it. It's also worth the sick scent of salty BO and sunscreen and the tingle of warmth that I suspect will tingle it's way right on to a healthy sunburn. I've never known a stronger feeling of absolute, mindless contentment than the one I get from sitting in the sun by the water.
A logical life choice, of course, was to move from Queensland, Australia, where car license plates bear the cheerful slogan The Sunshine State and it is possible to sit in a teeshirt at midday in your backyard year-round, to London, United Kingdom, where the average temperature is 10.4C and for most of the year the sky resembles a collection of ancient, soiled bedclothes. I'm getting used to it, but I'm not going to lie about how much I started to pine for a sweaty, barefoot beach holiday.
I set off abroad on my own again. My taste for solo travel is a constant mystery to most of my friends, who I'm sure are worried I'll be dreadfully bored without them. It seems they can't imagine anything more horrible than getting to decide exactly what to do and when to do it, for ten days straight. If you haven't tried travelling alone, I suggest you do. The worst that can happen is you discover your company is intolerable — to yourself or to others — which is something you probably need to know anyway.
My notes for the first day of my Croatian getaway read as follows:
Tube late; coach delayed; plane delayed. This bodes well...
Such unbridled enthusiasm. I must have been hungry. What it should have said is: Leaving a chilly and unrelenting rain behind; all else irrelevant.
I fly into Zadar, because it's cheapest and conveniently central on the coastline. I change (very enthusiastically, with much flailing of limbs and two-legs-in-one-hole issues) into shorts at the airport and ask a few loitering taxi drivers for directions until I manage to stumble across the bus stop, and the local bus into town. Zadar, like just about every other city in Croatia, is arranged into two distinct parts: the pale stone haven of the old town, and everything else. I get off the bus outside the old town walls, with the intention of wandering in the warm afternoon through the centre to the seafront and making my way three kilometers or so back along the ocean to my hostel, charmingly named The Wild Fig, which puts me in mind of craggy Mediterranean cliffs scattered with fruit-laden trees and half naked ancient Greeks in gold painted headdresses. It's all very languid and peaceful.
Well, I've done a good job of being under-prepared, as per usual. I walk half way before realising I don't have a map, or battery on my phone, or really any idea where I'm going other than the name of the hostel and street address on a small slip of paper in my backpack. I walk what feels like maybe two and a half ks along the coast and assume I'm getting close. I dive inland into a spaghetti mess of little stone streets that swallow me for a good half hour before landing me kindly in the bustling central bus station. The hostel is supposed to be nearby — I have some vague memory of reading this on the website — so I count this development as 'progress'. Even better: there's a large, plastic covered map. Half the street names seem to be missing or abbreviated, but I find what I think will be the right street, try to mentally photograph the cartoonish square kilometre surrounding it, and set off. An hour later I'm back at the bus station cursing these winding roads to hell and wondering how I missed the street in the first place, as it seems to lead directly out of one end of the bus station. Anyway this is all very embarrassing but I find it in the end after having an effective tour of Zadar's suburbia and acquiring a charming tan line from the straps of my backpack.
I meet people the second I set foot in the hostel kitchen, and an hour later we're drinking wine and heading into the city centre for a festival in a vast dusty carpark lit with spotlights. This is the reason I don't fear solo travel. If you fancy company and have even the vaguest hint of social ability, you can have it. And if you'd rather wander about the wilds of some forgotten corner of the planet alone, musing on the tenuous nature of your life, you can do that too. In fact, you can do whatever you damn well please. And sometimes it pleases me very much to be shouting conversation with strangers over drum and bass and collecting coloured paper confetti in my hair.
I'm constantly amazed by the capacity of the ocean to slow time. The mere presence of a water mass and the lack of any kind of commitment throws me into a timeless daze and I suddenly feel like it's perfectly reasonable to eat when I'm hungry and sleep when I'm tired and sod everything I've learnt about having breakfast before midday and lunch right on it. People spend all day by the water. Leathery Croatian men wander constantly through the tangled streets under hanging branches of fig and pomegranate and olive. I pick figs where they grow wild and eat them sun hot and soft straight from the tree. Basically the only thing missing from this fantasy is the naked Greeks.
It's afternoon and I'm lying on the hot pebbles and watching a seagull glide over the little cove, the black tips of his wings parallel to the blue-on-blue horizon. The white wind caps of the sea roll in endlessly in my peripheral vision. Green flecks of polished smooth glass show between the pebbles on the beach — scattered tokens of other people's parties licked to smooth jewels by the sea. I'm reading Jack Kerouac and his wild winding prose suits a holiday. I lay there eyes open and daydream of neverending hot nights and foreign tongues on the air and other wonderful things that smell like grand adventure.
Wiry shirtless boys throw themselves dripping and whooping off the cliffs. I think I'll join them in a second, once I'm done with lying here like I'm beached and feeling the cold flecks of the Adriatic splash the soles of my feet.
Now, from Zadar it's an easy day trip to Krka National Park, which I gather is like a slightly less impressive version of Plitvice that has gained popularity by allowing people to swim beneath the falls. I've managed to collect a friend at the hostel (a girl from Brisbane — why do bloody Australians insist on clinging to each other? We're intolerable, aren't we?). A bus takes us from Zadar to Skradin. Next we're supposed to board a ferry that will chuff us upstream to the falls. Of course we walk well past the ferry stop and eventually hit a small information booth containing a cheerful clerk who informs us that we've come a kilometre past the ferry, and it's only four more ks along the river to the entrance. We hike it in our thongs (flip flops, jandals, whatever; you know I'm talking about footwear) and slowly shed sweaty items of clothing. It's actually a beautiful walk. We take a dip into the river along the way to ward off the midday heat.
My cousin, upon seeing a photo from my trip to Krka, mentioned the word 'soup'. This is a perfectly succinct description. I'm constantly torn between a seething hatred for tourists who ruin beautiful places and the horrific knowledge that I am their photo-taking, ice-cream slurping brethren. It's not a nice feeling, but I'm getting used to it.
We take turns swimming (where are all these people leaving their shiny precious DSLRs and iPhone5s while they frolick about all together down there in the water?). The lake is surprisingly cool, for soup. The water is blue-tinged and clear enough to see the pale rocks that make progress by the shore treacherous. There's a strong current pushing outwards from the falls, which are considerably more beautiful seen from the water. I float about for a bit and try to mentally photoshop everyone else out of my field of vision.
I revisit Zadar at the end of my trip and spend another two nights eating warm figs and drinking local wine on the beach. This city puts on great sunsets. People gather as the sun goes down and sit on a great set of stone steps that descends from the old town into the ocean. There's this haunting, moaning song that hangs over the whole scene, eclectic notes that are somehow harmonious, rising from the ground beneath the steps. It's the sea organ, an instrument played solely by the motion of the sea and the wind. It's beautiful, and one of only a handful in the world. It is a strange and unique soundtrack to sunsets in Zadar. On my last night in Croatia I walk to the old town with two girls I've met and we climb the bell tower to watch the sun sink low in the sky, then we sit by the organ as the sun sets and listen to the sea sing.
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