Ciao Croatia

After nearly six weeks of exploring this wonderful country (with a few side trips elsewhere in between), our time in Croatia has come to an end. This last part has been spent in Istria, the Italian-influenced region of Croatia. The area is renowned for its food and wine.

But first we had to get back here. Leaving Switzerland we went through a long tunnel in our car - on a train! You literally drive onto the train, then stay in your car while the train takes you through the tunnel. We realised we did this same trip with the kids eight years ago. It was still fun!

We drove quickly across northern Italy en route to Croatia. We had one night in Italy. The town we stayed in was on a lake and it was really busy. We didn't like it much but the view from our balcony at night was pretty amazing.

It was a long couple of days of driving but we arrived in southern Istria at last. We picked up John's bike from the lovely apartment owner in Bale who looked after it for us then we drove onto a coastal town called Premantura. This turned out to not be much of a town unfortunately. The water wasn't so clear here, the rocky beaches were crowded and the bike tracks were pretty rough.

John still had some good bike rides though and I hired a bike one day too. We had a good ride and I loved the part where we rode across a bay on a narrow track. I got too hot towards the end of the ride though. It was usually in the low 30's each day and that's a bit hot for me when I'm huffing and puffing up hills.

We left Premantura and drove through the lovely town of Rovinj. This is a popular tourist town but it seemed to cope with the numbers well. It was a beautiful place.

We went into a church and, much to our surprise, we found a Lycian tomb inside. Remember all the Lycian tombs we saw in Turkey? It turns out that the saint of this church was buried in this one apparently. We have no idea why.

Also, to our surprise, we witnessed an extreme version of the European tradition of taking dogs everywhere when this guy brought his dog into the church!

Some of the buildings in Rovinj were lovely.

I loved these chillies for sale at a market.

We drove further north and arrived in the hilltop town region of Istria. The towns here are often built on hilltops for easier defence but, visually, they're spectacular. Towns like this are scattered all around the region, but the town we stayed in, Motovun, was truly stunning.

We had a ball here. We had a fantastic apartment with a table and chairs outside overlooking the amazing view. We loved it! In the photo below we had just bought some local cheese with truffles plus some wine. We found dry biscuits in our apartment and bought a few figs. Instant cheese platter! To top it off, there was an old guy next door and his friends were the waiters from our favourite restaurant across the road. They were all enjoying a drink in their break so we shared all our drinks and cheese around (hence the two glasses in my hands). We love these unexpected fun interactions with people.

Our fun waiters. We ate at their wonderful restaurant nearly every night. The food was amazing and a bit different from the usual Croatian fare.

Gnocchi with truffles anyone?

Our wonderful apartment with Bruce the bike resting outside.

The town was a great mix of old and new. I spent days just exploring the cobble-stoned streets while John rode his bike.

We climbed the tower above and were rewarded with views like those below. Wonderful!

Some of the roofs have such old tiles.

Throughout the town were old, fallen down ruins and beautifully renovated homes. Sometimes the old and the renovated were in the same building!

The Croatian word for 'cheese' is 'sir'. John took a liking to this ad for 'Sir Cheese!'

Shops sold lots of locals products. John had fun tasting the rakijas (grappas) in this store.

Motovun is in the centre of truffle country. You could get truffles in every restaurant and they were sold in many shops. Check out this amazing basket of them just sitting on the bench in one shop!

You could buy truffle paste, truffle salsa, truffle oil, truffle cheese....... Forrest Gump would have had a great time listing them all!

One night we went truffle hunting. We've done this before at home but only on a farm. This time we hunted in the forest. We were between seasons - black truffles had just ended and white truffles don't start for a few more weeks, but we managed to find two white truffles! They weren't great quality but it was lots of fun walking through the forest on a beautiful evening. I'm not sure the dogs were so well trained - one just wanted to play and the other wanted to eat the truffles but still, they did manage to find them.

A dog's nose knows.....

You can spot truffle hunters by the square spade they use to dig the truffles out.

Using Motovun as a base, we explored some of the nearby towns. We saw this on a menu somewhere. This adds a whole new meaning to the term "mixed drinks"!

We checked out a castle in Pazin. It was ok.

We drove to another town called Beram where we had to find Sonja at house number 38 to get the key to see the nearby church we had read about. It's all so wonderfully local! Some of the old stone houses in the town were amazing.

It turned out that Sonja didn't speak a word of English but that didn't stop her. It also turned out that she doesn't lend us the key - she brings herself with it! To our surprise she jumped in our car and pointed where to go, chatting the whole time even though we couldn't understand much of what she was saying. We all just laughed and that was conversation enough.

The 550 year old frescoes inside the church were wonderful. They're famous for the scene where all the skeletons are leading recently deceased people to the afterlife. The frescoes were painted over hundreds of years ago and were only rediscovered in the last century.

We dropped Sonja back to her place and went for walk. We came across some fig trees. They were so yummy! We love the way that there are so many fruit trees growing everywhere. We've seen figs, apples, plums, apricots, pears, quinces (I think), nectarines, peaches and even one banana tree. The figs are a bit special to me because we saw so many fig trees in Turkey but they weren't in season. I remember wondering if we'd come across them somewhere else. We sure have!

One night we had a very special dinner. We lashed out and went to a restaurant where the guy is a gourmet chef. He runs the place by himself, with only a waitress. It turned out that we were the only people there that night. So we had two people working just for the two of us!

Needless to say, the food was amazing. True to the chef's ethic of using local products, there wasn't a truffle in sight as they're not in season. We had six courses and they were all fantastic. A highlight was the most amazing range of small nibblies, including what they called a ham and cheese sandwich which was so much more than that! The chocolate cake was also hugely understated. It was more like a melt-in-your-mouth taste sensation!

We ate outside under a huge tree with beautiful views around us. The only downfall was that the place was located at the end of a really long, steep, windy road. I had to stay very sober to get us home!

Our more usual places to eat are what's called konobas. These are small, family-run restaurants. Sometimes I would just have loved a salad roll but really I can't complain about the amazing food at these places. We kept our eyes open for Obiwan Konoba but didn't find it. (Sorry - that was a dad joke!)

We explored the "world's smallest town" of Hum. It was very old - and very small!

Another town was called Groznjan. It has become a bit of a base for musicians. At any time of day you can walk down the old streets and hear musicians practising. We came across a group of French horn players giving a casual performance in the town square.

It's also a place for artists to work and sell their art.

We moved on to another town called Momjan. This was ok but nowhere near as wonderful as Motovun. Our room was above the konoba so we didn't have far to go to get a feed! The family also own a winery so there was lots of wine paraphernalia around. We loved the signs for the ladies' and men's toilets!

The view from our balcony was lovely. Those lights you can see in the distance are in Italy!

This town wasn't attracting the tourists that many other towns were and many places were falling down.

John had discovered a wonderful local wine, called "Super Istrian", so we went to the winery that made it to taste some more. We met a Swiss couple there and had a wonderful afternoon with them, their tour guide and the winemaker. 

The winemaker's story was interesting. He had left school and didn't know what to do with his life. His neighbour had just planted a vineyard and suggested that he should learn to become a winemaker. By the time he finished his course in four years, the grapes would be ready to start being made into wine. The guy didn't even like wine at that stage but decided to do the course anyway. He has now worked for his neighbour for 10 or 12 years and absolutely loves his job.

I'll leave you with a sunset shot taken from our little garden at Motovun. We'll never forget this place!

Hooroo!

Heather and John

Yodeley-he-ho!

Well we're a long way from England now! We flew to Paris, picked up a car and drove through to Switzerland. John's old school friend, Matt, lives in a ski village in Switzerland (he's a ski and snowboard instructor) so we went to stay with him for a few days. And what a few days it was!

Just getting to Matt's place was an adventure. We drove up a beautiful valley then parked our car near one of many waterfalls that spilled down the sides of the valley.

We then caught two cable cars to Murren, Matt's village. It sure beats walking up those hills!

We explored the town - it was beautiful! It was so Swiss - timber houses with flower-boxes at their window sills were framed by incredible snow-capped mountains. The Eiger, the Jungfrau and the Monch towered over us.

Let's just say that the first night was big. We had brought some duty-free grog with us and Matt had allowed for a big night. The next day, the skies cleared and we had magnificent sunshine for most of our remaining days. Perfect! John started the day with a coffee with a view.

We went for a walk that day, just taking it fairly easy. I don't think I need to comment too much on these photos - they speak for themselves!

In our three days there, I think we tried just about every Swiss dish there is! We had fondue, Swiss cheese, rosti, more cheese and many traditional dishes. One of my faves was the very unusual combination of pasta, fried onions, prosciutto and cheese - all served with sweet, spiced apple! It's a weird combination but gosh it was good! So much of the food is high-carb comfort food - perfect for farming at altitude or skiing but not so good for my hips! It was sooo yummy though!

The next day turned out to be a real highlight. John and I hired some bikes with the plan being that Matt would show us how to ride more or less downhill all the way to the Thunersee, about 20 kms away. The guy we hired the bikes from seemed to think that the track Matt wanted to take us on was too risky. We figured if it was that difficult we would just walk. And that's exactly what we did.

We started out just cruising down the sealed track with the stupendous mountains providing a stunning backdrop at every turn.

The track then became steep and rough in places but we just walked the bikes down some sections and it was fine. The track soon turned into a road again and we rode through some gorgeous villages. We stopped for coffee in a lovely town then crossed this covered wooden bridge. How cool!

We bought cheese and onion pies (another Swiss specialty) at a shop then ate them at an old castle. What a perfect picnic spot.

We then rode into Interlaken, a larger town which was full of tourists. Matt's friend Nics takes people up in paragliders so we waited for her to fly down to us. Paragliders were coming in every few minutes - it's an enormously popular thing to do here. They reminded me of planes queued up to land at a busy airport.

While we waited for Nics to pack up her gear we rode around a nearby church complex. It was all so photogenic..

Nics joined us on her bike and the four of us continued on, over rivers, through forests and past colourful houses.

We came to the Thunersee at last. Nics had a swim but it wasn't quite hot enough for the rest of us to be bothered trying to dry off without a towel. We then rode on to a restaurant and bar on the water's edge. It was beautiful.

As we whiled away the afternoon, we saw the skies darken......

As we ate dinner it got darker and darker. Thunder rattled overhead and rain started to fall.

The rain eased and we decided to make a break for it. Big mistake. Suddenly the rain bucketed down. We were riding along a bush track at the time. We remembered seeing a bird hide earlier so we all bolted for it. We made it there but it was too late - we were completly soaked! It was such fun though!

To add to the fun, the way to get home from Interlaken without riding was not what I would call ordinary means. We had to catch the 9pm train and if we missed it the next one wasn't til 11pm.  We bolted through the streets of Interlaken in the dark and just caught the train by seconds. To my amazement they had a carriage just for bikes! It was all so civilised. We then hopped off the train and caught a bus - again it had space for our bikes. From the bus we caught 2 cable cars up to Matt's town, wheeling our bikes onto each one and arrived back at Matt's place late in the night. What an awesome day!

The next day Matt had arranged for a friend of his, Simon, to join us for a walk. Nics came along as well so there were five of us. It was another great walk.

Paragliders were everywhere. The views from them must be amazing.

On the trail......

Can you spot John and Matt in the photo below?

Along the way, Nics and I found wild blueberries and raspberries! The raspberries weren't quite ripe but the blueberries were yummy, although they were quite small. I've never seen wild blueberries or raspberries before so it was pretty special!

We had another magnificent calorie-laden lunch at a restaurant in the middle of nowhere. While we ate, a helicopter landed to take an injured woman. Helicopters seem to be everywhere here.

Over lunch, Matt, Simon and John decided to conquer Mt Schilthorn, another 900 vertical metres above us. Nics and I opted out and took a different route home. The guys had a camera but didn't take a single photo so all I can say is that they had a great time. They arrived at the top of the mountain at the building where the James Bond movie "On Her Majesty's Secret Service" was filmed. They got to the famous revolving restaurant at the top just as the clouds rolled in. Oh well. They saw the view on the way up at least!

Meanwhile, Nics and I had a wonderful walk back. We passed the farmers in the photo below. All the farmers here collect the cow poo from the barns and pump it out onto the hills. I'm not sure why. These guys were taking it one step further and holding the hose to spray the poo around. Now that's a serious amount of liquidised cow poo! They laughed when I took the photo.

Our walk back was even more spectacular than the walk out.

The nature at our feet was just as gorgeous as the mountains around us.

Nics knew where there was a waterfall that we could walk behind so she took me to it. It was amazing! This is the view from behind the waterfall.

Switzerland is such an incredibly beautiful place. I think it would look so different in winter but that would also be amazing. It's a very expensive country when you're travelling on Aussie dollars but I'm so glad we got to see so much of a small part of it.

Thanks for looking after us so well Matt!

See ya!
Heather and John