Dobar Dan - Good Afternoon or Good Day.

       Hvala lijepa - Thank you very much

    For practical purposes, this is all the Croatian you need to visit the Dalmation Coast as a tourist. In Croatia, English is a standard subject in the curriculum of even the grammar schools, and almost everybody between 15 and 35 speaks English. Do note that Croatia is shaped like a large C. The top portion, southeast of Zagreb, is not really the area where most tourists go, so the statement above does not quite apply there as well as for the lower portion of the C, which is the Dalmatian Coast. Here, in the restaurants and the shops and other tourist services, the staff all speak English very well. Not as good as in the Netherlands or in Denmark, but most certainly much better than any Croatian you would be able to master in a few months.

    The Dalmatian Coast, on the Eastern Coast of the Adriatic Sea, ranges from 50 kms in width in the north to just a few km in the south. The boundary is more or less the town of Rijeka to the north and the country of Albania to the south, and with the city of Split in the middle. The lovable Dalmatian dogs received their name from Dalmatia, but so does the dalmatic, which is a liturgical vestment used by deacons and bishops in the Catholic church.

    The first time I visited the erstwhile Yugoslavia and the Dalmation Coast was in 1956, a student with more adventure than common sense in my head; with a backpack traveling on a budget. At that time Marshall Tito was still in control. It wasn’t that easy, because people there didn’t speak English at that time, and we had to converse in a hodgepodge of European and sign languages with our hands, facial muscles and whatever was available. People were not very open at that time and although they wanted badly to speak to a foreigner, they always looked around to see whether the secret police was watching.

        That was more than 55 years ago, but I still remember that we took the bus from Zagreb to Split and at one point the bus driver asked us to get out of the bus and walk about 50 yards up the crest of the road. And there, suddenly, below us, was the blue Adriatic Sea and the town of Split. The view was so breathtaking that my heart caught in my throat. And I knew I shall never forget that experience, and I knew I wanted to come back there again in the future. But that road over the mountains has now been replaced by the fast A1 motorway to bring you to Split from the North.

        There was no internet at that time, of course, and when we get to a city we would go to the City Information office to find a room for the night. In the afternoons there were local people waiting for visitors like us to drop in, so they could offer us their rooms. In Dubrovnik we booked a room from a lady, whose main selling point was that the room was higher than the ramparts. It was indeed a nice airy room on the top floor in the B&B, and the ramparts were just a few yards away from our balcony . There was a view of the Adriatic sea beyond.  There were no cruise-ships yet spoiling the scenery by disgorging their thousands of passengers on the Stradun.

    That period was actually one of the darkest of Yugoslavia; they had rejected the Marshall Plan, because Marshall Tito wanted to stay non-aligned. But he still managed to consolidate Yugoslavia, and by the 1970’s Yugoslavia was prosperous and established. The Yugoslav passport became to be desirable at that time, because one could travel almost everywhere with it. It was the golden age of Marshall Tito. And when he died on May 4, 1980, there were 127 kings and heads of state attending his funeral; still now the largest number in the world history of funerals of state leaders.

    Fast forward some 50 years. In 2008 my wife and I were in Zagreb for a few days, where we rented a car to visit Plitvice Lakes. We also had a peek at the Dalmatian Coast. Yes, we decided then; we’ll come back soon.  But it was not until 2013 that we booked an 11-day tour from Gate 1 Travel, called “11-Day Affordable Croatia and Slovenia”. But this included the flights to and from the USA, so the actual period there was more like 9 days. At the end of the tour we took a rental car and drove to Austria and then down to the Cinque Terre in Italy.

  

      And in 2014, one year later, we were back in the area, this time with our long-time traveling friends from Australia, Andrew and Robyn. We rented a car for two weeks and then we took a one-week small-ship cruise to drift on the azure waters and to visit the islands along the coast.  What follows here is a combination of these last two visits, except for the cruise. For this I have decided to devote a separate chapter., “On a Slow Boat on the Adriatic.”

left: A lighted sign on the fence of a park in Opatija. It is in Slovenian and it reads: “I feel phenomenal”

And that is how we felt of our trips.

   Our guide for the guided tour in 2013 was Brane Wittmar, a no-nonsense tour director, who kept strict control of time and who insisted that everyone should be in the bus at the allotted time. That was important, if you want to see the maximum in the allotted time, and to prevent slackers to create havoc with the schedule. The program for the day was usually wake-up time at 6:30 a.m., breakfast at 7:00 a.m. and in the bus by 8:00 a.m. Not one minute late. And it also meant early to bed, not long after dinner.

        But in 2014 we were on our own, doing a tour more befitting our age; the two men 81 and 84 of age and two ladies, of whom I will obviously not be telling their age in a public document.  But they were both still very trim and good-looking. On that trip we took it easy to enjoy the sights and to spend a little more time in bed in the morning instead of starting the day at the ungodly hour of 6:30 a.m. And just as the locals, we regularly took time off to sit in an outdoor cafe to relax and to watch the people go by.

    I have not covered our tour to Montenegro in this chapter, even though this country also has a shoreline on the Dalmatian coast. You can see that in the separate chapter entitled: “A Day in Montenegro”.