Istria 2011, Rovinj

It was time for a coffee and a beer and there were plenty of busy harbour side bars to choose from so as we looked for empty spaces Micky reminded me of his theory that if we (the men) made a selection then this would be automatically overruled by Kim who has a curious habit of always walking to the next one perhaps in some sort of belief that it will always be better, or perhaps she just thinks we can’t make a good choice? Micky stopped by an empty table at a perfectly acceptable café and sure enough Kim rejected it and led us instead to the one next door. It was almost identical and the coffee and the beer would be exactly the same so there really was no explanation. Micky smirked!

It was really hot in the midday sun and we sat and watched the harbour activity, the tour groups being led around the town and the children playing in the square. Rovinj was certainly very different to Pula with a chic Italianate ambiance that oozed style and disposable income. Whereas in Pula the tourist part of the city rubs shoulders with the noise and sweat of its industry Rovinj felt exclusively like a pleasure zone for holiday makers, yachtsmen and tourists with no hint of a scruffy industrial area. People in smart clothes parading along the promenade stopping every so often to stop for a sociable drink or to gaze into a shop window with overpriced souvenirs or to buy a couple of scoops of Italian ice cream from the parlours all along the front.

After our refreshment break we walked through the main square and melted into the side streets with the twisting cobbled streets flanked by pastel coloured buildings rising steeply from the pavements with washing lines strung between them and brightly painted shutters on the windows. The route to the top took us a maze of streets until we emerged at the top and in the cathedral square. All but Micky went in for a look around and then we took an alternative path and descended down to the square. On the way we passed a shop selling shell costume jewellery and as Kim examined the necklaces the shop keeper rather sharply said that if we were just looking then we should do it with our eyes not our fingers. We didn’t think this was a very friendly sales technique and if we might have been tempted to purchase something then we certainly wouldn’t be after that.

It was lunch time so we stopped at a water side restaurant advertising a reasonably priced menu of the day so we choose a table ordered some drinks and made our selections. Surprisingly Christine choose fish and I say surprisingly because although she is not so anti-sea food as Sue this was most unusual. And then unsurprisingly she didn’t like it and gave most of it away to Micky in exchange for his meat selection. Over lunch we agreed to take the boat excursion so we phoned Alex and told him that we liked his five for four deal and that we would meet him tomorrow at twelve o’clock.

After lunch we passed from one side of the old town to the other and walked through a market selling local produce and vegetables and then, except for some excitable seagulls, to the quieter side of town, which was less picturesque and home to a large stone monument to Croatian heroes built in the monolithic style much loved by the previous communist regime of Yugoslavia and which looked rather foolishly out of place but very, very permanent.

On the way back to the car the girls stopped for some ice cream and we retraced our steps to the car park. There was no wheel clamp and so we left the delightful town of Rovinj and ignoring the coast road took the direct route back to Fažana.

After a drink at the Konoba Ferral we let the rest of the day just quietly slip away. First we walked south out of the village along a stony beach that arched away in a crescent shape from the village and it was so warm and the sea looked so nice that I went for a paddle in the water but everyone else declined to join me and I have to say that it was a bit cool. Later we enjoyed another spectacular sunset and then being creatures of habit dined once again at the Konoba Ferral and we all enjoyed an excellent second meal where Kim and I shared a special fish plate and Micky, Sue and Christine had beef steak and we all declared our meals to be perfect.

Istria 2011, Palm Sunday and Intermittent Coastal Roads

But that was only until six o’clock the next morning when the peace and quiet amnesty was over and the bells began to ring again and through a half slumber I counted the strikes and satisfied that it was still only early dozed on and off between the quarter hours until it was time to get up.

The day started with a crisis because during the over-zealous search routine at Stansted airport Kim had lost her hair brush and didn’t feel able to tackle the day with only the use of the hotel complimentary comb and I was dispatched to try and buy a replacement. At eight o’clock on a Sunday morning I wasn’t terribly optimistic but to my surprise there was a small shop open in one of the side streets and although it wasn’t a state of the art styling brush they had something that would suffice for a couple of days so I purchased it and returned.

It was a glorious start to the day with the sun flooding into the village square, making the water sparkle like thousands of tiny diamonds and the brightly painted boats shine in the reflected light. There was a good breakfast at the hotel and without many guests it was all for us. Despite the reliable early good weather Croatia has a compressed holiday high season from late June to mid September so the hotel was virtually empty except for us.

Being a week before Easter it was Palm Sunday, the day the Catholic Church, celebrates Christ’s entry into Jerusalem and on account of this there was a lot of activity in the square outside the church as more and more people began to assemble. Some had traditional palm leaves but it seemed that almost any sort of vegetation was acceptable and there were a lot of palm substitutes being carried. Soon it seemed the entire village was assembled outside the church and at half past nine they formed into a procession and set off to parade through the streets. It took them about fifteen minutes and then they began to file back into the square and into the church. There were so many people that only those at the front of the parade could make it inside so those at the back had to stand in the pleasant sunshine and listen to the service through loudspeakers attached to the front of the church.

Our plan today was to drive north along the coast to Rovinj and possibly Poreč but we would see how the day went before committing to both. The map seemed to suggest two alternative routes. One was a main road, possibly even a motorway, and so, with my paranoid nervousness about toll roads, we selected what appeared to be a perfectly good coastal route that would take us through a succession of villages along the way.

In theory it was a good idea but some of the roads that the map suggested were actually not really roads at all and in between villages the tarmac often ran out only to be replaced by a deeply rutted track that was completely unsuitable for our little car. Added to this was the inadequacy of the road signs that would regularly disappear leaving us to guess the direction of travel. The result of this was that we were forced to stop a couple of times and turn around and try again and after an hour or so we travelled inland from the intermittent coast road and came to the main road which wasn’t a toll after all and would have been the far better option in the first place.

As time was getting on we abandoned the idea of driving to Poreč and drove straight to Rovinj where we arrived late in the morning. The town was very busy so it took a while to find a parking spot and then some more time to understand the car park fees. It was free on Sunday but I needed to reassure myself completely about this because I didn’t want to get back to a wheel clamp.

The car park was next to the marina just south of the old town and as we walked past the boat repair yards and nautical shops there was a good view of old Rovinj. Like a lot of other Croatian Adriatic places such as Primosten and Trogir the original town was built on an island with a natural moat for protection so the town jutted out into the sea with layer upon layer of buildings crammed around the outside and rising up to a cathedral on the top. The moat has long been filled in and the town has spread onto what was the mainland and we walked around a busy harbour full of pleasure boats and towards the busy main squares.