Scaling New Heights
Our street is a very skinny one and just as we’d loaded our bags out the door and were about to make our way down the stairs, a very determined tour guide, with a paddle raised high above her head saw us, made eye contact but didn’t flinch, marching forwards, leading her steady stream of tourists behind her, pinning us to the wall and forcing us to wait for her entire group to pass. It would not only have been courteous to let us go first, as it was obvious we had started leaving our apartment, but the thing that really cracked us up was her poker face. I was laughing out loud and the mass of tour participants flowing past didn’t give us so much as a smile, bar the very last couple who also saw the humour in the situation and giggled out an apology.
Check-out was at 10am this morning but since we weren’t due to leave Dubrovnik until late this afternoon, Predrag had offered to keep our bags in the corner of the cafe for us after breakfast. We went back to them at various times in the day to get sunglasses and hats but no one batted an eyelid. It was a miracle our stuff was still there when we returned .
After my breakfast cereal with an unidentified fruit that Toby said tasted like a plum that had been in his school lunchbox for a week, we decided to take a stroll along the city walls. Before we could take that stroll, however, we had a steep climb up the almost vertical, uneven stone steps that seemed to never end. Still heaving with people, it was a wonderful mix of breathtaking views and breathless tourists. Just when we thought we'd conquered the worst of it, another flight of steps would appear around the corner, reminding us that the medieval Dubrovnik locals clearly had thighs of steel.
It was amazing to see the town spread out before us - the same view we’d had from the cable car but much more up-close and personal, so much so we could see everyone’s laundry flapping in the breeze. Having envisaged us balancing along a precarious wall of ruins, I’d had no idea how wide the wall would actually be. In some parts there are restaurants and shops up there- a people highway. Every turn revealed another spectacular vista, another cluster of red roofs or another jaw-dropping glimpse of the sparkling Adriatic, so clear you see all the way to the bottom. It was like walking around the top of a giant medieval wedding cake. We spied the basketball court where we’d shot some hoops and all the beaches we’d seen at ground zero.
At one stage - I have no idea how he had worked it out - Sam pointed out the street where our apartment was. Amazed, my eyes still on our little street, I reached back to tap someone I thought was Toby on the shoulder, enthusiastically exclaiming: ‘hey look!! That’s our little street down there!’ Spinning around, I realised it wasn’t Toby at all but an elderly lady that gave me one of the strangest looks I’ve ever seen and couldn’t have been more nonplussed about my street if she’d tried. I started laughing hysterically, adding to my unhinged status in her eyes and even though I tried to widen the gap between our group and hers, we kept catching up to her.
Walking the wall wasn’t a brief undertaking, especially given the crowds, but Toby was desperate for one last swim. The water had looked so inviting from the wall, in different shades of blue and green.
We settled on Sveti Jakov Beach, not far from the old town; the beach the kids had swum at yesterday. The secluded, peaceful beach, carved from a rocky cove, wasn’t too crowded and the beach bar was open. Sam went up to enquire for us, what they had on offer. The guy at the counter told him to scan the QR code to see the menu. Still clad in his budgie smugglers, he didn’t have his phone on him so asked for just a summary of what they sold. ‘No, I can’t give you’, he said dryly. ‘Is too many things’.
Oh well.
Croatian is a language that pairs letters in its words that don’t normally hang out together, making it extremely tricky to pronounce. Our next destination - Mljet - fitted that trend. Was it ‘Midget’, ‘Mill-jet’, ‘My-jet’…? Turns out it’s pronounced: ‘Mm-yet’ (kind of like Mm Bop). The ‘l’ and the ‘j’ don’t even get a look in.
Our ferry for Mm-yet was leaving at 3:30 from the wharf in the new part of town. I’m a keen believer in leaving a buffer of time just in case something goes wrong so we made a plan to rendezvous at the cafe at 2 to collect our bags. Toby and Sam had gone off to grab some lunch and Molly had ventured off to explore one more beach but sure enough our punctual offspring showed up at the designated time and we were taxied to the wharf with time to spare.
I’d received an email this morning advising of a change of plans. Due to ‘strong northerly winds’ our ferry would need to now dock at a different port on the island. The catch was, this port happened to be 40 minutes drive from the original port. Thankfully there was a taxi mini van parked in the parking lot. Once we located the driver, he agreed to take us, a French Canadian couple and a French mother and daughter along the winding, forested roads to the other end of the island. It was a squish with 4 in the back but we were grateful we could all fit. I also got to practice some French!
Most of this island is national park and the only inhabitants we saw on our drive were a couple of deer. A far cry from the madding crowds of Dubrovnik. I asked our driver if he was born and bred on the island and he said though he’d lived all his life here, the lack of hospital on the island meant his mum had to ferry the hour to Dubrovnik for his birth. Toby asked if any of his friends had been born on the boat, giving him a laugh.
When you book something online you’re never really sure what it’ll be like in the flesh. This gorgeous place far exceeded our expectations! Hugging the lake’s edge, the rustic old stone buildings draped in grape vines greeted us when we piled out of the van. Our host, Miro, who had to be just a shade under 7 foot, along with his equally lofty female offsider, immediately started gathering up our bags, gearing up for the steep climb (enough with the steep climbs already) towards our unit. We all sat on the balcony, bags strewn all over the place, panting from all the excursion. Miro looked like he might expire. ‘I got sister who live Australia’ he told us in his deep, heavily accented English.
We are really deep in the middle of nowhere. Miro explained that the restaurant (run by him) would be open tonight but not tomorrow night because he would be in Dubrovnik. We are unsure whether we’ll have breakfast before he takes off for the mainland tomorrow but I guess we’ll soon find out.
Our rooms are so cool - stony walls, stony floors, an ancient fireplace/pizza oven in the wall, big green, shuttered windows with unparalleled views of the lake. The boys are upstairs and Molly is downstairs with us but she has her own room, up some stairs with a fairytale glass wall. This would be the perfect place to come and write a best-seller.
Molly had an exploratory walk and saw a small animal that turned out to be a mongoose! Mira told us ‘mongoose very fast and mongoose eat snakes’. Good to know.
As we were milling around on our balcony admiring the view, there was a woman in a cossie, sitting and reading in the sun. She introduced herself as Aida (like the Opera but pronounced: Eye-Da) and told us she lived here. She said she couldn’t help but overhear that we were in need of somewhere to eat tomorrow night but told us not to fret because she knew a guy - Mladin (I thought she said Aladdin) who ‘was good cook and he do good fish’. Apparently Mladin was the man. He had a boat (‘a little thing’) and could show us the sights - ‘for price of course’ - and he could ‘catch fish and cook us great dinner’. In fact, as she pointed out, she was reading his book right now. Pointing along the road, she urged us to go down to his villa and knock on his door. Noticing our hesitancy, she tried to call him and then said, ‘I find him and he find you’. OK…
We showed up for dinner at Miro’s restaurant where, apart from the staff and maybe his family, we were the only customers for the night. He cooked us up some scrumptious fare and pulled Sam and Toby a couple of beers with epic heads on them. Our pasta dishes could have each fed a family of 5. Part way through our meal on the terrace overlooking the lake, under the grapevines, a man walked in. Toby said it had to be Mladin. Sure enough, looking like a young Robert de Niro, our friendly neighbour approached our table and said: ‘OK. What you want from me?’
It seemed Aida had filled him in. At the mention of a fresh fish dinner Tobes chimed in and said: ‘We’ll pay of course!’ He threw his head back and laughed, saying: ‘Of course!’ How much though? We had no clue.
Molly and Sam were outed as not eating fish but he didn’t see a problem. He could cook vegetables too and had some sort of Indian cooking philosophy (prepare properly and with love). Tobes seemed to know what he was talking about. We enquired about paying the national park fee and he waved it off saying, ‘No, no need’ and with a conspiratorial wink, added: ‘we are illegal’. Yikes.
He told us he had no time constraints as he was on vacation ‘7/24, or whatever you say’. I asked if he had a fixed price for the boat trip and his answer was: ‘it depends’ - in other words: no.
We were to meet him at the terrace at 3 tomorrow for a boat trip - ‘we not rush, we take time’ (hope he’s not charging by the hour) followed by a slap up homemade meal at his place. This could either go really well or really badly.
On our way out, we told Miro our plans and he said; ‘Who’s Mladin?’ Uh oh. If I don’t post tomorrow, alert the authorities
