Crow-ayyy-shaaa!!

We flew out of Luton on a rather unremarkable London day to the sunny port of Split, Croatia. Our hostel was located in the south-west corner of Diocletians Palace, a huge fortified palace built by the Roman Emperor Diocletian sometime in the 3rd century. From this central location (with tips from the fantastic Australian hostel staff), we explored the restaurants, bars and markets of Split until we boarded our boat 'Aneta' at midday on Saturday.

We spent the majority of the 7 night 'Sail Croatia' tour lounging on the huge sundecks, reading, swimming and chatting with the 25 or so kiwi and aussies on the tour. We stopped at a different port each night, and had the afternoon to look around and sample the shops, bars and cuisine before heading to the next port early the following morning.

Each port held it's own attraction; the ancient fortress perched above the bar lined promenade of Hvar, the national park of Mjlet with a 12th century monastery located on a island in a picturesque lake, or Markarska's breathtaking backdrop of stone cliffs. The history you felt in each city was impressive. A highlight for me was getting lost in the narrow worn-stone alleyways and stumbling upon a glimpse of the rickity washing lines and vegetable gardens (normally hidden from the passing tourist), that signalled true croatian life.

Although the touristy things - like the bar perched on the rocks between the ocean and Dubrovnik's city walls, or the cocktail bar atop a turret in Korcula were pretty cool too.

By the time we arrived back in Split we had four memory cards full of photos,vastly improved summer tans and a strong aversion towards bread (we were served it every breakfast and lunch for 7 days!) With our new found 'boat buddies' (and Maree) having flown home to colder climates on the Saturday morning we were left wondering what the hell we could do to fill our remaining 3 days in the seemingly compact city of Split.
We needn't have worried.

What ensued was some of the best days that you could imagine!! We spent sunshine hours at the beach, rolling off our towels and into the crystal clear water at regular intervals. The afternoons were spent eating pizza, seafood and pasta overlooking the ocean with a Pina Colada in hand. We attended the Split Film Festival where we watched Babel, a beautifully shot inter-continental movie by the director of '21 grams.' We lost out somewhat in the translation, or rather the lack of it, though. The entire movie had subtitles in Croatian only - regardless of the language being spoken by the characters!! This was fine in the American scenes with Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett, but hearing people speak Japanese etc in the scenes set in Morocco, Mexico and Japan while trying to decipher Croatian subtitles was pretty interesting!!

The high point of the holiday was the football game we attended on the Sunday before we flew out. A home game between Split (Hajduk Split) and arch rivals Dinamo Zagreb, this was not football - but war! In my untrained eye both teams were fairly crap, but bar a couple of major punch-ups (one almost involving the referee!) the majority of the action was not to be found on field. The fans were mad - crazy, rampagingly, stoically patriotically mad!! Dressed head to toe in team colours they sang and chanted, stamped so hard we thought the stand would collapse and threw maritime flares onto the field. The rival supporters were no better, chanting insults and setting fire to not only the Split team's flag, but at one point a part of the stadium too! Although it was pretty mental it was hardly dangerous - although we left right on the final whistle feeling pretty pleased about the 2-2 scoreline. I can't even imagine the riots that would have ensued had the team experienced a home ground loss!!

We flew out late afternoon on Monday, into a London that was much colder and wetter than we had left it!!