After what seemed an interminable delay following our arrival, Adriatica, the shipping company, and the Croatia immigration authorities in Split finally decided to let us and the rest of the passengers off the boat, and we were in Croatia. We’d heard that Split itself wasn’t up to much, so we’d already decided to try and get out and on to one of the islands as soon as possible. Fighting our way past the touts offering their rooms to us, we headed for the ferry ticket desk, and bought tickets to Supetar on the island of Brac, although not before chatting to a friendly tout–he was quite happy to accept that we weren’t staying now, but we took his card anyway in case we wanted to stay in Split on the way back. Rather amusingly, it wasn’t actually his card at all, but instead the card of one of the large hotels in Split (he just crossed out the details on the front, and wrote his on the back). He also told us how to say “thank you” in Croatian, which according to the guide book is something like hvala, but which seemed to my ears to be pronounced koala (or at least that was what I would go on to increasingly self-consciously say to everyone I encountered for the next week).
The ferry ride was short and smooth, and when I wasn’t falling asleep, I spent the journey flicking through the guide book to read about Brac, and specifically Bol, where we were planning to stay. My recollections of reading about Croatia in the Rough Guide back home were that it said things to the effect that it was a place that never seemed crowded, and where you could always escape the people, but somehow in the time between us leaving the UK and arriving in Split someone had rewritten the book so that it now said things like “only go to Bol if you can travel there in the off season, or if you don’t mind crowds”. Oh dear, I wondered, where were we heading?
When we arrived in Supetar we caught a crowded bus over to Bol, and headed for the tourist office to try to find a room for the night. If I didn’t know what was going to happen over the next few days, I might have said that the staff at the tourist office in Bol were perhaps the least helpful in Croatia. The conversation went something like this:
Us: Hi, we were looking for a room for tonight, could you help us with that? Do you know if this hotel (pointing to name of hotel in book) would have any rooms?
Her: [In voice that suggests she has no idea whatsoever] Er… I think they have rooms.
Us: Could you call them for us to check?
Her: No. You have to go there.
Us: Ok… and if they don’t, do you have any other suggestions, maybe a private room?
Her: We have some rooms with shared bath, in this area [points to map]… but they are full.
Us: Oh… Ok.
And with that, we left and made our way to the hotel, which luckily turned out to have a room for us. And it was lovely–from our window we could see the small harbour, the crystal clear blue sea, and the beautiful sunny day outside. Tired from the journey, we decided to rest for a while, before venturing outside, so unfortunately I have to confess that the first proper thing I did on arriving in Croatia was to sit in an air-conditioned hotel room watching A Hard Day’s Night with Croatian subtitles on TV.
But eventually we did venture out, and Bol was lovely, and not nearly as crowded as the Rough Guide implied. In fact the only negative point about the place was the awful music being played in all the restaurants. We ended up eating our dinner in the least worst option–an acoustic guitar duo massacring popular classics like The Man Who Sole The Worle and Californiaa Dreamin.
Ah, but we were here…