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Hvar Town

In the end, I’m not sure Hvar Town was really worth the bother. Despite its pretty harbour, and the fantastic views that we found when we climbed up to the citadel above the city, the town’s charm is nothing compared to Bol or Dubrovnik (our next destination). Hvar is also rather lacking in beaches, and we had to make do with a quick swim off the rocks to the left of the harbour, as assorted ferries and expensive yachts passed us just further out on their way in and out of town.

Hvar’s real attraction, of course, (and the reason why it’s the most popular Croatian resort amongst Croatians themselves), is people watching. As such, we spent most of our time sitting around in the bars around the square and the harbour taking in the surroundings, from the endless stream of people passing our table, to the rich folks eating dinner on their flashy yachts (including one chap, slumped on a chair at the table at the back of his sleek boat who bore an almost uncanny resemblence to the eponymous protagonist of Weekend at Bernie’s).

By far Hvar’s strangest bar, and the real place to see and be seen, is Carpe Diem, which sits at the very end of the harbour. In the early evening it gets completely packed for a loud, heavy, dance DJ set as the sun goes down, before emptying at about 7pm when the music stops, and then slowly building up to a second wind later in the evening. We popped in for a quick beer (bottled, and several times the price of every other bar in town, natch) much later in the evening, somehow scraping in just before some kind of strict name’s-not-down door policy came into effect and the guys at the door started turning people away. So we sat on the steps nursing our one beer bottle each feeling every so slightly underdressed, holding our just-purchased next-day’s-breakfast in plastic supermarket carrier bags and watching the beautiful (and no so beautiful) people, like the middle aged guy wearing blue combat trousers sitting over in the other corner surrounded by a table of 20-somthing women hanging on his every word. Presumably it wasn’t his fashion sense they were interested in. Later, we were joined by a couple of hilariously drunk Irish blokes (who had somehow also cracked the door policy) drinking cocktails from impossibly large jugs and generally being amusingly drunk.