In the U.S. media has been published another article describing Croatia as a desirable destination. This time Croatia was fascinated by Seth Kugel. Its full text we are transmiting on this blog:
"It was Take Your Parents to Work week at the Frugal Traveler, and you should see my office! Pine-covered islands jutting out from a stretch of the Adriatic that shifts from deep navy to aquamarine like a color-coded relief map; stone houses with red-tile roofs clustered improbably on the sides of mountains and along the edges of the harbors and swimmer-friendly coves filled with fishing boats. The company cafeteria’s weekly special? The freshest fish, squid and octopus, with sides of local cheese and thin-sliced prsut (sounds like — and is like — prosciutto). And my Slavic office-mates are just about the nicest people I’ve ever worked with.
The only problem is, I can’t get them to stop speaking Croatian.
Actually, that’s not really true: the English skills and hospitality of the people in Croatia were enough to quickly and utterly charm my parents, the highly seasoned travelers Peter and Judy Kugel, who flew in from Boston to join me for Week 5 of my frugal Mediterranean tour. As for all Croatians being wonderful, I can only vouch for those on the Dalmatian Coast that includes the southern mainland and islands that seem chipped off it.
For only a moderate step up in budget from our family adventure in Nicaragua last summer, my parents and I were able to live comfortably and meet many more local residents. That’s because of Croatia’s fantastic lodging system, in which families rent rooms (sobe) or apartments (apartmani) on their property or attached to their own homes. Private lodging provides almost four times as many beds in Croatia as hotels do, at least according to recent government data, and staying with hosts offers not only a peek into their family life but also a source of genuine insider advice.
That’s especially important in Dubrovnik, where most residents stay the heck out of the place most tourists make a beeline to: the impressive but overpriced walled old city. On my first and last nights with my parents, we stayed in town in a great neighborhood, a 20-minute walk from the old city’s main gate, in a two-room apartment attached to the home of the talkative Tony Djuric. It cost us 60 euros a night, or $88. (Prices are commonly quoted in euros, although the Croatian kuna, about five to the dollar, is the currency for everyday transactions.) We barely met Tony’s wife, but we accompanied him, his 10-year-old son, Luka, and Luka’s classmate to a local beach and the grocery store to buy treats for Luka’s last-day-of-school party. Tony seemed thrilled to talk about his job (he’s a “commercial man” at a bakery – we think he meant salesman, but aren’t sure) and his country’s complicated history.
For the five days in between we hit the islands. We spent two nights on the deeply pine-treed Mljet (population just over 1,000), where we stayed in two rooms owned by Andro and Ane Strazicic. Always around were their daughters, their friends and a kitten who tried every cute way possible to sneak onto the table for the grilled fish feast that Ane prepared for us for 100 kunas apiece. (My room cost 200 kunas a night; my parents’ was 240.) After Mljet we went to Korcula, where we stayed for three nights with Maria and Zeljko Seledin and their 7-month-old baby, Petar, who wore a bib that read “my mother loves me” in Croatian.
Maria charged us 60 euros a night for a two-bedroom apartment with a huge living room and kitchen, and a deck with a dramatic view across deep blue waters to the stark mountains of the Peljesac peninsula. She made phone calls for us and regaled my parents with the tale of how she had met her husband when he worked as a fisherman off her native island of Lastovo. She even let my mom hold the baby.
Still, I’d like to think my mom had a better time with me than with Petar. As an adult, traveling with my parents has always been fun. We share an adventurous attitude and an aversion to overspending, which isn’t surprising as my brother and I scrimped and laughed with them on many family vacations. We also have compatible senses of humor. My father, a retired college professor, is responsible for one-liners, which are about one-third hilarious, one-third predictable and one-third groaner. Here are two from this week:
In a small-town cafe, an upbeat pop song in Croatian comes on the radio.
Me: This is a kind of catchy tune.
Dad: I love the lyrics.
After two chatty German bikers swerve around me on a path through Mljet National Park, I raise the ancient but long-debunked Kugel family myth that my dad secretly speaks German.
Me: Dad, translation please?
Dad: “Who’s that jerk in the middle of the road?”
My mom, who works as a university dean, is a more sentimental type: “It’s like a dream being here with my husband and son.” But she has her own brand of humor, as she showed when we walked along a harbor where several gorgeous boats were docked: “I don’t know why these three attractive people walking down the street are not invited onto one of those yachts.” She is also the energetic enthusiast, and was thrilled when we rented a tiny, bright orange Fiat convertible for 10 hours (420 kuna including gas) to get around Mljet, posing on it like a teenager for my dad to take photos (and for me to take a picture of him taking the picture, a staple of Kugel family albums).
Though we could afford a car rental for only one day on each island, those days were probably the highlights. We got to drive on high-elevation roads, staring down at stunning coves; and we could poke around little towns, deciding where we would have stayed if we’d had a car the whole time (or a yacht).
On Mljet, the clear winner was a tiny town called Prozurska Luka, a round harbor with a nearly perfectly cone-shaped islet in the middle; it looked as though it had harbored aspirations of growing up to be a volcano but switched to pine forest management halfway through. We had been enchanted by Prozurska Luka from the road far above in the morning and agreed to head down for a late lunch-early dinner toward the end of the day. The lone restaurant in town disappointed a bit (my parents didn’t like their seafood risotto and I couldn’t get through my black risotto, made with cuttlefish) but the view of the island didn’t.
The runner-up was St. Mary Island in Mljet National Park, a spot popular with day trippers from Dubrovnik. St. Mary is a tiny island on the larger of the park’s two lakes (technically inlets) that you get to on a boat (the ticket price is included in the 90 kuna park entry fee). There’s a 12th-century monastery on the island, as well as a restaurant, but the highlight was a path that leads behind the monastery to a little grassy not-quite-beach, from which swimmers can glide through some of the most perfectly still water I have ever seen outside a Poland Spring bottle. It was so calm that moving through it creates not a splashing sound but a noise more like wind chimes or the slow crushing of a very thin wine glass.
Mljet is all about calm; Korcula has more action. Maria’s and Zeljko’s apartment was a 15-minute walk from the teardrop-shaped old city, which is supposedly the birthplace of the explorer Marco Polo. (Evidence is flimsy; the city was controlled by Venice, but long-form birth certificates from the 13th-century Venetian Republic have been lost.) The old town is remarkably picturesque and more genuine than Dubrovnik’s, but we preferred Racisce (pronounced ra-CHEESH-cheh), a fishing village where houses hug the slope down to the harbor; exploring the alleys and paths that separate the homes behind the main road is a bit like wandering a completely unspoiled old city, though one not quite as old.
Still, probably our favorite place of all was Gera, a restaurant run by Zeljko’s sister Stela in her agritourism lodge in the town of Zrnovo. Dinner is served on white tablecloths that cover wooden tables on a porch overlooking the gardens. I had an exquisite pair of just-charred, juicy squid; my mom had a “first-class” (white meat) fish and my dad had a made-from-scratch meat bisque with noodles in it and pork brochettes. To drink, Gera’s house-made red wine; on the side, fresh eggplant and green pepper and zucchini drenched in homemade olive oil and grilled perfectly. (“I have never had an eggplant that tasted that good,” my mom said.)
“Will you come back to Croatia?” Maria asked us as we took in the view from our porch (er, her porch) on our final day, back in Dubrovnik.
My parents have been around the global block, so they knew the correct answer was, “Of course,” even if it were an outright lie. But they might just return. My mother regrets not making it to the allegedly gorgeous Plitvice Lakes National Park, and my dad has rated the Croatians the nicest people in the world. What had started as a chance to see their son at work ended in a three-way love triangle of my mother, my father and a country. I was a mere chauffeur and one-liner straight man.
IF YOU GO
My parents flew British Airways to Dubrovnik via London, and got socked with $1,475 round-trip tickets by reserving late because their no-good son couldn’t confirm his schedule. That no-good son breezed in on a 58 euro ferry from Bari, Italy. From Dubrovnik, Mljet and Korcula are the easiest large islands to get to, though most people miss out by not staying on Mljet. There are plenty of sites for Croatian apartment rentals online, and if you can afford a car on Mljet or Korcula you can easily find places to stay in our favorite villages, Prozurska Luka and Racisce. You can get in touch with Tony in Dubrovnik at tony.dubrovnik.apartment@gmail.com or his site, Andro and Ane on Mljet at androstrazicic@gmail.com, and Maria and Zelko just outside the town of Korcula town at petar.segedin1@du.t-com.hr or through their site. June and September are the best months to go; in July the Europeans stream in, and August is an all-out Italian invasion.
MY BOOKS
It was all going so well. My parents and I split most things three ways (though I paid for my own room at Andro’s and at Ane’s), which, predictably, meant savings. And even more savings than I expected: my parents may not tolerate youth hostels or unsanitary conditions as well as I do, but they sure know how to scrimp on the food budget, taking to my one-restaurant-meal-a-day policy with vigor, grocery shopping daily and preparing breakfast at our rental apartments and cheese-meat-and-fruit picnics for lunch. (I frequently bend my rule for a pizza slice or a prepared sandwich.) With just three hours to go in the week, I had spent 58 euros for the ferry and 412 euros for my share of our adventures, a full 30 euros under budget. Then, thanks to a miscommunication with the gas station attendant, we somehow managed to top off our rental car’s gas tank with diesel. My share of the damages ate up that surplus pronto, and my final tally was 497.96 euros.
A previous version of this post misstated the ages of Petar Seledin and Luka Djuric: Petar is 7 months old and Luka is 10 years old."
PLEASE, VISIT SETH'S BLOG!
