Autor: Ania

Croatia Day 7: Muggia

Since I am absolutely in love with Italy, I just had to visit this country! 3 years earlier we had visited Triest – the biggest Italian city in the vicinity of Croatia. So this time we chose something less obvious – Muggia.

I cannot say a lot about this small city except for a statement: it’s a perfectly typical Italian town, with all the charms the country has to offer. What i mean by that? Small old town, see, shining cobblestone, espresso for 1 EUR, narrow streets, marina, pizzerias and most of all – smiling Italians having fun at every possible moment.

When we arrived we had a small tour round the place interrupted by a compulsory coffee break.

Around 5 PM we got hungry and decided to look for a typical Italian pizzeria to have pizza. We asked local people to recommend us something and they did, so we went there. What the locals didn’t tell us was that in Italy noone will serve pizza at 5 PM. It was actually pretty funny to observe the waitress’ reaction: „You want pizza now?” (hidden message: „Are you insane?”). We kindly replied that it’s OK and we will wait a bit for the oven to heat etc. and in the meantime we ordered some wine and starters. When pizza finally arrived at least we were already in good mood.

With full bellies and enhanced humour we set off to explore the town at dusk. In principle, with the sunset Muggia resurrected. From a lazy, bathed in sunlight,  a bit dormant place, it became one huge festivity scene. And the views… I really don’t know if the sunset was special that day, because if it’s ordinary, then I wanna move there when I retire!

Don’t ask me what the occasion of the fete was. Each and every time I visit Italy in summer, there is a celebration of some kind (no matter the week day, no matter the place). I find amusing. I love Italian spirit! Anyway, there was a multitude of events in Muggia that day. Parade, music orchestra concert, rock concert on the street – to name a few. We watched all of that with awe and high spirit.

Croatia Day 7: Postojna and Predjama

We decided to spend our first weekend in Croatia… not in Croatia 🙂
On Saturday we chose two locations – first of them was Postojna in Slovenia.
Postojna is well known for its cave which is of 20 km length! It’s visited by millions of tourists every year and it’s not without a reason.

Postojna caves are known also for human fish (shown below). It’s a blind amphibian living in very few places in the world. What’s interesting about this creature is that it has adpated to living in complete darkness (so cave environment). It was absolutely forbidden to take photos with the flash since human fish are photosensitive.

It’s a pity that those photos don’t give justice to what we have really seen underground. I recommend visiting this place – to me it was really extraordinary.

When we left the cave we went to the Predjama castle, which is situated just a couple of kilometeres near Postojna. Before I say a word, just have a look at this photo…

The castle was built in the rock (don’t ask me how but apparently it’s been standing there since Renaissance). The rock serves in many cases as foundation and walls. It looks amazing.

Croatia Day 6: Hiking Rossijevo sklonište 1580 m

The next day we went hiking again. We started from Alan (yep, we reached it the easier way – by car). We wanted to do a mild ascent, like 2-3 hours of walking. We looked at a map and chose one of the routes that looked suitably.

We walked and walked and walked. Up, down, up, down… No sign of the turn right we saw on the map. At some point I got pretty tired and started being a bit anxious that we lost our way. But no, we didn’t. It turned out that the route we reckoned to be for 10 km was a 20 km one.

At some point we reached a summit we were aiming for. It was actually pretty cool, with a real mountain shelter inside, equipped with food, stove, dice and rainwater.

By the shelter we met a group of spelaeologists from Bulgaria who were there on a caving expedition. Wow, that’s exciting. We talked to them for a while and went back to Alan. We wanted to reach our car before the sunset. You can find the route on my Endomondo.

Croatia Day 6: Canoeing trip

The next day was supposed to be an action-packed one. I am writing „was supposed to”, because the canoeing trip we signed up for was not so thrilling as we thought it would be.

Pros:
– fantastic, clear, sweet water
– lovely views
– canoeing practice
Cons:
– a bit boring
– too many pauses

All in all I don’t regret taking part in the venue, but the next time I will make sure that the river is raging enough.

Croatia Day 5: Alan

Alan threw a gauntlet in my face so I could not ignore this provocation! „I will climb you, Alan” – that was my only thought from the moment I had to turn back in the middle of the route. And I made my promise, I came back.

There is not so much to talk about the route. Rocky mountains are the best!
But I have to say that although I did conquer Alan, I am not entirely sure who won the battle… It turned out that Alan is not so much a summit, rather a mountain shelter that can be reached by car. The shelter workers were very surprised that anyone chose to reach it on foot…
Anyhow, it turned out that from Alan all hiking roads begin, so we had to chose a relatively short one (since we were already tired after hiking a total ascent of 1101 m). We were recommended to climb on Buljma and we did. The views… spectacular.

It was a very pleasant moment – to be on the top of the mountain, to feel the cold breeze, to watch the islands just like on the map. Alan, you were a worthy opponent.

Croatia Day 4: Opatija and Rijeka

On Monday we went to see two lovely points: Opatija nad Rijeka.

Opatija is an incredible place. It’s a small city at the seaside, often called as Croatian Riviera. It really is very posh and it shows. Classy restaurants, spectacular monuments, expensive super cars and chic boutiques – that’s an ordinary landscape of Opatija.

We did a tour round the spot and had a compulsory bath in the sea. A pretty high springboard occurred to be the top of the pops.

Rijeka, unlike Opatija, is not a very tourist place in my opinion, but it has some lovely spots as well.
We started by walking in the city centre and then went to see the port and have a dinner in one of the restaurants.

Refreshed by an excellent food, we set out on a trip to the castle. Yes, yes it was a trip comparable to Frodo’s one to Mordor… All right, maybe I’m exaggerating a bit but we found it really surprising that climbing a couple of stairs was such an effort for us. But almost always when one climbs up – one will be rewarded by nice views.

Croatia Day 3: Plitvička Jezera and Kuterevo

On Sunday we set out to Plitvička Jezera (Plitvice Lakes). This was our main destination – the National Park of Croatia and, I would say, the most famous place of the country. And well, it’s fame is undoubtedly merited. To me this was the day with the best views from the whole Croatia trip.

We made the long tour round Plitvice on foot with the exception of traversing the lake with a ship. The green is ubiquitous, it’s kind of amazing how many shades of this colour we have seen.

After Plitvice Lakes we headed to Kuterevo. It’s a small village I read about in a travel guide. It’s situated almost at the end of everything – really lovely and isolated place. It’s a must see point if you are in the area. Why so? It’s the residence of abandoned bears found in National Parks of Croatia. That’s right – „bear orphanages” – they exist!
The place is special not only because of the prevailing cuteness of baby bears. It’s managed by the volunteers from all over the world – one might think it became a Bohemia place for contemporary youth. The uniqueness expresses itself almost at very step there – starting from the fact that when we reached the place we were welcomed and guided in a familiar atmosphere by a young Croatian girl, through the presence of totems, signs, monuments, installations all over the place done by teh volunteers and ending on the souvenir shop where one can buy hand-made goodies (done by the youth of course). It’s a very original place.

Croatia Day 2: Alan and Zavratnica

On our second day we decided to do something mild so that the drivers can recover from sleep deprivation and regain power. I have to say, it’s a bit ironic how the day really looked like, because it definitely wasn’t a mild one.

We decided to visit Zavratnica – the place where a sunken ship lies in the bay and can be visited with snorkels. We wanted to spend the day a bit active though, so we went for an option to getting there from Jablanac – a 4-km-route „for adventurers”. Well, of course we are adventurers!

But on the route it turned out that there is a path leading to a mysterious mountain called Alan. Noone was really prepared for that (we were all wearing sandals), but I managed to convince people to go and try climb Alan. Now I admit, it was silly.

On the route we got lost and found ourselves walking on the stone run. It was extreme, very dangerous but most of all fun. And the views were spectacular.

At last we found the route and decided to keep walking to Alan. We had lots of fun by that, shouting „Alan! Alan!” all the time just like the groundhog on a well known video by Animal Planet. The route was getting steeper and steeper, our water supplies were shrinking and let’s face it – sandals is not the best choice for going into rocky mountains. So somewhere in the middle we had to give in. That hurt my pride but don’t worry, I promised myself to come back and I did just two days after.

The views from the route and  place we reached…

On our way back to Zavratnica we were really tired, our feet hurt but that was not the end of the surprises. We got to know why the route in the guide was described as „for adventurers”.  In principle, there was a section where we had to slide down a steep stone river. Well, we ended up all fours desperately trying to reach the bottom. Dangerous but fun!

All the hardship was paid off though when we reached Zavratnica bay. First thing we did was to jump into water. Very refreshing.

We snorkelled down to the sunken ship, it was not very deep (we didn’t need any special equipment). That was pretty cool. There were fish of different kinds, sea anemones, rusted metal covered with seaweed. We did some photos with the underwater camera.

We spent the rest of the day exploring the underwater world, sunbathing and relaxing. On our way back to Jablanec we took even more lovely photos.

Croatia Day 1: Senj

Longly awaited holidays came at last. This year’s destination: Croatia.
We started from Szczecin in the afternoon, splitted into two cars. The route was fine, it took us ~13 hours to get to the place. But boy, when we got there we made a stop just to absorb the beauty of the place.

This is the first image of the sea we saw before getting to the destination – after a long ride it was a decent reward for the pains of journey…

And this was the second image…

We arrived in the morning, so after settling in our accommodation place, taking showers and short naps, we set out to see Senj – the city we stayed in.

The city as such is rather small, so after a short walk around we headed to the main attraction – Nehaj hill where the Senj fortess is situated. The view from the massif was really spectacular, so although climbing up in such a hot weather was an effort, it was worth it.

The view on Nehaj…

The very first day on holidays always is like a shock to me. I find everything so spectacular, so fantastic, so marvellous… This was the case with Nehaj too. I could have stayed there for ages just to watch over the sea and mountains. But well, there were other beauty – places to discover so we went down to the city in the quest for finding a beverage to cool down. On our way we spotted even more quaint views of the place.


Back to the roots: pilgrimage

Our family and friends know the story how Radek went to a pilgrimage just for one day (to visit me on the route) and stayed till the end with only one pair of spare socks and briefs. Ach… good ol’ days!

Anyhow, it’s been 7 years since that memorable event and we decided to make a small tribute to that this year. We have no time and motivation to go on a full pilgrimage to Częstochowa, so we joined the group just for one day: Szczecin – Stargard (which is 27 km). A lot has changed in this time, but the pilgrimage spirit is definitely the same!

This year we were lucky or unlucky with the weather… It rained and it rained pretty heavily. OK, let’s face it – it rained cats and dogs! This is unlucky, because there is no worse thing than rain when you have to march. One gets soaked, demotivated, cold… But then you think: „I’m doing it for a reason, so it’s even better if it’s tough”. And in this sense it’s a positive thing.

Here are some photos from the day… We started as always at 7.00 o’clock with the mass in the sanctuary of Mother from Fatima. Then two groups formed and set out to Stargard -first through the housing estates, then through the forest. The first stop was after 10 km and this is when it started to rain.

Then we marched another ~10 km in the rain. Gosh, that was extreme. It took us twice as long to get to the lunch stop which was in Kobylanka. Fortunately, when we reached the village, it stopped raining. That was really good news because there is no sense in having pauses when it rains. In Kobylanka we had some time to change clothes to the dry ones and use the hospitality of the parishioners who prepared food and drinks.

Last leg of the route was Kobylanka – Stargard and came rather quick. All in all we did the distance of 27.02 km in a 6-hour-march (pauses excluded). Here is the route tracked by Endomondo application.