Down by the seashore and other Croatia General Tips

Favorite Thing: Wonderful as the water is in Croatia, some of the beaches are little more than concrete platforms over the water and others are very narrow. For someone coming, as I do, from a place where the beaches are wide stretches of pure white sand, these places hardly qualify as beaches at all. However, lots of them have what I would love to see here at home ... cafes right on the beach. Simple, a few tables and chairs under an awning or shady trees, somewhere you can get a beer or a coffee, where parents can watch their children playing just a few feet away from them, where you can sit in a chair (good for creaky joints) and relax by the water, stay for dinner if you like. We have have beautiful cafes at our beaches with balconies and terraces but none of them are actually down on the shore - and it's just not quite the same


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Favorite Thing: Ask anyone in Australia what is the archetypal Aussie cake - the answer is bound to be a lamington. A square of sponge cake, rolled in chocolate sauce and coconut, you find them all over the country. I never expected to find them in Croatia!

Years of immigration have seen the introduction of a wonderful variety to food in Australia - what we eat and the way we cook it. I guess this is just a little reciprocation. I'd love to know who it was who turned the tables and took this little bit of Oz back to the old country. There they were though, in bakers everywhere, as Aussie as vegemite, lamingtons! I'm not so sure that it's been a fair trade.


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Favorite Thing: The Illyrians and their bunjes are a visible but mysterious presence in Dalmatia. For a structure that is some 2000 years old, this rebuilt bunja on Hvar is in amazingly good condition though I don't think you'll find it listed on a local realtors lists as a potential holiday home, no matter how historic it may be.

We saw our first bunje on Brac and became intrigued with the lost Illyrians who built them. The name rang bells - echoes of Shakespeare studied at school - wasn't Orsino the Duke of lllyria? The bunjes we saw didn't look like ducal palaces. Wikipaedia to the rescue - the Illyrians were the ancient tribes who inhabited the Western Balkans in Classical times.

What is a bunje? A dry-stone walled house, typically round with a stepped stone roof, quite large inside. It seems on Hvar they're known as "trim". The one in the photo here is in a field right at the turnoff for Vrboska.

Photo 2 shows a bunje on Brac - definitely "ripe for renovation".


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