Day 24 – Korcula Island (Monday 6th May 2024)

Our day started with a little grocery challenge in the nearby Koznum supermarket. After breakfast we visited there to get some fruit, chips and other essentials like boot polish. Gotta keep them RM’s lookin’ good. On that subject, they’ve been a good choice of footwear to bring along – able to handle the rough tracks we’ve walked in comfort and, with a bit of that boot polish, they’ll be more than appropriate for the opera in Vienna or the theatre in the West End.

Anyway, in Europe when one buys fruit and veg one must weigh it at the point of pick-up in the store, press at number on the panel attached to the scales and a sticky ticket will be printed which can then be scanned at the checkout. We were aware of this system thanks to our experience in Joselin in France in 2017 but we couldn’t work out what number bananas were. A helpful local hit the panel for us and out popped a ticket. Great! Well not so as it turned out. We took a punt and went through the self-checkout – just for fun! The attendant checked our items and declared (in Croatian) “You have not paid for the bananas!!” I knew I’d scanned them so we protested. To cut a very long story short it turns out that our helpful local friend had inadvertently hit the button for apples not bananas. A young and much less linguistically challenged girl stepped in and sorted it out for us. Fun way to start the say. No similar problems with the oranges we bought once I understood the system.

 

The next two hours we spent travelling from Dubrovnik to the island of Korcula via the village of Ston at the head of the Peljesac peninsula. Our stop in Ston was very brief, just 50 minutes, enough time to have a coffee, post that postcard to Mum and get a couple of snaps on the lanes and its famous walls which, so we were told, come in a very distant second place to the Great Wall of China in the Stone Wall Stakes. The road along the peninsula wound its way through rocky, hilly terrain past numerous small vineyards. The tops of the hills were quite barren while the slopes supported low scrubby vegetation of some sort as well as the grape vines of the aforementioned vineyards. Our tour leader declared that the best Croatian wine comes this region. Interestingly, the vines are not supported by any post and wire structures, just small individual plants in the soil. Apparently, they don’t spread very much and the fruit is small but intense.

Or arrival at the port of Orebic was perfectly timed. No sooner had we unloaded our luggage from the bus and boarded the ferry and we were underway on our 20 minute ride across the narrow strait to Korcula Island. Korcula is one of about 1000 islands, big (like this one) and small thatlie off the coast of Croatia. The main town of Korcula Island is named for the island. Like all towns in this part of the world it has an old town and a newer town. Our group took a short walk past a tower on the old ancient city fortifications to a little square on the dockside. Here we met a chap who was “hosting” us for the next two days. We’re not staying in a hotel but rather in separate rooms scattered across the old town. Our room sits above the towns main square just outside what would have once been a gate into the old town. It’s accessed by a magnificent, broad set of steps that lead from the square to the gate. If you’ve seen the Ponte Rialto in Venice, picture it rising to its zenith and then stopping. To me it looks like half a Ponte Rialto. The room is no different to any hotel room we’ve already been in except that it has two important additions – a kettle (woo hoo!) and a proper washing machine (wooooo hooooo!!!).

 

A load of washing went on intermediately and then we went top meet to rest of the group for an orientation tour of the old town. The town is quite tiny with water on three sides but there is much more to it than my first glance showed. Countless restaurants, bars and cafes can be found along the tree-lined promenade on the side opposite to which we landed. Narrow lane-ways no more than a couple of metres wide dissect the town with most leading from the waterfront promenade up the hill to the church. Some of us walked along the harbour on the other side towards an old monastery sitting on the point for a view across the water back to the town. On the way back Kerry and I stopped with Doug and his wife Laurie at a harbour-side cafe for a coffee and to enjoy more of the view.

 

 

Tonight we’re visiting a Konoba – typically a family-owned restaurant that makes and serves only traditional Croatian dishes. The patriarch of the family and his wife greeted our group in the courtyard of the restaurant (owned by his son) and he proceeded to tell us the family history, including his stint in the antipodes (15 years in NZ), while sipping his family rakija and feasting on delicious dried figs. The meal consisted of a platter of goat and cow cheese and deep-fried zucchini, home-made penne-like pasta in a meat sauce, bread with home-made olive oil and red-wine vinegar, a traditional biscuit-like sweet and wine from the family vineyard. All in all a very pleasant evening in a very relaxed setting.