Day 31 - Istria – Part One (Monday 13th May 2024)

No rush to get going this morning. With a car at our disposal we were beholden to no one else’s schedule. After breakfast we walked up to the car-park 100m from Apartment Iva and hit the road. First stop was to top up the tank – just 20 litres almost refilled it. The Clio averaged 4.2l/100km on the trip from Split. Pretty good, I reckon, especially since I was not trying to be frugal with fuel.

 

Our plan was to find our way to the eastern side of the Istrian Peninsula by no particular path except one that avoided motorways and toll-roads. The Istrian Peninsula is triangular in shape - a stretched Tasmania would be the best way to describe it. Dissecting the peninsula diagonally from the north-east near the coastal city of Rijeka to the south-west near the tip and the city of Pula is a high-speed motorway. Another intersecting motorway runs more-or-less parallel with the western coast up to the border with Slovenia. Without those motorways Istria would difficult to traverse by road. There’s not a lot happening in the way of rail transport either and ferries up and down either coast are few and far between and then mostly in the peak tourist season only.

 

If one was to draw a line from the north-west of the peninsula where Croatia and Slovenia meet on the coast to the tip then you would find that land north and east of that line is very mountainous while the land to the south and east is (relatively) flat. About 12kms east of Rovinj we ducked under the motorway at the town of Kanfanar. A little further on we spied a church tower sitting atop a small hill so turned thew Clio towards it. The church tower was in in the old part of the town of Zminj. As it turned out, an unexciting rural town where we stopped for a coffee to map out a course for the day.

 

Look at any map and you’ll soon see that Istria is just chock-a-block with tiny, little villages scattered all over the country-side. This is a phenomenon not seen in Australia where the distance from one town to the next is never, ever walking distance. In the UK and France the proximity of villages is greatly reduced when compared to Australia, but in Istria they are right in top of each other. Without a word of exaggeration, we saw countless instances where the “Now leaving (inset village name here)” sign was followed 50m later by the “Welcome to (insert new village name here)” sign of a different village. In some cases the local council economised and put both signs on the one pole! Many of them are hamlets, rather than villages being just a cluster of residential properties and their sheds in a maze of narrow streets and lanes amongst the fields. Not far out of Zminj on the road to Barban we found an area just like this comprised of hamlets called Zagrici, Dohrani, Klimni, Ridani, Jusani and Bencici to name but a few. We spent quiet some time winding our way from one to the next stopping to take photographs of the ancient stone buildings, their wild gardens, the tiny lanes and the fields around it all. There were a few odd looks from the local residents from time to time.

 

 

We got back on the “main” road and continued on to Barban, a small village on a higher point in the landscape, not far from the coastline, hoping to find some lunch. Nothing happening here so we headed toward the larger Labin, a proper town, where we managed to find a Mlinar bakery (just like a Bakers Delight) and got a pre-made roll, a sticky pastry and a coffee. BTW, Mlinar bakeries are all over the place in this part of the world, in just about every place that even half looks like a town. They’re stuff is good and well priced.

 

In Labin we were not too far from our other objective for the day – a drive along the coast road from Plomin to Opatija. Like the Great Ocean Road in Victoria, this road hugs the coastline halfway up a mountain range that plunges into the sea. This 35km, 45 minutes drive did not disappoint. The waters of the Adriatic Sea were flat as, and although the air was a little hazy it didn’t spoil the view towards the large islands of Cres and Krk that lie in the Kvarner Gulf. We stopped at the lovely village of Brsec, clinging to the mountainside above the sea, and wandered around there for a short while, up and down its stone steps and stairways, winding in between the houses and out to terraces bordered with potted red geraniums overlooking the sea.

 

Further in we travelled through more villages, stopping in Lovran down by the water’s edge where sat and watch some old fishermen try their luck of the stone pier. Lovran and other towns beyond it are much larger and I can easily imagine their grand hotels that line the road buzzing with holiday makers in the not too distant future. Just before we reached Opatija we took a sharp left at the village of Icici – it was the intensity of the squiggly line that represented to road on my map that made made me do it. And boy was it steep and winding. The numerous hairpins were so sharp that GPS-girl was constantly advising me to “in 100m, turn right” followed immediately by “in 100m, turn left”. When we got to the top we found ourselves in the verdant “Park Prirode Ucla” National Park. A small handful of hamlets popped up along the road through the Park but it was mostly winding road up through dark green forests and then down the other side. The Ucla Tunnel gave us the option to drive underneath the mountain but where would be the fun in that?

 

 

After was seemed like an hour we made it back down to the other side… and the fun began. Our intention was to tale the aforementioned motorway from here back to Rovinj. Tired from driving all day we made a wrong turn as we approached the motorway and wound up on the wrong side, heading back to the eastern coast. We wanted to go west. I guess GPS-girl was tired too because I’m sure I followed her instructions properly. Or maybe she was just exacting revenge for all the times I’d ignored her advice during the day. Anyway, there we were trapped on the wrong side of a tollway. I drove out to a toll booth to be roundly castigated by the attendant there and forced to reverse back into the incoming traffic and cut a cross a few lanes to the safety of the parking are where we gathered our thoughts, found a little office, spoke to the very helpful and understanding attendant there who provided the advice we needed, gave permission for us to exit at the point we’d entered and directed us to the correct tollway entry point. With hindsight and later investigation, there was a whole bunch of road modification work going on that was not reflected in even Google Maps so it’s not a wonder we all got confused.

Heading back to the west we completed the 80-odd km journey back to Rovinj in quick time, happy to turn the Clio’s engine off in our little car-park up the street.