Cruising Along the Croatian Coastline

Since the last update we’ve been travelling along the Croatian coastline and checking out old towns like Split and Sibenik and attempting to get fitter by riding bikes up mountains on Hvar.

Hvar is a lovely island in the Adriatic Sea with bright white limestone shores, lush green pine trees and beautiful blue water. But be warned, in May it’s bloody freezing and I couldn’t go in further than my knees. It was probably around 14ºC. Colourful language came out of my mouth every time I put my feet in the water, both from the cold and the deceptively painful pebbles that the beaches are made of. Pedr seemed to think he was the smart one by not even bothering to try.

Apart from the cold water, the walk along the coastline was a pleasant experience. We also attempted to ride between the two main towns on the island, Hvar Town & Stari Grad, which were about 20km apart. 20km isn’t too bad for a bike ride. The bit we hadn’t really thought about until after we’d handed over money for the bikes was how hilly the island was.

We set out riding along the road happy and carefree (so carefree that we didn’t even have helmets) before slogging it up a hill. And another hill. And another hill. We’d get to the top of a hill only to discover that it’s just a flattish section before the next hill started. As we went higher and higher the flat sections got shorter and shorter until it was just one continuous uphill. Turns out that Pedr isn’t so great at endurance-type activities (except for hiking). Whilst he can do chin-ups with zero training, biking up a steady incline didn’t agree with him so there were quite a few unscheduled stops on the way up the mountain. We even drank all our water before getting to the top and were very lucky to find a kindly woman (who spoke no English) give us ice water from her freezer once she realised we were trying to ride between to two towns. (She thought we were crazy by the way) But we eventually made it to the top, 400m up over 6km, and were rewarded with fantastic views over the island and sea.

The second part of the trip was the complete opposite, the road just goes straight down. So we literally rolled down the mountain 12km all the way to Stari Grad to be rewarded with delicious ice cream. Anything cold was delicious at that point. On the way home we decided to take the lazy way out and take a taxi back to Hvar Town. I forgot to turn off Strava (bike tracking app) when we were in the taxi so now I have 2 ‘Queen of the Mountain’ titles for completing sections in 20% of the time it took everyone else. I wonder how long it will be before they notice that 100km/h is not a normal bike speed…

Split is a cool old town which used to be a fortified palace for the Roman emperor Diocletian, but over the years almost all the buildings inside were converted into houses or Christian buildings. Including his tomb which became a cathedral, which is a little ironic seeing as he was big persecutor of Christians. But now it’s a very pretty town full of limestone houses with red roofs and green shutters.

While we were in Sibenik we visited a raptor rescue centre just outside of town. They take in injured birds and rehabilitate them before releasing them back into the wild as well as educating visitors on raptors with some of their permanent residents. It was pretty cool to get up close to them and we even got to feed one of them from a glove. I think Pedr was seriously thinking about working as a volunteer there as he was doing the maths on whether or not the rent from our house would cover us living there.