What's wrong with this picture?

roatia It was the end of a week-long stint at this oasis of a campground in the town of Bol on the island of Brač on the Dalmatian coast of Croatia. For us, it’s pretty far from home. That’s why I had to do a double-take when I pulled up the Space Star beside this VW Golf with Ontario plates that was parked at our campground. Looked pretty normal to me until I remembered where we were. Turns out this Croatian guy from Hamilton moved back home and decided to ship his car over the Atlantic. He never bothered to tell either Canadian or Croatian transport authorities. Strangely enough, the local cops never give him a hard time for having out-of-town plates. Apparently, having Ontario plates is almost as good as having Slovakian plates over here (so far people always seem to greet us with a bright smile and a friendly salutation in Slovakian when we pull up. We might have to sew Slovakian flags on our backpacks…hehe).

Back to the campground on Brač (Camp Kito). It’s a family-run joint. The wife is a Bosnian-born Serb and the husband is Croatian. No biggie. They get along so well that they manage to make their own wine, limoncello, walnut schnapps and olive oil. The cool thing is they make this stuff right there in the open (our tent was pitched underneath a canopy of grape vines). The wine is full-bodied, the limoncello actually has pulp in it, the schnapps is authentic, and the olive oil is truly organic (sorry mom, I wanted to ship some oil back to you but alas – the shipping was outrageous!) They also cook a traditional Balkan dinner every night. One thing that Elise and I love to do is paddle to secluded places, have lunch, then paddle back. So, we decided to show our new Austrian/Swiss friends in Croatia what paddling is all about (insert shout-out to Bettina and Christian here). We packed a lunch and some brewskies and rented four kayaks to take out on the (relatively) choppy waters of the Adriatic. Buyer beware. Three of the kayaks functioned no better than a survival raft made by Bear Grylls and I don’t think the fourth was a kayak at all! (it was actually a single-person sailboat for which they gave us a kayak paddle). Elise and I, the veteran Canadian paddlers, were sloshing around like flotsam while our new Euro friends were thinking “this is supposed to be fun?” I would have rather been paddling a piece of driftwood. Anyway, the secluded beach was found, pasta salad was consumed, brewskies got cracked, the socioeconomic policies of German-speaking Europe were contrasted with those of Canada, and we made it back alive.

We left Croatia for Mostar, Bosnia the other day…more on that to come. We'll also try to post some additional pics of our ten days on the Dalmatian coast.

-G