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Rick Steves’ Travel Blog

Here you can browse through my blog posts prior to February 2022. Currently I'm sharing my travel experiences, candid opinions, and what's on my mind solely on my Facebook page. — Rick

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Rovinj Saves Istria

 

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Rovinj — just a two-hour speed-boat ride from Venice — is the best coastal stop between Venice and Dubrovnik. I absolutely love the place. I’m not sure why. Let me just dig through its charms and maybe you’ll understand.

It’s small — like a little hunk of Venice draped over a hill, surrounded by the Adriatic on three sides. Peering through my camera viewfinder I keep thinking, simply, “romantic.”

Rovinj is a collage of vivid travel memories: shiny stones, boats — laden with kitschy shells for sale — rocking giddily in the harbor, and a bell tower with a rickety staircase that requires a powerful faith in the power of wood. From the top a patron-saint-weathervane boldly faces each menacing cloud front that blows in from sea.

Walking through the market puts me in a good mood. I feel like Marilyn Monroe singing to a bunch of sex-starved GIs. Women push grappa and homemade fruit brandies on me. Their sample walnuts are curiously flavorful. I’ll buy a bag on my way out of town…make someone happy.

The old communist monster hotel stands bold and garish on the horizon. Retro Tito-style cafés vie for your business. The woman who runs the Valentino cocktail bar hands out pillows as you arrive — an invitation to find your own nook in the rocks overlooking the bay.

Ducking away from the affluent Croatian chic on the main drag, I walk a few steps up a back street and step into a smoky time-warp bar that took “untouristy” to scary extremes. In fact, it was too untouristy to recommend in the “untouristy bars” section of our book. The town fishermen and alcoholics (generally, it seemed, one and the same) were smoking, bantering loudly, and getting too drunk on cheap homemade beer to notice the nude pinups plastering the walls. I no longer feel like Marilyn Monroe singing to sex-starved GIs. I feel like a rabbit at the nocturnal house at the zoo.

The guy who runs my hotel is Igor. His sales manager is Natasha. Interviewing them for our guidebook, I feel like I’m talking to cartoon characters. For all they know, I’m Boris. No one here knows me yet….it’s strange not to be taken seriously.

Romantic Rovinj is also humble: the fountain on the main square celebrates the water system arriving in 1959. The main monument on the seafront is a Social Realist block of concrete honoring the victims of “fascism” (read: Hitler and Mussolini).

The town’s tiny Batana Boat Museum celebrates the culture around the town’s beloved batana boat — an underwhelming flat-bottomed wooden craft little bigger than a dinghy. A video shows a time-lapse construction of a boat; another exhibit lets you move a wine glass from stain to stain on an old tablecloth, activating recordings of people speaking the local dialect (which apparently is more Venetian these days than Venetian itself); and a TV with a pair of headphones lets you listen to the local betinada music — a small choral group in which one man sings lead while the others imitate instruments.

On the prettiest corner in town, we spot a charming blond woman meeting two travelers to set them up in her rental apartment. My co-author Cameron and I wait until she’s finished, then ambush her with a request to show us the rental, hoping to add it to our guidebook listings. She says, “But I’m just a single woman with four rooms to rent and no agency.” That’s exactly who we want to partner with as we look for budget accommodations in Rovinj. We take a tour and the rooms are great. She can’t believe she’ll be in a book and pay no fee for the promotion.

Cameron and I high-five happily as Rovinj gets even better: We have a new listing for half the price of the town’s cheapest hotel (Miranda Fabris, at Chiurca 5, Db-€40 or €50 in July-Aug, lots of steep stairs, mobile 091-881-8881, miranda_fabris@yahoo.com).

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Ivana’s Istrian Fingers

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I woke up in the dark. I pushed open my lumbering shutters. The heavy rain storm had cleaned the air, and an early-morning light invigorated the colors. Glistening red-tile roofs led to a rustic stone rampart. On the rampart was my co-author, Cameron, pointing his camera at a lush landscape of rolling hills and simple farms. This was Istria.

Feeling overworked, I scheduled a massage for 8:30. When I booked, for some reason I decided I’d enjoy it more if it wasn’t a male Croat working me over. I requested a woman. The receptionist assured me it was a woman…“a young woman.”

So I traded breakfast for a “sport massage” and climbed up to the hotel’s spa room, where Ivana met me. The experience seemed Yugoslavian (even though that country is long gone): No chat…no soft music…no candles…just the radio and hanging neon lights. Still, Ivana’s hands were strong. She did her work dutifully. It was an hour and $40 well spent.

With me in tow, Cameron valiantly tried to unearth some gems in Croatia’s Istrian interior. But either our luck was bad, or (more likely) there are few true gems to be found.

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Compared with the rest of the former Yugoslavia, Istria is charming enough. But a history of poverty leaves it with a disappointingly weak veneer of culture — an ersatz Tuscany. While nice roads lace together a lush green countryside, it’s cinderblocks rather than bricks, broken concrete rather than marble, rust rather than rustic. Istria’s much-flouted truffles may be tasty…but not tasty enough to shape an itinerary. The hill towns are hill towns…but so poor that they inherited nearly no distinctive architecture.

My advice for Istria in a nutshell: Motovun (where we slept…and Ivana works) is a fine hill town, uniquely Croatian with a fun splash of Italy (Mario Andretti was born here). The smaller hill town of note, Groznjan, was too sleepy for my taste on our visit in the shoulder season. The big city of Pula is great for its Roman amphitheater and a walk through work-a-day Croatia. But the saving grace of Istria…and one of my new favorites anywhere in Europe…? I’ll tell you later.

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Sarajevo Roses, Croatian Squeegees, and the Worst Meal Yet

 

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I was actually looking forward to the all-day drive that would cover almost the entire length of Croatia. We left Mostar at lunchtime. On the way out of town, we stopped at a tiny grocery store, where a woman I had befriended the day before — a gorgeous person, sad to be living in a frustrating economy, and stiff with a piece of shrapnel in her back that doctors decided was safer left in — made us hearty ham sandwiches. As she sliced, I gathered the rest of what was a fine picnic meal on wheels.

Leaving town, we drove over patched blast holes in the pavement. In Sarajevo, they’ve filled these scars with red concrete as memorials: “Sarajevo roses.” Here they were black like the rest of the street — but knowing what they were, they showed up red in my mind.

My two-month trip was winding up. I’d be flying home in six days, and was now at the point where you start to budget your clothes — how long you’ll need to wear each remaining pair of clean socks to get home without doing laundry. Cameron and I compared packing philosophies. (Five socks and three underpants gets me about 10 days between trips to the laundry.)

It was hot…a bathing suit kind of drive. (I don’t travel with shorts, but resort to my swim trunks if it’s too hot for pants.) With bare feet on the dashboard, I can never relax…I’m always worried about being broke in two if the airbag is set off.

When we stop at the fortified village of Pocitelj, it seems the entire population is employed selling newspaper cones of dried apricots, walnuts, and cherries. Three little girls sit under an arch playing cards. I take a photo, and one grumbles at me, “One euro!” I make her smile. She’s having a bad day…mom thinks making her wear the traditional head covering of Muslim women in this town is good for sales.

First we follow the twisty coastal road north past appealing harbor towns and a chorus line of scrub-brush mountains plunging into the sea. Near Split, we board the perfectly new expressway and pick up speed. Every on-ramp, every sign, every light, every USA-style rest stop is shiny new.

On the expressway — where people spend $8 a gallon for gas and enjoy Western-style snacks in mini-markets — you see there’s a no-nonsense affluence to the former Yugoslavia that’s a long way from its humble but colorful past. It’s a land where dads with new cars teach their children to help squeegee the windows. Next week the Rolling Stones are playing in Montenegro, and all 60,000 tickets at $50 each are sold out. Obviously not everyone is selling paper cones of walnuts.

It’s clear we’ll be very late to our hotel, so we gird ourselves for the worst meal of our trip and have a rest-stop dinner. We walk through the smoke-filled bar — crammed full of angry tattoos and men who look like they could kill you without breaking a sweat. I can’t help but wonder which of these burly, aggressive guys might have been a killer or a rapist in the war that put “ethnic cleansing” into our vocabulary. While the bar is packed, the adjacent restaurant is empty. I ask the boy stuck at the cafeteria line what he’d eat. In his estimation, the mushroom and chicken with potato croquettes or gnocchi was the least of evils. I missed the woman with the shrapnel in her back.

At Rijeka, the ugliest town in Croatia, we run out of super-expressway. We’ve driven virtually its entire length and are about to pay the maximum toll. Cameron warns this will be pricey. We guess. Cameron says 250 kunas. I say 150. It’s 155…but the lady at the booth doesn’t understand my joy when she tells us the bill. (At about 5 kunas per dollar, that’s about $30 for the three-hour drive.)

We’re finally in Istria, Croatia’s trendy peninsula just across the water from Venice and bordering Slovenia. There’s a strong buzz about Istria…but my hunch is it’s a watered-down Tuscany at best. Through a driving rainstorm, we wind and wind through the dark to the summit of a hill town (Motovun). The road gets narrower and narrower. When we run out of road, we park, get out, and walk. Our rooms are ready. Sharing tales of tour guide friends who like to arrive after dark for the theatrics, we’ll have to wait to see what is revealed with the sun tomorrow. Then I’ll learn just how good this Istria is.

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Bosnian Hormones and a Shiny New Cemetery

 

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In two months of travel on this trip, exploring the city of Mostar ranks with Tangier among my richest experiences. At the same time, the vibrant humanity and the persistent reminders of the terrible war just over a decade ago combine to make Mostar strangely exhausting.

Just a few years ago, these people — who make me a sandwich, direct me to a computer terminal in the cyber café, stop for me when I cross the street, show off their paintings, and direct the church choir — were killing each other.

Three hours’ drive inland from Dubrovnik, Mostar (in Bosnia-Herzegovina) was famous for its 400-year-old, Turkish-style stone bridge — its elegant single pointed arch symbolic of that Muslim society and the town’s status as the place were East met West in Europe.

Then, during the 1990s, Mostar became an icon of the Bosnian war. Across the world, people groaned when the pummeled bridge — bombarded by (Croat Catholic) artillery shells from the hilltop above — finally collapsed into the river. Now the bridge has been rebuilt and Mostar is thriving.

Masala Square (literally “Place for Prayer”) is designed for big gatherings. Muslim groups meet here before departing to Mecca on the Haj. But tonight, there’s not a hint of prayer. It’s prom night. The kids are out…Bosnian hormones are bursting. Being young and sexy is a great equalizer. With a beer, loud music, desirability, twinkling stars…and no war…your country’s GDP doesn’t really matter.

Today’s 18-year-old in Mostar was a preschooler during the war. I imagine there’s quite a generation gap.

I’m swirling in all the teenagers, and through the crowd, a thirty-something local comes at me with a huge smile. He’s Alen from Orlando. Actually, he’s from Mostar, but fled to Florida during the war and summers here with his family. He loves my TV show and immediately has me going on a Bosnia script.

We walk, and Alen gives the city meaning. A fig tree grows out of a small minaret. He says, “It’s a strange thing in nature…figs can grow with almost no soil.” There are blackened ruins everywhere. When I ask why — after 15 years — the ruins still stand, Alen explains, “Confusion about who owns what. Surviving companies have no money. The bank of Yugoslavia, which held the mortgages, is now gone. No one will invest until it’s clear who owns the buildings.”

We side-trip to a small cemetery congested with over a hundred white marble Muslim tombstones. Alen points out the dates. Everyone died in 1993, 1994, or 1995. This was a park before 1993. When the war heated up, snipers were a constant concern — they’d pick off anyone they saw walking down the street. Bodies were left for weeks along the main boulevard, which had become the front line. Mostar’s cemeteries were too exposed, but this tree-filled park was relatively safe from snipers. People buried their neighbors here…under the cover of darkness.

Alen says, “In those years, night was the time when we lived. We didn’t walk…we ran. And we dressed in black. There was no electricity. If they didn’t kill us with their bullets, the Croats killed us with their rabble-rousing pop music. It was blasting from the Catholic side of town.”

The symbolism of the religious conflict is powerful. Ten minarets pierce Mostar’s skyline like proud exclamation points. There, twice as tall as the tallest minaret, stands the Croats’ new Catholic Church spire. Standing on the reconstructed Old Bridge, I look at the hilltop high above the town, with its single, bold, and strongly floodlit cross. Alen says, “We Muslims believe that cross marks the spot from where they shelled this bridge…like a celebration.”

The next day, I’m in a small theater with 30 Slovenes (from a part of the former Yugoslavia that avoided the terrible destruction of the war) watching a short film about the Old Bridge, its destruction, and its rebuilding. The persistent shelling of the venerable bridge, so rich in symbolism, seemed to go on and on. When it finally fell, I heard a sad collective gasp…as if the Slovenes were learning of the tragedy just now.

The feeling I get from people here today is, “I don’t know how we could have been so stupid to wage an unnecessary war.” I didn’t meet anyone here who called the war anything but a tragic mistake.

A big issue for me and Cameron for our guidebook is which day trip from Dubrovnik is best: the lovely town of Korcula on the island of Korcula; the Bay of Kotor in Montenegro; or Mostar here in Bosnia-Herzegovina. There’s no question: it’s Mostar. And with the money you save in relative hotel costs, you can hire a private guide and get the Mostar story from someone who had to wait until dark to bury his neighbors.

That night, as the kids ripped it up at the dance halls, I lay in bed sorting out my impressions. Until the wee hours, a birthday party raged in the restaurant outside my window. For hours they sang songs. At first I was annoyed. Then I thought, a Bosniak Beach Boys party beats a night of shelling. In two hours of sing-a-longs, everyone seemed to know the words very well…and I didn’t recognize a single tune. This Bosnian culture will rage on.

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Bosnia: Buffalo-Nickel Charm on a Road That Does Not Exist

 

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Today we drove from Dubrovnik in Croatia inland to Mostar in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Everyone takes the main, scenic coastal route: head north along the coast and then cut inland at Metkovic. But, with a spirit of adventure, we took the small road: inland first, then looping north through the Serb part of Herzegovina. When asked for driving tips, Croats — who, because of ongoing tensions with the Serbs, avoid this territory — actually insist that the road doesn’t even exist. From the main road just south of Dubrovnik, directional signs send you to the tiny Croatian border town…but ignore the large Serb city of Trebinje just beyond.

But there is plenty past the border. (And, we were relieved to find, an actual — and surprisingly well-maintained — road.)

While Bosnia-Herzegovina is one country, the peace accords to end the war here in 1995 gerrymandered it to give a degree of autonomy to the area where Orthodox Serbs predominate. This “Republika Srpska” rings the core of Bosnia on three sides.

The complex nature of things here comes across in the powerful language of flags. Over the day we saw several: a car charging with the old quasi-fascist Croat flag (echoing Croatia’s WWII Nazi puppet government), a Serb flag, and another with a circle of yellow stars — a tip of the hat to the EU…membership is the hope of many here.

Serbs, Croats, and Bosniaks come from virtually identical ethnic stock. They just have different religions: Orthodox Christian, Catholic Christian, and Muslim, respectively. Because of intermarriages during the Ottoman occupation, some (but not all) Bosniaks also have some Turkish blood. Studying the complex demographics of the region, you gain a respect for the communist-era dictator Tito — the one man who could hold this place together peacefully.

As we enter the bustling and prosperous town of Trebinje (the one that doesn’t exist in Dubrovnik), police with ping-pong paddle stop signs pull us over — you must drive with your headlights on at all hours. The “dumb tourist” routine gets us off the hook. I get cash at an ATM (even here — in perhaps the most remote place I’ve been in Europe — ATMs are plentiful). We enjoy a vibrant market, noting that there’s no way the casual tourist could determine the religion and loyalties of the people just by looking.

Bosnia-Herzegovina’s money is called the “convertible mark.” I don’t know if they are just thrilled that their money is now convertible…but I remember a time when it wasn’t. I stow a few Bosnian coins as souvenirs. They have the charm of Indian pennies and buffalo nickels.

Later, after a two-hour drive on deserted roads through a rugged landscape, we arrived at the very humble crossroads village of Nevesinje. Towns in this region all have a “café row,” and Nevesinje is no exception. It was lunchtime, but as we walked through the town, we didn’t see a soul with any food on their plate — just drinks. Apparently locals eat (economically) at home…and then enjoy an affordable coffee or drink at a café.

A cluttered little grocery — the woman behind the counter happy to make a sandwich — was our answer. The salami looked like Spam. Going through the sanitary motions, she laid down a piece of paper to catch the meat — but the slices of Spam landed on the grotty base of the slicer as they were cut. Buying strong Turkish (or “Bosnian”) coffees with highly-caffeinated mud in the bottom (for the US equivalent of a quarter apiece), we munched our sandwiches in the adjacent café, watching the street scene.

Big men drove by in little beaters. High-school kids crowded around the window of the local photography shop, which had just posted their class graduation photos. The girls on this cruising drag proved you don’t need money to have style. Through a shop window, I could see a newly-engaged couple picking out a simple ring. One moment I saw Nevesinje as very different from my hometown…but the next it seemed just the same.

Looking at the curiously overgrown ruined building across the street, I saw bricked-up, pointed Islamic arches, and realized it was once a mosque. In its back yard — a no man’s land of broken concrete and glass — a single half-knocked-over Turban-topped tombstone still managed to stand. The prayer niche inside, where no one prays anymore, faced an empty restaurant.