Sailing Croatia: Dubrovnik - Mljet

The Croatian coastline is lined with more than 1000 islands. Strangely enough, I didn't see 1000 Island Salad Dressing anywhere, but that would be too obvious, ne c'est pas? Of these 1000 islands, only 20 or so are popular with tourists....the rest are tiny and largely uninhabitable (unless you're a contestant on Survivor - hey, Survivor Croatia! I'm e-mailing that one to Jeff).

Anyway, Mljet - and I must include a sidebar here: Eastern European spellings are dof in the extreme. Basically, they accidentally forgot to put vowels in, well...OH, THEIR WHOLE COLLECTION OF LANGUAGES, but you say the words as if the vowel was there. So Mljet is Mil-yet. Easy, yes? I know, I threw my hands up in surrender many times as well. Where was I? Oh yes - Mljet is the southern-most of the larger islands, dubbed thus by the trusty Lonely Planet guide book: "the most seductive island in the Adriatic". Perhaps the author of so sweeping a comment was caught up in a torrid romance at the time of writing, the strength of which robbed him of his senses. Mljet was voted far and away the most pointless stop on our trip.

To be fair, the whole damn island is a National Park, so if you don't hire bicycles and cycle around it, you are restricted to about a kilometre of harbour front with a few restaurants and bars, none of which make cocktails. Seriaaas. No cocktails on the waterfront. It's like no sunshine in summer - completely at odds with natural law. We were quite keen to cycle around the park and swim in the two big lakes, but after we only docked at 5pm and found the entrance to be 90 Kuna a head, excluding bicycle hire, we decided it was fairly pointless. Instead, we hit up a local pizzeria for some amazing pizza and some extremely awesome camel piss wine. Our refined saffa taste buds were by now getting used to the idea of ordering cheap local wine in half or full litres instead of bottles. It was a third of the price, and as the bottled wines weren't that great anyway, it made more sense - especially after the third glass when your taste buds went pleasantly numb, and it could really have been camel piss for all you knew.

So nothing much happened in Mljet. We had dinner, took some drinks down to the "beach" (concrete slab on the other side of the harbour, complete with empty kiddies tidal pool) and took silly photos of each other. Mljet, however, was where we found out about The Smelly Fish Incident.

HippieChick is a lovely girl, but definitely not the best of cabinmates. She could usually be found out and about til all hours of the morning, blithely letting herself in and out of the cabin in a state of inebriation to fetch unidentified objects, attempting to bring her squeeze from HMS Cockfest back to the room for a cuddle (and here met an icy refusal from Tee, not once but 3 times) and generally disturbing the calm seas for her patient cabinmate, Tee. But even Tee had enough with this particular incident. HippieChick, being a hippie, is able to live on a very frugal budget. She also had a month and half of travelling in front of her when she first arrived in Croatia, so going out for dinner every night was not an option. She would often go back to her room and eat something she had bought at port that afternoon for dinner, while the rest of us sampled local cuisine.

On one of the first couple of days we were given fish for lunch. Very nice, spiced fish, served whole with wobbly little fish eyes staring accusingly out at you from the silver platter. Not everyone was a fish fan, and there were quite a few untouched fish left over. HippieChick saw an opportunity, and slipped one into her handbag, for later snackage. It must be said at this point that the fish was only wrapped in a napkin, and the rooms have no refrigeration facilities. It was also around this time that HippieChick got sick - a little gift from Tee who had started the trip recovering from a nasty cold. Thus, she couldn't smell anything. Tee however was on the mend, and could smell everything.

Later that evening, Tee commented on the slightly fishy smell in the room. That night they slept with the windows and door open, hoping that the room just needed some airing. The next morning it wasn't any better. We spent the day up top the roof in 35 degree heat, and Tee came down late that afternoon to the overpowering stench of rotting fish in her cabin. She searched high and low - in the bin, in HippieChick's luggage, under the bed - but to no avail. The aroma lingered on. That night the room was almost unbearable to sleep in, but HippieChick, blissfully unaware with her stuffy nose, slept like a baby while Tee tossed and turned, pillow hugged tightly to nostrils. It was only the next day - nearly a full 48 hours later - that HippieChick dug in her handbag to get something and discovered the rotten fish. Mortified, she told Britney and swore her to silence. Britney, who is about as good at keeping secrets as Perez Hilton, promptly told Tee and the rest of us, and for the remainder of the trip, HippieChick was shredded mercilessly and every fish joke in the book was worn out repeatedly. She was not amused.

Sailing Croatia: Trstenik - Dubrovnik

The morning kicked off with an early swim and an earnest discussion about what had happened the previous night. It was established that our group had incurred the following injuries:

HippieChick - blue and purple bruises on her arms and legs from being held down, and an especially attractive swollen nose from being elbowed, all by Crazy K
Crazy K - Carpet burn on her shoulder from being dragged across the deck by HippieChick
Lopz - swollen left index fingertip with suspicious looking red dot in the centre. Many theories were put forth before Crazy K conceded she may well have bitten said fingertip in drunken frenzy (neither of us can actually remember)
Britney - sprained ankle from everybody doing the brand new dance now
Jem - bruises along his thigh from coming short after jumping from the roof of the boat and landing like a tard in the water

There were also more than a few raging hangovers that had to be calmed with ice cold cokes and cold showers. We'd already learned not to drink the warm camel piss, sorry coffee, on the boat.

We arrived in Dubrovnik at 1pm. The city has been described as "heaven on earth" and the "jewel of the Adriatic". As far as cities go, it is uniquely beautiful and certainly a standout among the European cities I've seen (I'm still a beach girl at heart though). It was by far our biggest touristy day, with much sightseeing and wondering aimlessy around quaint alleyways. One of the highlights was walking along the top of the 2km stretch of old walls that surround the city - it gave us incredible views across the whole of Dubrovnik. Another was our visit to Buza Bar (immediately dubbed Boozer Bar by all board), an outdoor cafe bar perched high upon the rocks of a cliff face, with the towering city walls in the background and a drop down into the azure ocean in front. Absolutely sublime.

We took it quite easy that night, mindful of giving ourselves some much needed rest after the previous night's mayhem, and setting the tone for the rest of the holiday. We ended our day's tour with a picnic on the beach - one of only 3 or 4 sandy beaches in Croatia (I know, go figure right? You come all the way from the stony beaches of England, which is quite understandable given that England is shit, to the stony beaches of the Adriatic. What have the Europeans done with all the sand???).

Not all of us planned to have a restful, non-intoxicated holiday though (Boat bbq excepted). There were many revellers on our boat who power napped during the early evenings so they could party the night away in whatever port we were docked. Croatians are clearly a party loving people - they start late and end late, and they have bars and clubs aplenty to suit all entertainment needs. G-Days and Crazy K were definitely more partygoers than take-a-chillers. Perhaps it is our advancing age, but by midnight each night we were all exhausted and quite excited about the prospect of hitting the sack.

G-Days and Crazy K, on the other hand, could often be heard cackling away in their cabin at 2am, so much so that Eyes and Scarf, whose cabin shared a wall with theirs, often had to bang out morse code for "Shut the fuck up!" to get some dos. They went to bed late and woke up late, and it was with great amusement the next morning that we all waited for last night's Crazy K story, which involved such things as begging free beer from HMS Cockfest (and biting people when they didn't give it to her), talking to God (she doesn't really remember why and is not even sure she believes in God, but at one stage she was dead set on spending some quality time with Him up on the roof) and crying - floods and floods of tears. She is a very high-spirited, fun-loving girl with no off switch whatsoever, and her highs are as skyhigh as her lows are bottomless pits. No, she is not manic depressive (I don't think)...maybe just a little hyperactive. And an endless and constantly surprising source of entertainment for us, which she knows and enjoys to the max.

However, nothing Crazy K did on the trip matched HippieChick and The Smelly Fish Incident.

Sailing Croatia: Hvar - Trstenik

The next day we woke up nice and early to the stench of diesel fumes choking us out of our sleep, and made like prison escapees to the top deck of the boat for some serious tanning. Let me explain: there are 3 levels of accommodation: above deck en suite, below deck en suite (which is not so much below deck as inside the bottom deck), and the cheapass BELOW deck, as in you have to go down some break-neck steep stairs to get there, and there is not even one toilet to be smelt (these are communal and outside above deck). Shoes and I and Jem and Britney had rooms BELOW deck, and every morning when the engine started at 6am or some other ridiculous time, we slowly suffocated in our sleep until our internal body alarms woke us up shrieking "SOS!! Impending Death Alert!!" and we bailed out in the nick of time.

Despite the fact that our accommodations were less than pleasant when the boat was moving, we got the best deal at night. While the others sweated it out in the 28 degree heat and shoved pillows over their heads in an effort to block out the racket from the revellers on the surrounding boats, we burrowed into our narrow bunk beds in pitch darkness, with the aircon in the passage keeping us pleasantly cool as we slept, blissfully unaware of the shenanigans going on above deck. So yes, we were the cheapskates, but we ended up getting better value for money than those who opted for the more "luxurious" rooms.

We sailed for anything from 5 - 8 hours a day, usually stopping at our destination between 2 and 5 in the afternoon. We arrived in Trstenik at 2pm, to a scorching temperature of 37 degrees. We had all signed up for the optional Boat BBQ that night, as we'd been told Trstenik was a very small village with only one restaurant. Turns out this was just a blatant marketing ploy, as the village billed as "Croatia's most unspolied wine producer" actually had 3 or 4 cute little restaurants along the water, all with ridiculously cheap prices. Our 100 Kuna per head braai (about £12) was certainly a rip-off we would not repeat. However, since pretty much everyone on our fleet of 7 ships had fallen for the same ploy, we were all in the same boat - literally and figuratively.

What do you get when you put a group of 200 young people on a boat with crap food and nothing else to do but drink large quantities of alcohol? Why, you get the sailing version of a university fraternity, of course. One of the boats we travelled with was made up almost entirely of 21 year old Australian boys. It all kicked off at the BBQ, when we looked over at their boat and saw nothing but testerone waiting for a slut to happen. G-Days immediately dubbed it the HMS Cockfest, a name which not only spread through the rest of our travelling group but arrived at the Cocks themselves, who began wearing the label with a greatly misplaced sense of pride.

For example:

Shoes: Mate, do you know what everyone is calling you?
Cock (beaming from ear to ear): Yeah mate, we're the HMS Cockfest!!! We're all cocks!!! Oi! Where's my fucking pint?

As the liquor flowed, the mayhem began. HippieChick, being single and interested in a holiday hook-up, made every effort to get herself over to HMS Cockfest, hoping to find a cock who was maybe not as cocky as the rest (well, in certain aspects anyway). Jem, her ever-protective older brother, was literally cock-blocking her at every turn. So instead of multiple orgies, someone plugged their iPod into the sound system, and about 50 drunken sailors began dancing and stomping and doing-the-locomotion around the deck of the boat. It wasn't long before the casualties ensued. Britney, mid particularly exuberant dance move, fell over and sprained her ankle (she swears it was the pushing and shoving from the over-enthusiatic locomotion train). Crazy K got quite out of control and tried to raul everyone, teeth and fists flying. HippieChick, obviously needing an outlet for the aggression over Jem's constant cock-blocking, decided to take her on, and the two of them ended up in a knock-down, tap-out round of UFC, which had people less familiar with my friends' brand of crazy looking on in utter amazement - and fear, if I'm honest. I was unsteady enough on my feet to accidentally tip the contents of my bacardi and coke right over Eyes' head as I attemped to climb the ladder to the top deck - something which would have had Health and Safety in a shitting panic had there been such a thing in Croatia.

Everyone was mad as a box of frogs and having the time of their lives. The true extent of our fun, however, was only revealed the next morning when more than a few of us awoke with injuries that would hamper us for the rest of our trip.

Serenity Prayer

Saturday night was our first night out in a club since the smoking ban. We all went to Sugar Reef bar in Piccadilly Circus, and I can't even begin to tell to how awesome it was to get out of there smelling like roses instead of rubbish bags! It was Jez's birthday on Wednesday, and he's back in town from the oil rigs for 3 weeks, so his girlfriend organised him a surprise party. It was great - we drank, danced and cavorted in style - but made the rookie mistake of setting up a tab without first checking the prices. It turned out to be the most expensive bar we've been to in London, and our plan of spending £60 for the night was obliterated with a bill of £107; CRINGE. Oops. Oh well, it was worth it - I think. Yesterday we woke up to fresh smelling rooms (seriously, the usual aftermath of a night like Saturday has us waking up and hurling ourselves at the window to stick our heads out and gulp fresh air - it makes SUCH a difference!) and spent the day chilling at home. We'd decided on Friday to make a lamb roast for dinner. Recently the days have been cool, rainy and cloudy up until about 6pm, when the skies start to clear and it gets really warm. It's quite bizarre. We didn't take this into account when making our roast, and it started heating up at about 3pm yesterday. By 6pm, when the lamb had been in the oven for an hour and a half, the microwave was cooking the potatoes and we had the stove on to make gravy, our kitchen felt like the Namib Desert and we were all rushing onto the balcony every 5 seconds so we could breathe. The red wine we had with our dinner resembled tepid sea water from a baking rock pool in temperature - it's hard to get used to putting red wine in the fridge for 5 minutes - but other than that, the meal was delicious. We're all getting quite good at this Sunday lunch thing.

I have yet another saga from the Torturous Travel Diary to tell you today. At last look, we had bought our flights and party tickets for Portugal, and everything was looking good to go. Then we phoned to make our visa appointment, and found that the earliest appointment we could get was 14th August - and we fly on the 16th. What followed was 24 hours of harrowing fear that we wouldn't be able to go. The Portuguese Embassy was most unhelpful, saying that there was nothing they could do to bring our date forward by a few days. I was so desperate that, in a moment of illumination, I decided I was going to ask Shoes to marry me - in name only, for now, to be reaffirmed with the ring, the wedding and the pizazz when we eventually go back home. This would give me the passport I so desperately want, and would make my travel for the next 3 or 4 years 10 times easier and cheaper. I managed to convince my work colleagues that this was a great idea, and they were all cheering me on. Then I had a think about it on the train on the way home, realised that I might piss off quite a few people back in SA, never mind the fact that I think I would have to drug and drag Shoes to the altar (to say he's not quite ready to marry me now is an understatement), and decided against it - all in the space of about 3 hours. I know it wouldn't have helped me for Portugal, but I was thinking of Turkey - if we'd done this at the beginning of the year, I would have been able to go - and also my future travels; or rather non-travels, the way things are going. I haven't actually told him what I was thinking - don't want him running away for home or anything - and although I am still convinced it would be a good idea for ME, I do realise since it is not only me involved, I am unfortunately going to have to give up on the idea for everybody else's sake. Anyway. Moving on: we finally found out that the Schengen Office does Portuguese visas. We are now going to take our documents to them next week, and they will organise everything for us and have our passports back in 8 days - for three times the cost of what we would have paid had we gone to the embassy ourselves, but what can we do.

So, what's the problem, I hear you asking? Come on, if you've been reading this blog for 2 months or longer, you should know by now that there is ALWAYS ANOTHER FUCKING PROBLEM WHEN IT COMES TO ME ATTEMPTING TO TRAVEL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Pardon my french. So, this is the latest: our whole trip to Portugal revolves around going to the Freedom Festival (see pic to the left from last year's party), the mother of all trance parties in the universe. This means that we have to drive 400km from Porto, which is where we land, to the location of the party. Before you ask, no, we did not plan it that way - we decided to fly to Porto because it was cheaper than flying to Lisbon. In the party info, they said there would be two shuttles to collect people and take them to the party - one from Porto and the other from Lisbon. So, we figured that if there was transport from Porto, surely it couldn't be that far to the fesitval location? Not so. As is so often the case with trance parties, they kept the location secret until the last minute. In this case, they just so happened to release the location details 3 days after we booked our flights. It was a surprise; there was no prior warning, and it was too late to change our tickets. Lisbon is only 200km from the party - Porto is 400km. So we have no choice but to spend half a day in the car travelling there. Now, this in itself is not a disaster - hey, we're young, free-spirited and a road trip across Portugal doesn't sound like such a bad idea. Except that not a single one of us has a valid driver's license with which to hire a car. That's right people, in a group of 6 travellers, not one of us could pull ourselves together in time to get this sorted. Shoes has recently swapped his South African license for a British one - the whole purpose of this was so that he could do all the driving in Portugal and Italy. However, the license only indicates the date it was issued to him - ie May 2007, not how long he has actually been licensed for. Car rental companies require a minumum of one, and sometimes two, years on one's license before they will rent to you. With his current license, Shoes can't prove how long he has been driving for, and his SA license has been sent back to the depot for return to SA - in fact, I'm sure it is home / lost / stolen from the post office by now. We are going to see about getting a letter of endorsement from the SA Licensing Department to prove he has held his license for more than two years - but will it arrive in time? I still have my SA license, so I could get an International Drivers Permit. However, my license expires in October this year, and IDP's are usually valid for a minimum of one year. Will they grant me an IDP on a license that is about to expire? Eyes and Scarves both have valid SA licenses, but got themselves IDP's when they first came over here. Apparently, according to Eyes, they will only issue you with this once within the first year of your stay in the UK; thereafter you are required by law to swap your license. Which means neither of them can drive at all. Still need to confirm this. OJ does not have a license at all, and Neutrino is driving on an expired Irish license. Scheiße!

God, grant me the cunning to persuade those who are hard to manipulate; the balls to steamroll over those who won't help and the wisdom to know when to turn around and run. Ok, thanks.