Wandering Memories #5: Hitch-hiking Adventures in Dalmatia

In this episode a little less talk, and more photos from travelling around Croatia!

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Antoni, who picked me up and Bartek (a guy whom I met on the road) was a pretty crazy man. He decided to host us this night. We arrived to Starigrad, a small town near the Paklenica National Park. Antoni seemed to be such a playboy, which I wouldn't normally like, but he was very friendly and funny in his stories. We went swimming the sea, drinking beer. Antoni talked a lot about how to remove the canes, about the health properties of marijuana and... sea water 😂 He told us how he almost cut off his finger in the past, and he kept it half cut off in sea water for a few hours and.... his finger coalesced 😂 Antoni's megalomania was quite funny and we basically were non-stop laughing in his company. In the meantime, my dear friend Wojtek arrived to Paklenica - he had been chasing me by hitchhike for several days. I immortalized the moment of the meeting on the photo:

Antoni had a practically empty fridge with the exception of.... a dozen or so bottles of beer and several Sprite bottles filled with wine. We spent this evening, well, drinking what was in the fridge and watching some stupid documents on Croatian television. We slept sofas,chewed by mosquitoes all night long...

In the morning we ate a breakfast together, took some photos and said goodbye.

We went to the Paklenica glen, which is also a small Croatian Mecca of mountain climbers. We did a several-hour hiking with some really pleasant views.

We returned to Starigrad quite late. We didn't want to put too much strain on Antoni's hospitality, so we decided to go to the beach and look for a place to stay there. It was quite dark. As we walked along the beach, moving more and more away from the built-up areas, my flashlight showed an outline of a huge object standing several dozen meters in front of us. It turned out that these were ruins of some tower (as it turned out next morning, from the 16th century). You could enter it freely, there was even enough room for a fire. We decided that it was a perfect place to stay. We put up the tents, made the fire and baked the sausages we had bought previously and heated the beans , while drinking a wine.

The first thing I did in the morning after the heat awakened me, I bathed in the sea (0 people around). Bartek and Wojtek were still sleeping and it was wonderful to have the whole beach just for yourself. Then the companions woke up, they also took advantage of the Adriatic, we ate breakfast and went further through the sunny Croatia towards Dubrovnik.

Somewhere along the way we separated with Bartek and finally me and Wojtek were taken by Goran, a 21-year-old guy who had his own apartments for rent in Makarska. He told us that we coan stay there for a night. We got on really well and quickly found a common language. When we entered the apartment, we got pretty bewildered - it was full of full of equipment and had an amazing balcony overlooking the sea. The Goran disappeared for a moment and returned with 5l of wine, 2l cola and a pack of cigarettes. We talked and drank up to 3 at night, agreeing very well. Although in the end he started to be drunk so much that I had the impression that he started to talk bullshit. He finally fell asleep on the couch, and I went to bed.

We woke up about 7 or 8 a.m., we had get ready pretty quickly because the future tenants of the apartment came... We dressed up quickly while feeling the claws of huge hangover and drowsiness and were going out when the Poles who were supposed to live in the apartment entered and asked us how much we paid for the room xD
I dropped a clanger and quickly ran out, trying to get ourselves together a bit to start hitch-hiking to Dubrovnik...