July 20, 2012
Venice without the crowds: Vira - Stari Grad
| Heart | 0 | Comment | 0 | Link |
VENICE WITHOUT the crowds is how the guide put it. In fact, I realised after a while that the words came from the site of the very company that organised Alan's tour. It was one of many I came across and, specifically, the one that gave me the idea of hopping islands rather than take the coast road to Dubrovnik. The Americans were ending their ride at Ston, just before the main road, and going the rest of the way in their bus. A variation of that didn't seem a bad idea.
By now we had started to feel imprisoned on Hvar, trapped by the ferry that took bikes only twice a week. We weren't impressed by our camp-site across the hill from the town of Hvar, either, a place which boasted four stars and offered all sorts of facilities we didn't need but had to pay for. It was the only site on the western end of the island.
It did, though, give us a chance to speak to our neighbour, a lean and tanned man with a silly little beard and a genial disposition. He came from Denmark and I was able to tell him that at 13, when I started cycling, I dreamed of riding to see the mermaid in Copenhagen harbour.
'I really don't know why,' I told him, 'but at that age it seemed the very height of adventure.'
'The statue is very small, though,' he said.
I said I realised that but that hadn't discouraged me. I'd told my friends and they'd urged me to call on a boy in the next street who Had Cycled Abroad. To someone who had never left the country, that seemed impossibly exotic and the idea scared me. On top of which he was two years older and at 13 you don't just go and speak to boys of 15.
'And you rode to see it,' the Dane supposed. I conceded that I hadn't, that I had never been to Denmark and that it would be years until I rode anywhere but on the island on which I was born.
'Just as well you didn't go recently,' he said. 'It wouldn't have been there. Well, something would have been there because they made a copy and put it there and you wouldn't have known the difference. But the Chinese wanted it for an exhibition and in Denmark we are so beholden to the Chinese that we agreed, because they wanted the original, the right one, and so we made do with the copy. They are besotted with anything to do with Hans Christian Andersen, so anything we make, we put him on it and the Chinese will buy it.
'It's back in the harbour now but it's had an unhappy history. It's been decapitated twice, for instance.'
I said that was a lot for a single mermaid. Most people, if they get decapitated, suffer it only once.
From this crowded camp-site, we rode back over the hill to Hvar itself. How it could be described as Venice without the crowds, we never worked out. Venice, apart from anything else, has streets of water.
Hvar has simply a waterfront, a pretty but over-commercialised one in which millionaires' cruisers line up with water taxis that shuttle to and from the islands. We took one to Jerolim, a place the size of your foot on which a large wooden sign in the trees boasts 'Naturists welcome since 1878' or some such date.
It was a pleasant afternoon, relaxing under the trees and trying to balance on the stones beneath the water, but there was always a worry about having to re-climb the hill on which Alan had died of a heavy lunch the previous afternoon. In the event it was longer and therefore less steep from this side. Just as beautiful, too, and with that same beckoning bar at the top.
We pitched our tent on a humble site on the edge of Stari Grad and, apart from having to get up at two to stop a loud conversation between kids sleeping under the stars, and then again at three to tell them to turn off their music, we slept well.
Tomorrow, the ferry back to the mainland.
| Rate this entry's writing | Heart | 2 |
| Comment on this entry | Comment | 0 |