Barges, taking pictures, and perfect moments

Dalmatia Coast

Our bus is clinging to the cliffs and Debra is asleep on my shoulder, so I have to write between the curves and only moving my wrist. We are returning to Split after several nights in Dubrovnik, Athens of Croatia, Pearl of the Adriatic. Dubrovnik is located at the very tip of this crescent-shaped country. The border with Bosnia-Herzegovina runs so close to the east that along one five mile stretch it actually touches the Adriatic, cutting Croatia into two pieces and forcing us through a pair of border crossings. The ragged borders suggest the shreds that Yugoslavia was ripped into after Tito's death and the collapse of communism. We saw more evidence of the ethnic wars walking the walls of Dubrovnik: 80% of the red tiled roofs are new. These replaced the roofs destroyed in the siege of Dubrovnik, which lasted from October of 1991 until July of 1992. It makes me wince to think of the thousands of bombs that rained down on that beacon of enlightenment that shone through Europe's dark ages. What could the Serbs have been thinking? It would be like bombing the Louvre. Along the coast there are few other reminders of the war. Croatia is the sons' phase of history's fathers and sons cycle that says that the appetite for destruction skips generations.

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This summer has had three distinct phases for me: living abroad in Yerevan, guest in Switzerland, and now backpacker in Croatia. Upon arrival in Zagreb, I left my suitcase in a train station locker and reduced my kit to a guide book, my journal, a sarong, an extra shirt, an extra pair of shorts, swimming trunks, and my toothbrush. No shoes, no socks, just a pair of $2 rubber sandals. All fit into a tiny day pack.

Debra and I would be staying in hostels, depending on public transportation, and relying on luck and the kindness of strangers. We would need the latter as we had precious few reservations and we would be hitting the Dalmatia coast at the height of tourist season.
Our first stop was Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia. I had hoped to report that Ljubljana was an undiscovered Salzburg, but while it is a quaint, picturesque European town, it isn't Salzburg. Also, it isn't undiscovered.

We took the train to Rijeka, on the northern coast of Croatia. It was here that we got our first glimpse of the Adriatic. An overnight ferry took us to Split. From Split we hopped a ferry that services the islands. Our plan was to visit Hvar, but as we pulled into the yacht packed harbor, we decided to stow away and ride the ferry to Vis, Croatia's most remote inhabited island.

Although remote, lots of yachts make it to Vis. The island's sobes (guest rooms) were filled to capacity. We literally got the last room available on the island. A French couple we shared a taxi with from the other side of the island had the misfortune of following us into the rental office and as a result had to return to Split to spend the night.

Barges, taking pictures, and perfect moments

So here's the phenomenology of being a tourist as I see it. Life on the road is divided into two phases: barges and taking pictures.

Taking Pictures

As Debra and I wander the marbled streets of Dubrovnik, I find myself reflexively taking photographs of everything. The thousand or so people around me are doing the same thing. I have nothing against photography, and I enjoy the occasional slide show as much as my fellow man, which is to say not much, but compulsively snapping photos feels like I'm putting a cushion between myself and the experience of being in Dubrovnik. My experience is a second hand experience; it's the experience of taking pictures, not the experience of being in a special place. When I get home and look at the photos I will be having a third hand experience. It's the same with the cruise ship tour groups following their flag toting leader. They are experiencing a lecture about a special place. Yet another second hand experience.

Barges

Barging: getting from point A to point B. An example: let point A be Dubrovnik and let point B be Budapest, the departure point for our flight to London. Let point C be the locker in Zagreb where my stuff is stored. How to get from A to C to B? Like a chess player, I had been puzzling over this problem for months. I looked at train schedules, flight schedules, car rentals, parking fees in Dubrovnik, etc. At the last moment Debra and I settled on the following plan: we would take a bus from Dubrovnik to Split, take a cheap flight from Split to Zagreb, thus avoiding an overnight train ride. Freshly rested, we would meet this same train in Zagreb and travel eight hours to Budapest.

The first problem: I hadn't bothered to look closely at the bus arrival times. Had I done so I would have realized that the bus ride from Dubrovnik to Split was a grueling five and a half hours instead of the breezy one and a half hours I imagined it to be.

Arriving in Split, completely wiped from our trip, we hopped a shuttle bus to the airport where we learned that the 45 minute flight to Zagreb would be delayed by at least three hours. I noticed a patch of blue sea out the airport window. Debra and I hiked across the runway and found a nice little beach equipped with a bar.

We arrived in Zagreb at 11 PM, five hours later than we expected. We waited another hour for a bus to take us into town. Fortunately, the sobe owner we had contacted from Dubrovnik was patiently waiting for us at the bus station. He took us to our $120/night room where we would sleep for five hours before dashing to the train station.

I spent my last Croatian kunas getting my luggage out of hock. It didn't matter. There would be no dining car on the train and if there were, we would have to pay in Hungarian florint. We didn't have any of those either. Our last meal had been breakfast in Dubrovnik 24 hours earlier. Debra stopped speaking except to tell the backpackers that we shared a train compartment with that I was a nice guy but that she was a bitch.

Perfect Moments

So why go anywhere if it's all barges and experiences muffled by the simulated click of camera shutters? In Swimming to Cambodia Spalding Grey mentions a rare third mode: the perfect moment. This is a moment when the self is totally consumed by the place and the moment. For Spalding it happens when swimming off the coast of Thailand. Here are some more examples. One: Frustrated by the heat and tourists, Debra and I dive into the clear blue water under the walls of Dubrovnik. Along the tops of the walls our fellow tourists are photographing us.

Two: Unable to find a beach between the yachts parked hull to hull in Vis, Debra and I rent a motor scooter. Neither one of us was deterred by the fact that we didn't know how to operate the damned thing and that death was a virtual certainty. We spent the day puttering around the island sampling beaches. When I look at the photos I took of the scooter—look Deb, we're having a perfect moment, let's take a picture of it—I am surprised. I remembered it being much larger.

Three: After the long barge from Ljubljana to the island of Vis, Debra and I settle in to a picturesque sobe in a picturesque village along the coast. We take a walk along the shore. It's late in the day and we are tired. I notice a sign that says "Vino". I remember that everyone in Vis supplements their income by selling homemade wine. We stop in and a grumpy woman fills a one liter Pepsi bottle with a spicy full bodied wine from an aluminum barrel. We walk a little further and collapse on an old wall in front of a fort abandoned by the British 200 years earlier. We realize that by some sort of unconscious accident we have arrived, with a bottle of wine, at the perfect vantage point on the island to watch the sun as it sets into the Adriatic sea.

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