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Published: August 9th 2007
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I can fly!
Check out the 'urchin dancing shoes'
All class! We arrived at Vis in rapidly rising temperatures and made our way to the Tourist office in a bid to get some accommodation booked. We were worried that we hadn’t pre-booked accommodation on the island but as it turned out, this was a good thing.
The girl at the office made a call and within five minutes an elderly lady came to collect us to view her apartment. Sweating like cattle, we lugged our packs up the hill and walked up the final steps to be faced with the most beautiful view of Vis. The apartment was a great find. Only five or so minutes walk to the ferry point, band new inside, spotlessly clean and a great big balcony. The apartment next to us was empty and remained so for the rest of our stay so we had the great view all to ourself. The balcony became our living room and we ate all our meals overlooking the lovely harbour and ancient stone monastery. The old lady was a real sweetie too and despite the language barrier was really kind to us and kept on spoiling us with her Croatian biscuits.
Vis was a lovely quiet little place
so we spent the days exploring the lovely stone village, eating some of the best fruit we had ever seen, swimming and doing as much walking as we could handle in the heat. We bought some reef walking shoes to wear in the water as the Dalmation Coast has lots of sea urchins and is rocky. We paid about a pound more for the heavy duty versions after the guy at the market held the shoes up and exclaimed "With these.... you can DANCE on the urchins!"
We hired a scooter for a day and loved the freedom of riding past vineyards and abandoned stone buildings on the interior of the island. Our scooter was even more gutless than the ones we hired in Thailand. Zero to 40km in about 20 seconds but at least it got us up the winding hills okay!
During our scootering day we decided to find the lovely beach that we had seen on a poster. Armed with our sketchy little map and Croatia, we rode down a rocky road until we found an old man smoking a cigarette under the shade of an olive tree. There were a few other cars packed
The Blue Grotto
This was really hard to photograph. Darkness= slow shutter speed. Hard to keep the camera still on a small boat! around the place so we had obviously come to the right spot. In broken English, he assured us that the beach (Stiniva Inlet) was only 10 minutes walk down the hill. By this time we were dripping with sweat and desperate for a swim. We paid our money, prayed that the snakes weren’t hungry and started walking down the steep rocky track to the beach.
The beach had a lovely setting in what appeared to be a collapsed cave or the mouth of an ancient canyon. Unfortunately the swimming wasn’t the greatest as the water was almost murky due to the small opening where the tide moves in and out. The little restaurant (?) on the beach was pumping out tinny music that seemed a little unnecessary in such a nice setting.
After making it back up the hill in one piece (sweating even more than before we started) we scootered off and discovered paradise at the beautiful little bay of Milna. A gorgeous little spot with FANTASTIC swimming off the rocks or at the sandy bays around the headland.
It was in this lovely place that we ‘put off’ the seafood in Croatia. We had high
expectations as we haven’t really had decent fish since leaving NZ so we shelled out quite a few euros for ‘First class’ fish and calamari. Chris was nearly choking on what can only be described as lightly battered ‘bait’ and I was squealing as the eyes and a greyish liquid popped out of my calamari after I gave it a good squeeze. How we miss snapper….
Our other main activity on Vis was a (relatively expensive) boat trip around the island that included visits to the two bays that we visited the day before! Gutted, at least it included a trip to the Blue Grotto - a beautiful sea cave that we both really wanted to visit. While it was very busy, it didn’t detract from what is really a lovely natural wonder. The sunlight gets into the cave via an opening in the rock and reflects back from the sandy sea floor. This turns the water a stunning blue colour and you can look down about 16 metres. There’s also an underwater bridge that is down about 6 metres. It would have been an amazing (spooky!) place to have a swim but due to the tide and number
of people visiting it doesn’t appear to be an option, at least during the summer season.
All in all, Vis was the perfect island escape to us. By the end of our stay, we were completely relaxed and feeling great… must be the Mediterranean diet starting to work its wonders.
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