12 October, Hvar Town, Hvar Island, Croatia.

Walk up the steps, turn right into the third door and ask for Teo.

Out of all the places in Croatia I’ve been, if I had to recommend one for a vacation, Hvar would be it. Maybe it’s the people I met there, both locals and travelers, or maybe it was the fact that the sun was hot and the days beautiful, and probably it was the fact that I was there out of season, so the harbor which was full of boats wasn’t overfull, and the tourists, while present and sometimes annoying, weren’t overly present.


(the harbor and most of the city of Hvar Town)

I arrived on Tuesday, taking the fast ferry from Split, a catamaran that did the trip in about an hour, and docked in Hvar, rather than across the Island in Stari Grad, where the car ferries have to dock. All the guide books tell you that private accommodation is the best option in Croatia, but Hvar is the first place where I really found it easily. As soon as we got off the ferry there were seemingly dozens of old women and men waving signs that said “Rooms” in four languages. They get really really aggressive, and its one of those situations where you just can’t show any weakness or they will pounce on it like a cat chasing a fleeing mouse. I had prepared myself ahead of time, and had a hotel in mind if I needed it (though it turns out it was closed for the season, so I’m glad I didn’t) so I went into the negotiations with the room hawkers with an aggressive attitude, and it seemed to serve me well. The first woman to approach me had pictures, but when I asked her to show me on the map where it was, she pretended she couldn’t see the map without her glasses. Pointing up the hill and across the small harbor, she said it was only five minutes away, but that’s the standard line, and if you believe it then they will sell you beachfront property as well. I gave her another chance to show me, then literally had to push her away and started walking towards the center of town. A few steps later, another woman was standing there holding a sign, but not shouting or being pushy so I asked her where her room was (assuming that the ones who didn’t have to work so hard to rent the room were more likely to have good ones). I pulled out the map but she smiled and pointed at the steps, and said “just part way up… “

So, before I go on, the thing you need to know about Hvar Town is that there are two kinds of streets. The main city is built in a curve around the harbor, so it is roughly horseshoe shaped. There is the main level that circles at the harbor level, then steep hills that rise on all sides up from it, so what happens is that you end up with streets that stay on one level, or have a gradual grade, making a semi circle a certain distance from the water,



and then you have the cross streets that connect them, which are steps.



That’s it… if you’re moving away from the Harbor you’re climbing steps. If you’re not, you’re following the line of the water, no matter how far away from it you are. It makes navigation very easy, but it makes traveling around town in general an adventure in working your quads. Especially if you’re wearing a backpack. My saving grace was that I was traveling with a sixty year old woman (not as old as most of them) and so she kept a pace I could manage.

As we started to walk off together, the first woman who I had talked too pushed up beside me, waving her sign and pictures of the place in my face and yelling at the other woman in Croatian. I pulled away from her and  told her she had her chance, then she wrote down something and waved the piece of paper in my face… “Only 70 kuna!” I pulled away from her again and started walking up the steps with second woman, who said just loud enough for the other to hear, “Stupid woman!”

Happily, she really did mean it when she said it was only part way up… we climbed one set of steps, turned on a narrow street to the left, then started up another set. I was wondering how far up we were going when she opened a green metal gate and walked into a small concrete courtyard. She pretty much had me right there… the location was ideal, and the little courtyard was nice, and as it turns out the apartment was great. It looked as though it belonged to someone as a summer home, furnished cheaply but nicely, with lots of artwork, some books, and a fully stocked with the kinds of used towels, blankets, pots and pans you find at home, rather than a typical rented place. It was  a double bed in one bedroom, with another bedroom with bunk beds, a nice kitchen, and a good bathroom, lived in but clean. She had told me 150 kuna at the bottom of the hill, but since the other woman had been yelling 70 at me, I figured that was probably closer to the going rate. I told her that I liked the place and would give her 70 kuna a night, to which she looked pained and waited just long enough to come back with One hundred. I could have countered with 80 or 90, but one hundred was all I was shooting for, and I didn’t feel like getting into heated negotiations over $2 a night when I was getting a great apartment for the equivalent of $16, so I said okay and she immediately went from forlorn and pained (her negotiating face, I presume) to happy. She gave me her card, Lucia was her name, and she had multiple phone numbers as well as an email address, and told me to call her if I decided to stay longer or needed anything. I only rented the apartment for two nights, intending to move on to Korcula Island on Thursday, and catch the ferry to Dubrovnik on Saturday, a plan that was destined to change like all the others, but with happy consequences.



After settling in, which after three months on the road just means throwing my backpack down and going to the bathroom, I took my camera and started walking. I hit most of the city (it’s a small city) and still had plenty of daylight left, so I walked up the hill to the Spanish fort overlooking the town as well. It was a good climb and a nice view besides, and I stayed there for quite a while, watching the sun go down, then finding great place for a photo, and camping there for about twenty minutes until the sun got just low enough to make the picture.



One of the joys I’ve rediscovered about photography - and I can’t even begin to say how happy I am that I bought this camera - is the pleasure of waiting for just the right moment to take a photo. I think the intervening years since I had my good camera stolen, doing lighting design and honing my visual skills have been good for this, because I think I have a patience now that I don’t remember having when I was younger. I also seem to have a better awareness for what I want, and what it takes to get it, what angle is going to work best and what kind of light I want. All of that is making me very, very happy when I walk around shooting pictures, and I think the results are good as well. I think that the difference might be subtle to you guys reading this, because ultimately all these pictures, no matter which camera they were taken with, are getting compressed a lot and made a good deal smaller to fit on the pages without taking forever to load, but it will be interesting to see if anyone sees the difference in the shots taken with the new camera versus the old one. The new camera is ten megapixels, which is big enough to make these photos a good size when they are printed, so I’m going to do some fooling around with printing at Holland photo and any other good photo labs in town, and see if anyone has any interest in displaying or buying my images.


(a statue that I found on the way up the hill and liked very much... )

I’m curious to see how the digital printing compares to what I want in a good film image… the process is so much different, and it is kind of strange thinking about displaying something as “art” when it wasn’t my own hands handling it in the final stage, but this is where the medium is headed, and even if I’m not happy with the results now, two or three years from now there will be camera bodies that are somewhat affordable (relatively speaking) with thirty or forty or even more megapixels, and I think that may be the point where film loses all advantages as far as detail goes… I don’t know what the official numbers are, as far as pixel size vs. grain size in film is, but no matter what the numbers are, its only a matter of time before the choice is one of aesthetics rather than how much information is contained by the chemistry or the computer, and that is the moment when film begins to lose ground as an artistic medium in the same way it has for snapshots. There are people who will argue with me on this, arguing both sides of what I think, that its already started losing that ground, and that it will be decades before digital approaches the detail available to a photographer working with a medium format or large format camera, and both are right, of course, in a way, but this is my opinion and I’m sticking to it. There you have my geeky rant for the day.


(a little spanish church that is on the way up the hill to the fort. Its not used anymore, but is lovely... )

After the sun went down and I hiked back down the hill, I went to a restaurant just below my apartment for dinner. I didn’t realize it at the time, but there were three right together, with three doors. Two are on an upper level, sharing a terrace that overlooks the harbor, and one is below, with its own terrace and a view that is only slightly lower. It turns out I didn’t walk into the one I was trying to hit at all, but its the best mistake I’ve made in a long time. It was just me and a couple sitting on the terrace, and I was served by a man who was maybe ten years my senior, named Teo. He was the nicest guy I’d met since before Split, and a fantastic server besides, going out of his way to check on the fresh fish, and doing all the little things that make you happy when they get done because you don’t notice when they don’t. We talked for a while after I finished eating (and finished writing out some postcards), and it was funny because I think he’d forgotten about me. He was standing down on the steps, with no other customers in the restaurant, and as is typical, I had to wave him down to get my check, or in this case, call to him from above. He looked around confused, and then looked up, and looked very embarrassed for a moment, the reason I think he forgot about me. But after that, we talked, and then later I walked down by the water, watching some of the locals fish for calamari, and ran into him again. We talked for another half hour or so there, and I found out that he’d fought in the war (the second man I ran into who did, and I’ve come to find out that pretty much every man of his generation did, most of them just don’t really talk about it, because it was a really, really nasty war… more so than even we were aware in the states, I think. Teo was a really interesting person, and even though I spent even more time talking to him another night as well, I’d like to know more about him. He was apparently doing pretty well under communist rule, taking a couple months off each year and traveling in Europe, living a bit of the good life, but when his country declared independence and Yugoslavia didn’t want to let them, he joined up, spent several years in the infantry, and now lives in a free country but works as a waiter, obviously not as well off financially at least, as he was before. Its curious, because as taken as I was with Latvia and Lithuania, struggling so hard against communist rule for their independence, I didn’t actually meet anyone who had fought for it. Here, there aren’t nearly as many monuments and statues and museums celebrating freedom, but at least Teo’s generation seems to take it very seriously and personally. Maybe it’s a bit like talking with someone who fought in Washington’s army in 1776… I don’t know.


(just for all you Wallace and Gromit fans... )

Yesterday, Wednesday, I spent the morning looking around the square and investigating a bit of the town that isn’t centered around the harbor, then walked down to one of the local beaches in the afternoon. There aren’t any really good beaches within short walking distance of the town itself, and the best options for swimming are to take one of the water taxis in the morning to one of the other nearby islands, which are more private and with better beaches, but there are a couple places that are passable, and so that’s where I went. I sat down and started reading up on Greece in my guidebook, but there were a couple hippy chick looking girls who were talking to another one, in English, so I started chatting with them as well. The one alone was from Canada, and traveling with her boyfriend and his brother. I can’t remember their names, and didn’t really find out much about them as they left after a short time. The other two were sisters, backpacking together through Europe. They worked as rafting guides, so we talked a bit about whitewater and I told them a little about kayaking in Slovenia. One of them, Paige (sorry, I’m writing this a couple weeks later on the ferry, and can’t remember the other’s name!) was also a photographer, and I was happy to learn she used a Nikon D70, the predecessor to my camera, and seemed pretty happy with it. Unfortunately I suspect I might have come across as trying to show off my newer, shinier camera a bit when we saw one another later in the day, because she didn’t have much to say to me the next couple times we saw one another. And we did see one another… Hvar town is small… around 4,000 residents total, and there weren’t that many tourists there… which meant that you ran into people multiple times. I had three girls who I’d seen in the internet café in Split, then ridden the ferry beside, then ran into multiple times on Hvar, including on the beach, then saw again on the ferry to Dubrovnik actively ignore me. I have no idea why, but when I said something to them the third time we crossed paths, just commenting on how the island was small and we’d seemingly be seeing a lot of each other, only one even acknowledged that I’d said anything. Later on, Sinead, a friend I met on Hvar, explained that it was because they were English. Sinead feels the English are the rudest people one meets traveling, but I’m not sure, and Sinead is Irish (okay, half Irish), so I’m not sure she’s good for an unbiased opinion.

Anyway, the two sisters seemed really cool, and it would have been nice to know them a bit better, if for no other reason then to get some good inside information on which companies to go with if I ever decide to go rafting or kayaking in Colorado, but the other times I ran into them over the next day and a half (as long as they stayed) it was just polite conversation. They did at least give me some good tips about southern Croatia and Greece though, Because of their description I decided to stay in Hvar rather than go to Korcula for the two days, finding out that it was pretty much the same, but smaller. That turned out to be a good piece of advice, and lead to me making a bunch of friends on the last night there.


(another view of the city and the fort... )

Not much new or exciting happened in between though, the days were spent walking around, meeting some people, and laying on the beaches, and the nights were spent having drinks and reading or writing, or chatting with the other people around. I finished the book “About a Boy” by Nick Hornby, and it was really good… interesting and fun and a very easy read. It’s the first thing I’ve read by him, but on that basis I’d try others. On Friday day I walked up the hill and checked out the Hvar cemetery.



There wasn’t much to it… I guess a town of 4000 doesn’t need much of one, but I did get a few good pictures and got to see some parts of the island that most tourists don’t cover.



Lucia seemed surprised when I told her I’d been up there, and immediately began telling about other things I should go see as well, but alas, at that point I’d pretty much covered them all. It was also interesting seeing just how small the city was for the people that lived there. In the days I was there, I met half a dozen locals whose names I knew… I think I saw all of them talking to one another at one time or another, even though I’d met them completely independently of one another. Again, four thousand people does not a big town make, and if not for the tourists filling it up, I think it would be way too small for me… but as it was, it was the perfect place to spend a few days and get some sun and meet some great people, and when we took the ferry out the last morning, we were treated to a stunning display of sun and clouds that wished us goodbye...



and so... on to Dubrovnik, by boat...

Stephen

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