The Reluctant Backpacker

Croatia

To Hvar by way of Zagreb. I'd never been to Croatia, and being the city/country counter that I was, it seemed only right to stop in for an additional passport stamp.

Getting out of Morocco was basically as difficult as breathing in it's hot air. After my run in with the Snoop Dogg cab driver I was set to fly to Zagreb, stay for a night (where by chance I'd meet up again with LD who was passing through,) then meet Amna at the bus station, take a 6 hr bus down to the coast, and meet Todd who'd left a day earlier in Split.

Todd was not happy to return to Zagreb, a city-hate he held from an earlier visit. Never having been, and needing a moment to regain my strength in Europe, I thought it would be fun. It was not. I was warned. It was a bit dreary, and small (not unlike, though I would never go so far as to call it Luxembourg.) It rained for most of my two days in Zagreb, which gave me a chance to fill up on coffee and catch up with LD in our strange, small, breakfast-less hostel (I also learned a valuable trick about how to swiftly put a duvet in to a cover. I don't know how I'd gone this long without knowing.)

Amna is the kind of friend who dips in and out of my life. She's a constant via email, and text, but an infrequent in-person friend. And we were an unlikely pair. We were forced in to friendship when we were assigned as roommates in our three-person (designed for two,) university residence room. She resisted being my friend because I was loud, didn't respect our shared space, and because she had made it her mission to make zero friends at school. But I wouldn't let her. After university she'd moved briefly to Toronto and then more permanently to London following a Master's degree in Nottingham. We hadn't seen each other since I dropped her at Pearson airport after our undergrad graduation.

In typical fashion, she refused to turn on her phone in Zagreb, which would have made coordinating travel arrangements simple, instead, I found her sitting on a bench in front of the bus station, bag in hand. Normal she was not, reliable she was always.

We rented a small apartment somewhere in Hvar. As with most of my apartment rentals throughout the trip I put a lot of faith in to Air BnB, and conducted little research of my own. This time it turned out nicely. The host was lovely, she permitted us our extra guest (though we'd failed to disclose that at the time of booking,) and hooked us up with the wifi password (always my most important requirement.)

We were on the island just before the tourist season began, which suited us fine. There was a pre-bustle bustle, but nothing overwhelming, and it meant we got a access to a lot of things without intrusion from Euro-tourist cohort. We ate, we drank little, we read a lot, broke in to the resort (not yet open for the season,) had a private beach view, and consumed our daily cookies gel. It was uneventfully perfect.