Split to Hvar

Day two of the trip is spent in transit to the island of Hvar. We'll be seeking out the town that the island is named for and spending three nights there. Croatia has, as I've been informed (and now witnessed), hundreds of islands. Many of them have historically important and vibrant coastal towns, of which Hvar town is one of the oldest & coolest. We leave Trogir after lunch and take a ferry from Split to the island's ferry landing near Stari Grad (one of the other towns on the island, perhaps even older in origin than the town of Hvar - the name literally means "old town."). There's a ferry landing in the town of Hvar, but it's smaller and the schedule doesn't work out. We still win, however, as we get to drive across the island from Stari Grad to Hvar town, taking in the landscape (at least, I win... she's doing all the driving).

Hvar town itself seems like an upgrade over Trogir to me. Jelena is there for the first time as well, and she classifies Hvar as a "mini-Dubrovnik." This bodes well for the climax of our Croatia travels - in Dubrovnik. I digress - Hvar beats Trogir on several fronts. To start, it has a huge fortress that looms over the town from atop the hillside. The town is situated on a small bay lined with docks. Fishing boats and million dollar yachts are keeping company along the water line, and a stone promenade curls around the town and stretches some kilometers along the coast on either side. This forms a natural town center, punctuated with a spacious stone plaza.

We have lunch here, and again pay too much money for mediocre pizza. This event begins a set of sessions of pure whining about the restaurant food in Croatia and Herzegovina. The menus blur together. Meat. Pizza. Pasta with Ketchup (huh?). Prices that seem too high even before the bad exchange rate factors in. Some of the restaurant names are even comical and slightly pitiable: “Meat and Fish House,” “Croatian Slow Food” (as opposed to fast food…), “Café Hello.” The restaurateurs truly don’t seem to know any better – they think they’re giving tourists what they want. Maybe they are for the general tourist visiting Eastern Europe, but Jelena and I are already yearning for vegetables and sauces that are suddenly scarce. My system is not handling all of the meat and grease very well – I want a bran muffin.

On the Dalmatian coast, almost everyone is looking to rent you an “apartman,” or room. If they aren’t, they have a relative within shouting distance that is. There are other common names for rooms for rent – “sobe, zimmer” (I think “zimmer” is German, but there are a lot of German tourists in Croatia). They just lump them all on the same advertisements, so half of the buildings have the words “apartmani, sobe, zimmer, room” pasted across them. We stop for directions at a crummy looking “apart-hotel” and end up getting recruited by the cook – now our host. He’s got a house overlooking Hvar and the port with several “apartmani” for rent. The price seems like a total steal until I realize that the queen sized bed is actually two doubles pushed together. Bummer. The price is still pretty good.

Hvar is really, really old. You can just feel it – things have been happening there for a long time. I feel compelled to start learning the history of the region. It turns out that Hvar Island has some of the oldest known settlements in the entire Dalmatian coast. Hvar itself stems from the Greek word Pharos, meaning “lighthouse.” Pharos was an ancient settlement on the island where Stari Grad (the town next to where we got off the ferry) now sits. The people were already there; the Greeks just gave it that name (and colonized them…). Wikipedia tells me that the name gradually mutated to Hvar mostly due to the Romans and later the Slavic people. The Romans chose to refer to it as “Pharia” instead of “Pharos,” and the Slavic speakers replaced the “f” consonant with the more natural Slavic “hv” consonant. I don’t know what happened to the “ia” at the end. Saving that technicality, we have a story for how “Pharos” became “Hvar.”

We’re in Hvar for almost a full three days. It’s really worth more than that. I could envision staying there for a week or more. The pathways around the town are great for walking and navigating the area by foot. There are beaches all over the island, but there are even some decent ones within walking distance of the downtown of Hvar. The “fortica” (fort) on the top of the hill is a nice afternoon hike and is a genuine attraction. There’s a dungeon, decent resources for learning about the history of the town, and it provides incredible views of the town and port. The structure is in great shape, as it wasn't really destroyed by warfare and earthquakes in the way that many other Dalmatian monuments have been. Apparently the Turks burned much of the town down once, but the fort survived (along with the Hvar population that managed to get within the walls of the stronghold).

Jelena wishes aloud that she could go back in time and see ancient invaders approach the town with their warships. The best invaders we can get today are some gaudy yachts. These invaders don’t want to burn the town down, however. At least, not literally. They’ve come to party, and there’s apparently no curfew. Bad disco music bounces off the bay, the hills, the fortica walls that repelled Ottoman invaders – my eardrums… until as late as 4am one night (maybe later). It’s probably awesome if you’re in town to get down every night, but it’s not good for sleeping in “apartmani” that overlook the bay…

In some ways Hvar was the highlight of the trip for me. It has the history and natural beauty of the Croatian coast in a nice, “contained” experience. As noted, there's even a potent nightlife. You could ferry directly to Hvar town and spend a whole week or two there without a car. The restaurant food is mediocre and overpriced, but that seems to be the norm. This is the only thing that I would change about our stay on the island – we could have purchased food at the market and cooked most of our meals in a rental that had a kitchen. No biggie. Hvar was a smash hit.