Return to biking,
Re-learn the muscles, enjoy
Freedom, sun, and sea...
We're back on our bikes! And since there are no hosts (as far as we know) between here and at least Split (around 400-500km), we will be biking it for a good, long way. It feels good to know that. :)
We woke up earlier than Ivo this morning, and he seemed surprised to see us packing our bikes as dawn broke. He promised to come with us to the bike repair shop in Rijeka this morning, since his friend owns it, and he's been itching to get out during the past few rainy days we've seen. Fair enough. We in his high-tech gear and we in our slowly-getting-more-gross gear ride 11km down the road to Rijeka and stop at the bike shop.
Evan's shifter cable had been fraying for some time, and he'd been cursing it liberally as the cable ends speared him in the fingers while he tried to shift. Bike dude deftly clipped the cable out and handed it to us, and we were astonished to see that there were only a few pieces holding it together... not much longer and the whole thing would have snapped apart. Anyway, it's now fixed...
We headed a bit out of Rijeka, and Ivo bade us good-bye. We were excited to get on the road again! And the coast here is magnificent. We could see it as soon as we headed out: the coastline is coated in mountains, and across a stripe of sea lay the long, thin islands of northern Croatia. The wind here is insane, and nothing more than a metre tall can grow on the rocky slopes we're seeing. The islands look like the face of the moon.
There isn't much traffic along this road right now, since it's off-season for this area's tourism. There were still a number of cars that passed us, bearing license plates from Germany, Austria, Hungary, France, Spain, Slovenia, ... but most of them are, fortunately, fairly relaxed and willing to tolerate cyclists riding side by side along the coastal route. The angriest are the giant tankers, but whatever. It's been strange to hear the progression of horns from country to country; the French horns were really wimpy, the Italian ones somewhat stronger, and the Croatian ones genuinely loud and angry.
In addition to the traffic concerns (which are minimal) comes the much more serious concern of the road itself. It twists precariously along the very edge of the land, sometimes high above the water and sometimes hugging it, but the Croatian road service evidently does not believe in guard rails to the extent that we do in the states, so much of it is separated from certain death over cliffs by just a few tiny cement pegs. Some of it bears railings, but they're so high that a fully-loaded bike with a rider could easily be swept underneath, anyway. In the wind that we're experiencing, this is terrifying.
The wind here is insane! It pours out of the mountains and down to the sea, generally present, but with severe gusts to remind us that it's there in case we get too complacent.
It's hard to find food here, which might be a problem. This stretch is clearly built almost entirely for summer tourism, and we have been hard-pressed to find much, and harder-pressed to find much open. Senj fortunately has a supermarket, but we're forcing ourselves to stock up to avoid starvation. Ivo and Aleksander also warned us that we need to make sure to have sufficient water at all times (especially important when we use >1 bottle's worth to cook dinner each night). Gone are the days of Italy and Spain and their fontanas. :(
Anyway, our goal today was to make it to Rab, which is one of the islands up here. We didn't quite make it... we're stopped in a town called Senj, about 40km from where we intended. It's okay, and we'll certainly make up the distance tomorrow. Stopping for repairs and all that slows things down, and that's fine, plus we stopped fairly early because we found a pretty nice campsite with sea access. For dinner we got to wander down a winding staircase to a secret beach where we attempted to take a swim before deciding that it is, in fact, too frigid and windy to do so in October. We ate super simple olive oil and garlic pasta, so we got to try the new olive oil we bought in Slovenia. It's Kalamata first cold press delicious stuff, and we SUPER LOVE IT.
It's bedtime. The wind is blowing everything everywhere, and this ground is impossible to peg in, so we're going to have an interesting time sleeping in our tent. A very cold time. Sigh. But today was so rewarding and stunningly beautiful that we don't care! I RECOMMEND CROATIA. We've been discussing how we should try to convince people that Croatia is the hipsterest country around... it's new, most people haven't heard of it, and it's becoming a more and more popular tourist destination. Plus it's name in Croatian, Hrvatska, is strange and fun-to-say enough that it could really catch on.