Slovenia to Croatia

Fiesa to Novi Vinodolski 392kms total kms to date 2154kms


We left the Istra peninsula and crossed the border into Croatia yesterday. Lonely Planet said that the border control could be a bit tricky here as Croatia is not yet part of the EU, but they just looked at our passports and waved us through – excellent..
.Carolyn's been sick with a coughing cold for the past few days and now I've got a headache cold with runny nose so we're not feeeling too great – but the weather is now sitting at 30 + with clear skies so we are happy cruising down the Croatian coastline, which is stunning. Our first stop was at a place called Rovinj, a little historic seaside port with a million tourists and lots of traffic – we are in the last week of school holidays here so things should get less populated as we move south.

We rode down to Pula looking for a campsite for the night and the GPS couldn't find it and it was a big city with lots of people and flash tourist development, so we carried onto a little place called Rabac – well, we thought it was little until we entered the campground – cars lined up behind each other trying to check in – the systems here are pretty antiquated and they take your passports and ID cards for safekeeping when you check in – this place was so big they had a “check in” counter and a “check out counter” - the only problem was there was 1 girl on check in and 2 on check out – at 3pm!! also they said that we had to wander around the campground to find a suitable site then come back with the number (wandering around 850 sites!), by which time you had to join the queue again – aargh!!!anyway, the campsite we chose was under some olive trees and very nice, so after setting up we went to the beach – beautiful water but huge stones to walk across to get in – very hard on the soles but apparently thats what they're like here. Everyone has wetsuit boots that they wear to get over the stones. That night we took the bike over to the little village that we could see across the bay and found a lot of very nice stalls and restaurants where we had dinner – after dinner there were 2 brass bands that started playing on the wharf so we listened to them for a while while having a cocktail – very pleasant it was too...

Today we started out early ( about 8am) to avoid the queue at checkout! And made out way through to Opatija which is another pretty seaside town ( I think this will be a common theme) – we walked around and found a wifi free site but alas when we tried to connect there was no coverage – apparently wifi is quite new in Croatia. We drove down to a little place called Novi Vinodolski ( see if you can find that – about 75 kms south of Rijeka) where there was a campsite right on the beach – we decided to stop riding about lunchtime and spend the afternoon on the beach – it was glorious and we can nearly see some tan now – well, almost. It's actually so hot we spend most of our time in the shade! As it's Sunday here there were lots of people about but that might be different tomorrow. The water was funny – quite warm in spots but these really cold patches which you could see by an oily type swirl where it was cold – very strange.
Also, I wasn't in an internet spot for the rugby All Blacks v Springboks in Soweto ( I tried hard!) but it seems it was a great game so if anyone reading our blog has a tape/dvd of the match, please keep it for when we return – let me know if you have one.