The farmer stands looking at his vines. This is not like a French vineyard, cloaking the entire hillside in monoculture. This is Istria in northern Croatia. There’s a lush forest, an olive grove, tomatoes running amok and a farmhouse that might be taken for a ruin, were it not for the curtains in one intact window.
“It’s been a strange year,” I say. “Brexit, Donald Trump, Iceland and Wales at the Euros.”
“A strange year?” He looks at me, a bit puzzled. “But the black truffles have been good.”
I feel at that moment that my summer trip to Europe has properly begun. Three days earlier, we’d crossed by car ferry into France. Would there be queues at border posts? Grim-faced officials scrutinising our newly devalued UK passports? Not a bit of it. We were stopped, with regularity, but only for motorway tolls – France and Italy sting you for those. Cheaper to head through Germany and Austria.
And now, in the hilltop town of Motovun, not far from the Slovenian border, I decide to slow things down. There are oak and beech forests cloaking a land of sweet valleys and severe limestone outcrops. I am eager to reach the sea, but I want to prolong the anticipation in these secretive hills, the ancient land of Istria.
My partner Sophie and daughter Maddy (13) take the car on ahead, eager to swim, but I’m doing a self-guided hike, with luggage transfers, all the way to the Adriatic. This will be the first part of our journey: once on the coast, we will island hop to Zadar on the mainland, kayak through the Kornati archipelago, then finish in the city of Split (on our return journey I plan to cut off a few miles by catching the Split to Ancona ferry).
If the Wi-Fi holds out, I’ll be sending five reports of the trip, gathering stories and ideas of where to go in this varied and fascinating country. Not that Croatia is in any way unknown territory for tourism. Austrian, Hungarian and Italian occupiers all had a bite at it recent centuries – and found that thousands of islands in turquoise seas with good beaches and fine wines were irresistible.
In summer, getting away from the crowds can be a test, but the truth is that most people never venture far from their car or a bar, and Croatia has loads of places that remain relatively quiet. In 2015, I remember walking around the miraculous maze formed by the ancient olive groves of Lun on the “party island” of Pag and never seeing a soul, even when I got lost and needed someone.
Setting out from Motovun, I’m struck by a sense of verdant nature at full blast. The path winds along the river Rečina: butterflies cloud the air, deer spring away through meadows, and frogs freckle the ponds and puddles. A recent thunderstorm has left plenty of muddy patches in which every animal has left its mark, including what looks like an otter. I wade the river three times and wish I’d got a proper stick, rather than a twisted old branch. Most of the buildings I encounter are uninhabited ruins and the path is not always easy to follow – I’m glad to have a compass with me – but this is magnificent walking country.
It is not until the hilltop village of Hum that I see another human being: a guitarist strumming in the gateway while a cat plays around him. Hum is not uninhabited: it was originally a small 12th-century Venetian castle whose walls and towers were eventually recycled as houses. There’s a restaurant, a bar and a handful of guesthouses where a few days could be idled away very pleasantly. But I tear myself away and retrace my steps downhill, then climb slowly through the trees and out on to a limestone plateau, a place of sumac bushes, tall grasses and pines. From there I drop back into woods and eventually make it to my overnight stop in another attractive hilltop town, Roč.
If I had an inkling that Istria might be a bit of a gastronomic paradise, my dinner that evening at Rocka Konoba inside the old walls of Roč confirms it, with a menu stiffened with local sheep’s cheese, home-grown herbs, and those truffles.
“A big one is called a ‘joker’,” another diner tells me. “Yes, the English word, from card-playing, but no one here knows about that. For Croatians a joker is a large truffle, nothing else!”
Next day I cheat a bit: bunking off to go rock-climbing with Marin, the son of my guesthouse owner, who has told me about a secret gorge filled with limestone pillars. I cannot resist. Vela Draga ought to be a Unesco world heritage site, but instead is a forgotten corner narrowly bypassed by a motorway.
We walk through scrub forest for a few minutes, then suddenly a vast wonderland opens up at our feet: a deep forested canyon from whose floor rise, like ghostly giants, massive limestone columns 100 metres tall. We climb several smaller ones to warm up, then tackle the largest, Veliki Toranj (Great Tower), its peak a Lost World of stunted trees and tiny aromatic herbs. For a few minutes on the first section of the climb, I’m traversing a vast white face of limestone, the ground 50 metres below. All the beauty and serenity of climbing, the wind and the sun, come together in a few moments of bliss.
Marin learned to climb from Austrian mountaineers who turned up in Roč one day, asking if anyone had ever tried to climb the nearby cliffs. “I was afraid of heights,” he says, “But climbing cured me. Now, up on the rock, I forget everything, I’m just in the now.”
I finish the day in Poklon, a tiny village on the upper slopes of Učka, the tallest mountain in Istria, at 1,396 metres. Evenings are cool here, with long views down through forests to where the coast is still baking in the sun. Zoran, the co-owner of Pansion Učka, serves wild boar for dinner and tells me about the bears occasionally sighted nearby. There is a cool wind blowing outside which he says is the bura, a local freakish cold air current that occasionally sweeps down from the Velebit mountains to the east, scours across Istria, before “dying in Trieste”. To warm me up, he serves biska, grappa made from mistletoe.
Next day it’s still cool, but the wind has dropped. An hour’s climb through idyllic beech forest pops me out on a summit with spectacular panoramas of the Adriatic from a tower built by the Austro-Hungarians, who held the area until the second world war, when the Italians took it. They say Venice is visible on very clear days.
There are days out walking on the mountains that quickly fade from memory, and others that never quite live up to expectations. Učka is not one of those. From the top it’s a long, wonderful, meander down through woods and meadows, eventually joining a stream that tumbles past ruined villages and craggy cliffs towards the coast at Mošćenićka Draga. And that is it. I have arrived at the Adriatic and the sea will be a constant companion for the next month.
Now the talk is all about seafood not truffles – and Mošćenićka proves to have some amazing restaurants (Konoba Na Rivi kod Benita and Restaurant Johnson are particularly good). I eat mussels, raw sea bass and a bizarre but delicious dessert of prawns with strawberries. Down by the harbour I enjoy the first of what I hope will be many swims. I also find a newly opened maritime museum, a small place that tells how this small town’s culture and history are intimately connected to the sea.
I’m wishing I had more time in Istria, but in the evening I can see the dark shadow of the island of Cres, 5km away. I get chatting to Stiven, the chef in another good restaurant, Konoba Zijavica, who proves to be an outdoor enthusiast. “Cres is a wonderful island,” he assures me. “I kayaked right around it last year. It’s full of remote shingle beaches and deep forests. It’s even got griffon vultures.”
I’d planned to skip quickly across Cres but I change my mind. It sounds amazing and, in peak season, less crowded than Krk, where we’ll be going after. The ferry is leaving in the morning, I’m reunited with the family, and it’s time to move on.
How to do it
The walk was provided by On Foot Holidays, which offers a six-night self-guided holiday from Motovun to Mošćenićka Draga for £575pp, including luggage transfers and most meals (flights extra). Transport from Portsmouth to Caen, from £79pp each way, was provided by Brittany Ferries. Transport support was provided holidayextras.co.uk, which also arranges airport lounge access, transfers and car parking. For further information see kvarner.hr and croatia.hr.
