We took our first trip to the nearby beach armed with all the usual paraphernalia, it was very busy, but not a single British voice to be heard. Caroline was straight in with her lilo and her new beach sandals, the beaches were pebbly rather than sandy. Then she managed to lose one of her new sandals somehow and while she was looking for it the lilo took off towards Albania. I ordered Michael into the water to rescue the situation as she was looking quite distressed by now and the water was quite deep. Michael waded in to save the day but by the time the water was nearing the top of his legs he started fannying about complaining about the temperature of the water lapping around his male bits that he affectionately refers to as his ‘cauliflower beanbag’. I eventually cajoled him in to sort out the situation and he saved the lilo and his sister, but unfortunately not the new sandal, which was now lying in 40’ of water.
We made friends with our nearest neighbour across the alleyway, who we affectionately called Mrs Doofang. She was 77 and lived in a really small, basic apartment and sewed all day and sang Croatian ditties each evening. We all conversed regularly with Mrs Doofang and if Dandy couldn’t be found in our apartment he would invariably be found across the way sharing fish and potatoes or wine and cheese with this delightful, generous lady and her many friends. Although she spoke no English we got by on a mixture of Italian, German, Spanish, French, Greek and some Croatian and multiple gesticulations.
We drove one day to a nearby island over some bridges and found a good place to park up for the day, the sea is so clear in the Adriatic and it looked really tempting here as we would have the place all to ourselves, Eastern and Central Europeans seem to never stop talking and we fancied some peace and tranquillity. It seemed to belong to a plot where a new house was being built and Dandy, keen not to offend, set off to find the builder to ask if it was ok. A radio was playing and a car was in the drive with its boot open but no one could be found so we made ourselves at home. A little later the car was driven down the drive and Dandy went to have words with the chap who didn’t understand much English and was pretty pished, much hand waving ensued then things settled down again. On this occasion Caroline managed to lose her new ball which was last seen floating off towards Montenegro, she wasn’t doing too well with her equipment!
Pirovac from our boat
A different man appeared and seemed to be asking us for money to park up where we had, so off Dandy went with him, towards the house, to sort it out. Sometime later he appeared with two glasses of local hooch in his hand somewhat worse for wear. Apparently he had been imbibing with the old chap whose house it was and couldn’t refuse the hospitality. Needless to say he was in no fit state to drive home and I had to do the honours.
We took a full day’s boat trip out to a chain of 89 islands, which formed the Kornati National Park, one day. We were due to leave at 9.00am but as usual we were still faffing about at 8.55am and even though the boat departed from a place less than 5 minutes from our apartment, we were the last on the boat. We had the worst seat on the boat, right next to the toilets and when they started cooking our lunch on the barbeque close by, that clearly hadn’t been cleaned for at least two decades; we were blinded by the thick, oily smoke. Dandy remonstrated with the chef chappie and advised him to clean his grill once in a while. It took three hours to sail to our destination and we had lunch on board before we disembarked with two and a half hours to spend snorkelling and swimming in the crystal clear water on the little island.
Dandy adding to the water mass (he was having a discrete pee!)
The ‘sheep’ on the boat all headed for a small rocky beach on the other side of the island but it looked far too crowded for us discerning types and we headed for a quiet spot on the other side with a bit of shade from a tree. The kids were absolutely shocked by two naturist Germans diving off their boat in the bay as naked as the day they were born, she had clearly been sponsored by Immac. Caroline was heard to say quietly ‘for god sake put your schlong back in your trunks please’. They seemed very amused by our amusement of them. We had great fun swimming and snorkelling and looking at the shoals of fish. Dandy scooped up a particularly ugly black sea cucumber in the fishing net and stuck it in front of Michael’s nose as he snorkelled along, it resembled a rather offensive looking turd and Michael inhaled about a litre of sea water and constructed a sea cucumber of his own, then was in fits of laughter for ages. When I was clambering out of the sea and negotiating my way around the particularly prickly prolific sea urchins, I felt something biting me on my front bottom, I looked down and saw a little fish at me, my family found this to be highly amusing.
Caroline and Dynamo on the boat, next to the bogs!
Back on the boat for our return trip we settled down for the 3 hour journey, I busied myself observing the range of quite ugly people on board. A young couple across from us were quite intriguing, she was very pretty with ‘piercing blue eyes’ – a Dandy quote, (I comforted myself by the fact that she had very chunky thighs) and he was extremely plug and had a face that I really wanted to slap! We all wondered why they were together as she spent the entire day looking utterly bored by him and ignoring his romantic advances. I reckoned she was using him. Another chap on the boat looked incredibly like Rab C. Nesbit’s mate – Jamsie Cotter and was looking dishevelled and wearing a vest but was clearly Eastern European. Dandy thought his wife looked quite dirty, I just thought she was hard faced! Oh how I love people watching.
We had a very good baker (Pekarna), next to the apartment, run by a Croatian family with little or no English. Every day Dandy and Caroline would fetch the bread supplies and as usual, the operation was never straight forward. Copious pointing and gesticulating to the products interspersed with babblings in Spanish, Greek and German but never the correct Croatian, would result in different samplings of dough produce each day. This caused much embarrassment to Caroline and delighted Mrs Pekarna who would hee haw and raise her eyes to heaven at every cringe worthy attempt.
We found a particularly good restaurant near the beach called Stara Rivo which offered superb service and an appetising menu. The tall, dark, chisel jawed and articulate waiter was particularly helpful whenever we stopped by to eat but Dandy couldn’t see the attraction – he just thought the food was good! Everything was going smoothly one evening, Mikos was paying attention to us admirably and I, swooning at every deep voiced syllable he emitted, enquired about desert. “For you, I have ice cream or pancakes with chocolate sauce”. He left us for a short while as we debated our desert course. Caroline quite fancied the pancakes but when he returned I asked for ‘crepes’ and somewhere in translation Mikos thought I was asking for crabs. He then went on to explain to Dandy that crabs are normally found in the sea and not an obvious choice for pudding in his country – Dandy, of course found this highly amusing and added to my embarrassment by suggesting that crabs are an after meal delicacy in the UK and asked what flavour of sauce could they be accompanied with. I dug an even deeper hole for myself by trying to explain what I had meant and cringed in embarrassment whilst twiddling with my hair furiously...................we eventually settled for chocolate covered pancakes.
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