Month: September 2025

I think there might be just a touch of “jaded traveller” syndrome here. Istria is fine, with a few diverting things to see, but nothing in the ” wowee” category. We’ve probably been here for a couple of days longer than necessary and need to move on.

But some early reflections

Food is generally very high standard – we’ve been to many places where it’s been much worse

No-one outside Croatia speaks Croatian, so the locals are all multilingual, especially English

I think in Croatian Scrabble, j would only be worth 1 point – it gets in everywhere

Paying for parking is widespread – we’ve hardly been anywhere where it’s free

Anyway, mountain towns (with views)

Motovun

And then on Sunday found Vrsar up the coast which was just what we were looking for, ie

• Beautiful coastal walks
• Comfy seats in the shade to sit and read
• Lots of clean loos

What more do you need???

And our final favourite restaurant – and as good a view from dinner as we’ve ever had

Continuing our explorations, tried Pula with its Colosseum – pretty amazing.

That was a great start, but the rest of Pula was a bit so-so with nowhere to walk by the sea. Ended up cutting and running to Fazana Beach with a massive campsite but nice places to sit.

And then decided to give Rovinj another chance which was much better although still very busy.

According to my newspaper, Rovinj is described as being “impossibly picturesque “. Hmmm – it’s ok but that sounds a bit like hyperbole to us.

Always a bad sign …

And yes, it was pretty busy and no standout monuments so we left after a couple of hours and hung out at our local beach.

Day was completely turned around by dinner which I had sort of booked by mistake – website was only in Croatian and I thought I had aborted before the end but I hadn’t which was great.

Enjoyed the fish and the views

For a few days, the weather forecast was for thunderstorms, flooding, travel disruption (and probably raining frogs and pestilence as well!).

So expectations were low – getting out for a brief walk would be regarded as a positive and we even resorted to “fond” memories of previous days when we were confined to barracks. (Granada, Sicily, Tenerife and Madeira came to mind).

But it was much much better than that, although fun in the morning.

But then armed with much wet weather gear we headed out to Porec, about 40 minutes up the coast.

Much of it from the 4th and 5th Centuries so quite old.

Congratulated ourselves on timing lunch during a showery interlude

And being smug thinking we had cracked it when the heavens opened again when we were only 5 minutes from the car park so fond memories of sheltering in the bus station.

Didn’t get wet from above but feet sodden from the floods.

Lovely evening in Valle

First of all, demonstrating my lack of geography I didn’t even know where Istria and Slovenia were when Eileen suggested it, so here we go

Easy journey and managed to get to the local town, Rovinj in the evening.

Got drenched coming back. Forecast for tomorrow is “inclement” so we’ll see how we go.