The Islands of Churches

Greece isn't the most religious place in Europe, but it is one of the few European countries to have a state religion and its countryside is literally covered in churches, cathedrals, chapels and shrines. Unlike other religious institutions in the country, though, the Greek Orthodox Church isn't required to pay any tax on their holdings - even as its clergy's salary, pension and even lodging is paid for by taxpayers.

On Andros Island, amid low bracken and soaring cypress trees, the whitewashed buildings dot every hill, every town. We walked by dozens - scores, probably - as we read and talked about what they signified. You see, religion in Greece is more than just a faith. The Greek Orthodox Church was the argument for the nation's existence in the first place.
In the springtime fields, surrounded by grazing goats and freshly bloomed flowers, Andros's little one room churches sit baking in the sun, locked up and lonely. Barely big enough to hold ten or fifteen people, some of these chapels date back centuries, to the long period of Ottoman rule.

Greek people will often try to tell you that Turkish rule nearly wiped out their religion, but that's hardly the case. It was during that period, even more so than the creation of Eastern Orthodoxy during Byzantine times, that the church was cemented as a singular thing, replacing many independent Christian sects.

For more than four hundred years, between the late 1300's and 1830, most of what is modern Greece was controlled by the Ottoman empire, along with Christian lands in Bulgaria and the Baltic. The shahs never established an official religion (though they did tax non Muslims at a higher rate), but rather segregated the population of its lands according to their belief under a structure that came to be called the "millet system." Under millet law, each religious group was to be governed by a single entity - and the Eastern Orthodox Church became the ruling authority for a large swath of people.
When Greece was fighting for its independence in the 19th century, just as the Ottoman Empire was crumbling, it brought its many disparate parts together with an argument for ethnoreligious identity. Any ties to previous branches of Christianity had long since been forgotten, and the populace had grown used to religious administration - even on the most remote of the Aegean islands, people had accepted the idea that being Christian meant being "Greek." This was a major shift - before the millet system, a Cretan considered himself Cretan above all else - separate from Peloponnesians, Thracians, Athenians and all the rest of what we now consider Hellenic peoples.

Although the islands and mainland parts of Greece had never been united before, their common religion ultimately drew them together. Gradually, over more than a century, property under British, Bulgarian, Italian and Turkish rule was subsumed into the old "Kingdom of Greece," as Hellenistic partisans began demanding that their faith be taken as "Greekness" in a more formal sense.
So it's not surprising that today Greek Orthodoxy is recognized as the "prevailing" religion of the nation. Other religious institutions are taxed at rates up to thirty-five percent, while the official church pays an undisclosed, voluntary tax on its holdings. Primary and secondary schooling is done in Orthodox classrooms by law, unless both parents sign a request that their child be exempt. A top priest sits on the board of Greece's semi-public bank. It's one of the closest relationships between church and state that exists in Europe.

Shown above - underneath a church in the inland town of Menitas, delicious, drinkable water gushes forth from an ancient spring.
On Sunday in Andros town the citizens split up amongst almost a dozen churches of varying sizes, from the imposing central cathedral to this minuscule fishermen's chapel by the old dock. The town was quiet through most of the morning, then came to life as the congregants began emerging into the sunlight to take their places at cafes and bars. Some carried halved, semi-circular loaves of bread and small bouquets of flowers - a lenten tradition, we guessed.

Ferrily We Roll Along

Anyone who has ever nursed jet-lag after merely "crossing the pond," knows that sometimes travel is easier said than done. Such is the case with "island hopping," a term that suggests a buoyant bouncing from place to place, but which actually involves hours at sea and either a good dose of planning or absolutely no time or money constraints. Island hopping is tricky, but completely worth it. It requires a Type A strategy, and a willingness to cut it some serious Type B slack.
At least one ferry sits in every port, dwarfing the cars, buses, bikes and smaller buildings around it. Where and when that ferry will move into action is usually scrawled on a marker board placed outside one of many ferry offices. The routes are always the same, but the schedule thins out drastically in the off season. Basically, this is my ideal sort of travel. I was the kid who sometimes wrote her history report in the form of a song, but would be absolutely paralyzed without an assigned topic. Island hopping in March equals creativity within a framework. It's a lot like one of those Choose Your Own Adventure books.
The ferry horn signals its proximity. People emerge from stores with packages they need to send off. Waiters collect coins and cups left by their customers, all waiting for the boat, all leaving at once. Napping bus drivers arise and start their engines for the load of arrivals coming in. Cars are returned to, bags are picked up. There's a very short amount of time for loading and unloading and everyone's gotta be ready. In Syros, men from the bakery sprinted on to sell candy to ferry passengers and, admirably, made it back off before the door closed once more.
These have been our first experiences as ferry walk-ons, having had our car with us on previous ferries. All crowded together, on either end, people recognize and greet one another. It's fun to guess how long someone's been traveling by what they have with them. A bag of newspapers and magazines was probably just a day trip onto a bigger island. A number of people carry sleeping bags, preferring to snag a spot in the lobby than pay for a private cabin on an overnight trip to Athens.
Ferry travel in Greece has changed a lot over the past decade. The ferries are faster and fancier, more expensive but more convenient. A recent conversation we had with a young gourmet shop owner named Achilles really got me thinking about how the culture of the islands must be affected by it all. We told him we'd gone to the Fourni Islands and he was amused/aghast. "They are crazy there!" he said. I immediately felt protective of Toula and Niko and all the rest, but understood where he was coming from. Fourni is remote, it's a backwater. Until recently, people probably rarely left their little island. Nowadays, students leave for school, to shop, to spend an afternoon out on the town in Samos. The characteristic 'craziness' may be dissappating.
There are a number of different ferry companies, but they're all basically the same, as the prices are fixed by the government according to distance, season and time of day. Still, it's fun to notice the difference in staff uniforms, docking procedure, refreshment options, decor. Here, on a SuperFerry, a separate walkway was available for people who wanted to avoid the car ramp. The high marks they got for this were offset by the on board Goody's and its wafting fast food smell. Our Blue Star boat had framed newspaper clippings near reception showing the vessel's special mission to Lebanon to pick up French refugees in 2004. They also had a self-service restaurant and didn't allow dogs. To each their own.
A port town looks its loveliest from the deck of a ship. Framed by the ship's solid lines and angles, an island's gorgeousness is magnified. Only from the water can you see the whole picture, the buildings piled on on top of another etched into the side of a cliff or scattered across rolling hills. It feels bigger and more three dimensional than your on foot experience had been and then it seems smaller and flatter as the boat pulls away from the port.
Watching the land fall backwards as you set out to sea stirs up a lot of excitement and tinge of sorrow. You're saying goodbye to a place you've called home, the solitary land mass that's been your solid ground for a few days or a few hours disappears before your eyes. And then it's back to the blank slate of the ocean and the anticipation of the next island's impression.

We sprung for a cabin on our overnight to Syros and were impressed with our location. Right at the front looking out over the prow! This wound up being unfortunate on account of the choppy seas. Our drawers slid open and shut, being vertical wasn't an option, but it was a heck of a lot more fun than airplane turbulence.

Fourni, Our Own Little Islands

We arrived on Fourni Island in the dark and drizzle. We stepped off the ferry feeling a little lost. Two small groups met there on the pier, those arriving and those leaving. They were all residents of the island, it seemed, and they said hellos and hasty goodbyes all together, a mixing of people under the dock lights.
"Are you Merlin?" a woman said in a heavy accent. She was standing under an umbrella, waiting for someone who didn't belong. As she walked us to her hotel - the only real hotel, though there are some guest rooms - she seemed excited. "You're the first guests," she said. "The first guests of the year."
(Click on the image to see it in full size - the panorama thing looks a little dinky on the blog...)

Covered in thyme and oregano, sea grasses and salt-corroded cars, Fourni is a tightly-bunched archipelago that's treated like one island by the Greeks. In the space between Samos and Ikaria (if that name sounds familiar, see our adventures with Kolokassi), not too far from the Anatolian mainland, the place has been mostly forgotten by everyone. We trekked over the main island for two days, returning to town each night having seen only a handful of people in the hours since we left. It's lonely in a perfect, empty way, where the land hasn't been disturbed much on its way up out of the waves.

Above, old windmills on a crag above town.

Food was one of the reasons we came here. The craggy ocean floor around Fourni is supposed to be crawling with crustaceans, and the local dish is an oregano-heavy lobster pasta that sounded good enough to warrant the journey. When we told Niko, the affable owner and cook at Niko's restaurant, that we wanted to try it he looked crestfallen. "No," he said. "The men cannot go out for lobster because of the weather." His despair lifted as he had an idea - "I can make it for you with big shrimps!" he said, holding his fingers seven or eight inches apart to illustrate the size of the prawns.
It was one of three meals we had there, the only open restaurant in town. For a while we thought that there was a second one - a man told us to go to "Jenny's," but Jenny turned out to be Niko's wife.

The fishing boats were on blocks in the harbor, their hulls being patched up and re-painted. It's cold in Greece right now, and the spring winds have kept the fishermen away from their nets and traps. We took a few long walks over the spine of the narrow, main island and had to fight a stiff breeze off the sea wherever we went. The taste of salt stuck to our skin, our faces got windburned and red. At night it rained, during the day we had fitful sun. It felt like maritime spring, when weather comes at you fast and the sky changes in an instant.
We might have been disappointed about the scarcity of seafood - it was hard to scare up fresh fish anywhere, and Niko was too honest to sell us frozen stuff - but we were too in love with the Fourni experience to care. Everywhere we went, people waved. They knew we were there already, news had spread. There are only about 1,600 people on the three inhabited islands, most of them concentrated in Fourni town. Of the twelve official settlements, nine are populated by less than forty people. Plagia could barely be called a hamlet, with only four citizens. Agios Minas is even smaller. Population: three.

Above, a roadside shrine for a local resident.

The ferry comes rarely, especially in the winter. It can be days between boats, or even - if the weather is truly bad - weeks. The islands aren't big enough to have an airport, like most of their neighbors, so life here can feel very much cut off. In some ways, it felt like one of the most remote places we'd visited. Finding a community this closely knit is difficult - the archipelago's website offers a biography about many of the shopkeepers - about the hairdresser's: "Regrettably Kostas Spanos succumbed in april 2004 suddanly to a heart disease. In the meantime Maria Amorianou inherited the barbershop. Maria learned her trade in Pirea and she approaches the regular customers of Kostas as well as the youth."

In the Mediterranean, there's both a sense of inescapable overdevelopment and the hope that something pristine lies just around the corner. Fourni represents that promise of quietude and tradition, where things haven't changed in centuries. Beehives dot the hills. Tiny, whitewashed churches are strung out along the empty road, sitting unlocked with candles burning inside. Goats poke their heads up from behind stone walls and tiny flowers bloom in the weak, march sunlight. This is it: the place untrammeled, to be breathed in like the freshest of air.
Of course, we didn't stumble upon Fourni, it took us a daylong journey by plane and ferry to get there from Athens. Without meaning to make the trip, nobody arrives in that little port - which is what's kept the place as sleepy and wonderful as it is. Closer to the tourist hubs, it would have been gobbled up long ago. It's not a place that's easy for a weekend. There's no clubbing once you're here.

And though the plane helped get us close, it meant more to step onto land with rolling legs and the sound of waves in our ears. An island, after all, should feel like part of the sea.
We left Fourni the day after we were supposed to, getting onto the ferry at six thirty in the morning after an overnight hold because of wind. One cafe was open on the waterfront, its tables semi-full with a collection of departing islanders and bored fishermen.

The night before, everyone knew about the hold. Nikos was expecting us, though we thought we'd said goodbye for good the previous evening. He'd made us tomatoes stuffed with rice, a light and creamy fava and a big plate of steamed broccoli. No boats had gone out to fish. It didn't matter, dinner was delicious.

The Layover

There are worse places to be stranded for 5 hours than a Greek island - especially Samos. By the time we boarded our ferry to Fourni, we'd been utterly charmed by the place and wished we'd had more time. We arrived at noon and left at dusk, right as Samos slipped into her evening attire, dark and glittery. Our boat pulled away from the dock and the sun set behind the mountains as if the two were attached by a string.
It's an island used to these sorts of visits, a quick once over by travelers on their way to Ephesus in nearby Turkey, or other east Aegian islands. Samos is a ferry hub, neither close enough to mainland Greece to be a hotspot, nor far enough to be alluringly remote. When we arrived, this information board listed our next boat at 2:15 as opposed to the 6 oclock departure we'd been expecting. We were excited. Who likes a long layover? The woman inside informed us that the sign was old. "Another agency. Closed five years ago." She pointed to a luggage storage room, a welcome curve-ball. We'd be able to do more than sit at a cafe and stare at the sea after all.
Samos is one of the sunniest place in all of Europe with sunlight estimated at about 74% of the time. Well, we hit the other 26% - a mix of sun and clouds, as they say. Sunday's a fine day for that sort of thing, ducking into a cafe here or a museum there. Older women in black came back from church and joined their neighbors at a coffee shop. We followed the scent of bread and the tracks of a few loaf carrying men to find a bakery, hidden down a backstreet. Unable to find anything to really put on our sweet-smelling sesame roll, we treated ourselves to a more proper lunch. And this is where the series of pleasant surprises began.
12:30 is an unthinkable time to begin lunch in Greece, but we haven't quite acclimated to late feedings yet. So, we sat down at Kouros tavern, joining a trio of old men and a family with two young children. The Early Bird crowd. When shown the fish selection by a bemused young waiter, we asked for an order of each. Both the plump sardine and the thumb-sized red mullet could have dangled from a necklace, that's how beautiful they looked. Shiny silver and iridescent pink. The red mullet still shone bright pink through the light batter and was so tender, it fell off its barely visible bones. We've never seen or tasted anything like it. Their moist, delicate sweetness went perfectly alongside the meaty bitterness of the sardine (cooked in the same fashion). Truly awesome.
Oh, we'd also ordered a small carafe of "open" wine (meaning "house"), writing it off as a necessary cultural experience. Samian wine has been renowned since Classical Antiquity. Who are we to pass it up? While it was nothing exceptional, it gave us a midafternoon energy boost. Just when it began to rain again. These children in the main square didn't seem to mind, but everyone else huddled back indoors. We slipped up the stone staircase to Samos' Archaeological Museum, where we found a shuttered ticket booth and an open door. A woman turned the lights on for us and her grandson, noticing our bewildered looks, shouted: "It's free today!"
This part of the world is just so rich with ancient history, chock full of archeological findings. Still, Samos' collection was shocking. The island is the birth place of Hera, Zeus' wife. So, naturally, a massive temple was erected for her around the 8th century BC: The Ireon. Statues from the excavated site stand around the museum's first building. All intriguingly headless. One female was the twin of a statue on display in the Louvre. Another held a bird in her arms and had a long dedication inscribed in the folds of her dress. The pièce de résistance was the colossal kouros - the largest surviving kouros (male statue from the Archaic period) in Greece. Over 16 feet tall it was mind-blowing and, in a room of its own around a corner, popped up out of nowhere.
In awe, we were ushered out across the street to the second building. Here, the collection was focused on pottery, tools, trinkets for Hera and, as we like to call them, "ancient Precious Moments." There had to have been close to a thousand pieces in their "archaic sculpture collection," including a bronze pine cone and a bizarrely large number of bronze griffin heads that used to adorn cauldrons. Other griffin heads from the Ireon can be found in the MET. Birds, turtles, wooden figurines, the findings were the most diverse of any Archeological Museum I've been to. (I get a little sick of spearheads and nails to be honest). All from the island of Samos.
The Ireon site itself was too far for us to visit and make our ferry in the evening. Who knew we'd want our five hour layover to be longer. It is still being excavated, which I find fascinating. I would love to have seen the holes in the earth and the lone standing column. To imagine all the statues we'd seen whole and erected in the flower covered field. Instead, we just strolled back and forth on the waterfront until it was time to collect our bags at the ferry office and embark on our next leg.
Samos is the birthplace of Hera, Pythagoras (of theorem fame), Epicurus and the astronomer Aristarchus, who is the first person recorded to have suggested the Earth moved around the sun. We didn't know any of this when we arrived, not bothering to do much research on what we figured would just be a lunch stop and quick dilly dally. I feel like one of those people who say, "I found love as soon as I stopped looking." Travel is like that sometimes. The best stuff just kinda sneaks up on you.

Cres Island

Cres Island has been our favorite. It's rocky, scrubby and desolate for long stretches. The pace is much slower than on other islands like Losinj, Pag or Krk - it hasn't developed into a tourist spot in the same way, for some reason or other. There are pretty stone beaches and long cement promenades, pine forests and hardscrabble sheep pastures. Though people do go and there are a few thousand residents, it's never difficult to find yourself alone. We camped on Cres for four days and then went back yesterday because we missed it.
Outside of Cres town, the villages are sun-baked and sleepy. Perched high up above the water, places like Lubenice and Beli have almost run out of people, with only a few old folks left in the ancient buildings. Water is scarce in the higher hills, and the roads to these towns are narrow and difficult - they exist now more as curiousities than communities, and all the younger people have left for other, easier places.

In Beli, on the northern part of Cres, we found doors open to quiet kitchens and beautiful vistas down to the sea. The walls and ceiling of this small covered market - unused at the time - were covered with scratched-in names and words. A beach far below was busy with sunbathers and swimmers, but the town was nearly silent. Endangered griffon vultures wheeled overhead, their nests not far along the coast in a preserve.

Cres town is much more bustling, with a lively center and a packed marina and harbor. The water is clean enough - even with all the boats - for thousands of sea urchins and whole shoals of glittering fish. Locals fish right from the town shore or dive in the shallows with snorkels and masks, collecting mussels and clams from the bottom.

We ate lots of squid, octopus, sardine and dorade, all of it caught right in the surrounding channels. Men in overalls and rubber boots sold their catch on the pier in the morning, then retired to the cafes for the afternoon, keeping an eye on their bobbing boats while they drank and talked to one another. We were spoiled by the quantity of fresh, delicious seafood. It's a little frightening to think about turning back inland.
Though there isn't the same kind of infrastructure in place on Cres as on other islands, tourism is still the big industry here. There's a big focus on camping, though, which is nice because the island seems less developed even in the hotspots. Some dozen campsites, ranging in size from massive to tiny, dot the coast. Some are better equipped (and noisier) than others - ours had thousands of people and this carnival type space on the outskirts.One of the reasons Cres is less touristy than other islands is that it's not connected to the mainland by road. Unlike Pag, Krk and others, visitors need to take a ferry to get to Cres, where they are likely to need their own car. The ferry "town" of Porozina is really just a dock and a few bars.

Coming to Opatija from Cres was hard. The mainland and the city are pretty and fun, but we missed the simplicity and loneliness of the island. It really was a Croatian backwater, with sheep and tractors on the roads and a sense of unspoiled culture. When we took the ferry back, knowing what to expect, the rush of familiarity and excitement was almost confusing to the two guests we brought along. By the end of the day, though, they were talking about going to other islands and about how much they loved being offshore; it's really nice, we all agreed, to be disconnected and left alone.

Hiking on Cres Island

The ferry to Losinj Island was a means to our end destination, Cres Island. Attached to Losinj by a short bridge, it is the largest island in the Adriatic and mostly uninhabited and wild. We saw this as a perfect opportunity to try out our "Walking in Croatia' Cicerone Guide. Don't let the name fool you, "walking" implies fairly level ground and the ability to wear sneakers or other "walking" shoes. This is just the first of many of Cicerone's little jokes. We completed two of the hikes in the guide and found other humorous word choices, like "stroll" and "rating: very easy." Luckily, we were outfitted in hiking shoes and a secret desire for something tougher than 'very easy,' so it didn't put us out too much.
The first hike took us from Cres Town up to the little chapel of Sveti Salvadur, then down to a cove in Sveti Blaž. Once up above the town, we found ourselves surrounded by piles of stone on three sides and a hot sun above. Our feet walked over rocks and pebbles loudly, as if surveying the site of an ancient avalanche or collapse. Stone walls made a sort of maze made navigable by trail markings. Thankfully, Cicerone had hit that nail on the head. Olive trees and Christian altars were the only thing breaking up the ocean of rock around us. It all felt very biblical, like the sun had, in time, stripped everything down to the pallor of purity. Even the wooden crosses nailed here and there were bleached colorless, as were the triangular stone rosaries draped around them. This altar had a battery operated light, which blinked one little red flame every other second. We imagined the pilgrimage someone must take to change the battery. Cicadas chattered loudly and we counted at least five different types of butterflies.
This was all very level and, without the precarious surface underfoot, would most definitely have been a very easy stroll. We soon emerged to more forested terrain and spotted the water below for the first time. This put an extra spring in our step, because we knew that eventually, that's where the trail would lead. An incline began, coupled with shade and we stopped for a moment at the church, where a group of brits were taking pictures and laughing, sweatless and in flip flops. We acknowledged it more as a benchmark than a destination and continued right along, under a cooling ceiling of pine.
Finally, it was time to descend the ridge we'd traversed and approach the cove that had been taunting us from below. Just above it, the trail widened and life abounded, present and past. Distracted by the blue to our left we were startled by a sheep standing right in our path, staring as if waiting for our eyes to meet. It's wool was mangy and long, but had the dyed red streak of ownership. Terracotta tiles were piled high in a mound here and the rest of the ruined stone house stood in its own pile there. An outline of a chapel marked the center of the disappeared little hamlet. Of course, it was simple a ruined wall resembling lego structure just begun. This is when we realized that we'd forgotten a bathing suit. There were a handful of people on our lusted after beach below and we prayed that their bodies wore a "suits optional" sign. As we found them clothed, we moved around to see if the other side was more secluded, desperate for a swim. Nope, a boat was docked with four people- middle-aged Italians - lounging aboard. But then.... they were naked! That evening, we toasted Europe and Croatia, specifically, for being a place where forgetting your bathing suit isn't the end of the world.
The next day, we tried out another trail, our second hike. This one was not as well marked, from the dramatic cliff top hamlet of Lubenice to the peak of Helm, and was tinged with a slight sense of foreboding throughout. Probably because the start was marked by a gravestone. My feet were slightly blistered from the rockwalk the day before and the soft bedding of dried orange pine needles cushioned the first part of the path. Intense plant weaponry lined the perimeter of our trail, thorns like you wouldn't believe. Burrs stuck to my hiking socks, justifying their (very cool) calf-high length. All of a sudden, I started to get nervous about snakes. It's amazing how an emotional mood can be set way faster than it can be shook away.
Soon, it was a rock floor, which made my blisters groan but silenced my newfound fear of snakes. The guide book said we'd go through two gates, but at least ten more seem to have been erected since they last "strolled" through. Each one was fashioned out of twigs and sticks and needed to be lifted and moved out and back again gingerly. Just as often, we had to swat away placemat sized webs with some of the largest spiders we'd ever seen ornamenting the centers. Prey dangled in the middle, mummified into a tiny gauzy teardrop.
The Cicerone guide also said that the views from the top were all blocked by trees, but that seems to have been rectified, as we found a ladder and view platform at Helm's peak. Once again, we looked down at our watery salvation and pushed along back to meet it.
Back we went to Lubenice, where more tourists had arrived and where one of the seventeen permanent residents offered to sell us homemade olive oil with a shout of "Olivo!" out her front door. A gorgeous cove sat at the cliff's bottom and we hoped that the "45 minute hike" would zig and zag us down the steepness. It did, but it also had the thickest coating of stones we've encountered so far. If the route to Sveti Salvadur was a rock sand box, this was quicksand. We heard loud whimpering from the couple below us and were just happy that the path was wide enough to keep us far away from a drop. Each step pushed a wave of scree ahead of us, making for a posture conundrum. Leaning forward while navigating a steep descent seems illogical, but leaning back makes you feel like you'll slide. A swim. A swim. A swim, the though pushed us through. It took much longer than the 45 minutes Lonely Planet said it would.
At the end of the journey was the prettiest beach I think I have ever been on. Impossibly, the water was bluer and clearer. Schools of fish rushed around our ankles, all in plain site through the water. Only ten or so people were there when we arrived, almost all carried to the coast by their boats. But we had really earned it. What looked like white sand from above was actually smooth stone, which massaged the soles of our feet. We lay, our bodies half on the hot stone and half in the lapping water, not needing to worry about the messiness of sand. It was hard to tear ourselves away and we did so only after collecting a few stones as smooth as marbles, one red, one yellow, one black and one white.

P.S. Neither of the two Cicerone walks nor the third hike down to the cove below Lubenice were dangerous if proper shoes are worn. So, please, no flip flops. And wear sun block. And bring lots of water. And you should probably not do the third if you're even moderately afraid of heights. Otherwise, enjoy!

The Zadar Mali Lošinj Ferry

Croatia's coast doesn't so much mean an end to land, as it does a point where the land begins to trickle out. The islands continue for miles, breaking up the Adriatic into a series of channels and spaces. It’s a watery place, with rough stone edges and remote specks and ridges. The only real way to get around is by boat, which is how we got from Zadar – on the edge of the sea – up to Lošinj island.
It’s a monotonous journey, but a pleasant one. We boarded at nine in the morning and drove off the boat in Mali Lošinj at three in the afternoon. The coasts of the mainland and of the islands slipped by slowly, none much unlike any other. A handful of other voyagers joined us, some getting off before us, some getting on at stops along the way. Two decks, painted blinding white, were mostly empty because of the intensity of the sun, but the inside of the boat was quiet too. It’s a lonely, less-traveled route.
A constant, low-frequency hum was the only real noise below deck – the sound of the engine churning. The Adriatic was flat and calm, and the only change in the reverberations came when the ship ground into reverse as we neared a port. The only other persistent noises: a slight clattering of the coffee cups, piled high on the cafeteria bar, and the voice of the cook, who sang and yelled with a great deal of energy. He made a meal for the crew, served at noon, that smelled tantalizing – only sparsely-filled sandwiches were available to the passengers. The sandwiches sat in seran wrap behind glass at the bar. A bowl of bananas was apparently meant for someone else; the bartender told us that they weren’t for sale.
There were three stops along the way. The ports were small and sparsely populated, little more than a concrete dock jutting out from a sleepy island. What I will remember most is the clarity of the water. Without the churning of the ship’s wake, it was nearly transparent. Looking down from the deck, it was possible to imagine that the rocks beneath the surface were only tinted a light aquamarine and not underwater at all. These outer islands were surrounded by the clearest seawater I have ever seen.
A flurry of activity erupted in the hold at every stop. Though few passengers boarded or got off, locals swarmed on board. They stacked and carried away crates of produce and cardboard boxes, picking up shipments from other ports and sending goods and packages onward along the route. This seemed to be the more important function of the boat – not to bring cars with foreign license plates to distant locales, but to supply the inhabitants of far-flung places with a link to the mainland. Jadrolinija, the giant among Croatian ferry companies, is state owned and not overly concerned with profits. It exists because the people on the islands need a connection, not because people are clamoring to travel this way.
Between stops, very little happened. When someone got up to go on deck, or when the cook changed his song, everyone noticed. People came back below into the air conditioning almost gasping from the heat and sun.
As we approached Mali Lošinj, the last stop on the line, a restless excitement came over the passengers. In the sixth hour of our voyage, the uniformity of water, sun and movement had begun to devolve into tedium. Everyone was glad when the port came into view; no one lingered long on deck before assembling at the cars.
We’ve taken a number of shorter ferries on our trip, including a few here in Croatia, but never one that felt like a journey in itself. Driving off, we felt less that we'd been on a boat for six hours - more that the land had slipped away for an interminable amount of time and we had just found it again.