Europe > Croatia > Dalmatia and the Adriatic Islands > Dubrovnik > Articles > Riding the Dalmatian Coast

For years, I had in my mind’s eye this image of classical Mediterranean beauty - of olive groves and violet-grey mountains, of pure blue sea and the smell of lavender, of golden stone and red tiled roofs and timeless villages sighing contentedly in the heat of the afternoon. I had bicycled through the littoral of Lebanon and Syria, Turkey, Greece, France and Italy and I had seen rough approximations but they never matched my vision. Wheeling through the Balkans, I heard rumour that the Dalmatian Coast had everything I sought and, besides, after two weeks in Bosnia I needed a holiday.

From the Croatian border post in the Dinaric Alps the Adriatic glowed beneath me. I could see Dubrovnik and I fancied that I could feel the honeyed light soaking the medieval alleys, smell the calamari risotto and taste the Karlovac lager. I was close but this, I was reminded, was the Balkans where little is as it seems.

“I am sorry.” At least the Croatian policeman was being nice about it. “You cannot cross here.”

He shifted his cap uneasily and explained that I was in ‘Republica Srpska’ - a Serbian-peopled state created out of a corner of Bosnia Herzegovina under the Dayton Peace Agreement and not recognised by Croatia.

“You have to go back.”

“But how can you send me back to a country that, according to you, doesn’t exist?”

It was a weak card. He gave me a hopeless smile and a tin of bully beef and said: “Please do not think that Dalmatian peoples are not kind.”

They have no reason to be kind. Their history is one of invasion after invasion. Romans, Christians, Venetians, French and Austrians have all left relics while the Mongols, Saracens, Ottoman Turks and Germans have merely plundered. Rebecca West who travelled extensively in the Balkans in the 1930s felt that the place had never had the chance to enjoy the benefits of its economic endowment while 50 years of Communism and the most recent war in Bosnia have ensured that little has changed since her time.

A day’s ride north of Dubrovnik, the border was open and I spilled out of the hills with the Naretva River into the Adriatic Sea. The stubby white Jadrolinija ship surged out of the small port of Drvenik leaving a tail of marbled blue and white. The off-shore Islands (there are 1400 of them) stretch from the Montenegrin border in the south to Rijeka and look like an extended family of green humped sea monsters swimming for Italy. They rose around us as the towns on the coast dimmed to yellow specks.

On the island of Hvar, I felt I could have been in any decade of the 20th century. The road was deserted and I bowled through invisible clouds of scent - myrtle, lavender and rosemary, passed crumbling stone buildings and tangled scrub of heather and ilex, aloes and palms. The island, Rebecca West was told “is noted for the extraordinary sweetness of its air, which is indeed such as might be inhaled over a bed of blossoming roses.”

The Zvonko family, the first people I had seen for an hour, were digging the garden of their restaurant ready for the May 1 opening. The father, Beba, spoke some German and his 12-year-old daughter, Marina, spoke excellent English. The village, now an extensive ruin of limestone and slate which sloped away from us towards the sea, had once been home to 70 people all with the same surname.

I camped in the garden, among purple irises. We had dinner - tuna marinated in oil, coriander and garlic, cauliflower, prsut (Dalmatian cured ham), feta cheese, olives and bread - round an enormous stone table under a canopy of ragged vines. We talked about Tito and his partisans who had used the islands in the Adriatic as safe havens during the German occupation in 1941-44. Beba, through his filial interpreter, told me how the war in Bosnia had crippled tourism in Dalmatia and he was opening the restaurant for the first time in six years.

There were tourists in the town of Hvar - Germans, English and Slovenians soft shoeing across the marbled square passed 15th century palaces weathered to gold. There is a Venetian arsenal (now a museum) and the oldest municipal theatre in the Balkans as well as Franciscan and Dominican monasteries, all of which are gathered close about the small harbour. The prospect from the ramparts of the 16th century Venetian fortress, over the tightly packed red tiled roofs and the two classical campaniles to fishing boats, a piny headland, the blue water and foaming sea monsters beyond is one of exceptional and timeless beauty.

I was now assured that wherever I went in Dalmatia I would be happy. So I bought a piece of ‘burek’ (the delicious snack of filo pastry stuffed with cheese loved by the Turkish) and a ticket for the first boat anywhere, which brought me to Split.

The 1700 year old walls of the great summer palace of the Roman emperor Diocletian dominate the old town and the waterfront. Within the walls are the emperor’s mausoleum (now a Catholic cathedral), the belltower of St. Domnius, an open-air peristyle, dripping Roman cellars and a network of serendipitous alleys full of boutiques, galleries and cafes. I spent a Saturday milling with the elegant crowd of shoppers, trying to look as effortlessly cosmopolitan as they did in their historic surroundings.

Split is the largest port on the Dalmatian Coast and away from the old town, a sprawl of docks, factories and warehouses. I eventually found the Adriatic Highway and turned north. Marshal Marmont, the governor of the Illyrian provinces appointed by Napoleon in 1806, first built the road. It runs from Rijeka south through Zadar, Split and Dubrovnik to the Albanian border, pinned to the sea all the way by the Dinaric Alps. It is perhaps the finest coastal road in Europe and one worldly old Bosnia hand I met compared it to Highway One through Big Sur, in California. Certainly, it is one of the greatest coastal bike rides in the world.

I rode through Trogir, Primosten and Sibenik: clean, picturesque towns with Renaissance churches and grand public buildings bearing stone lions of St. Mark, the sign of Venetian possession. The Italian influence remains and the young, I thought, looked as cool as the Milanese or the Brescians, sipping machiatos in the medieval piazzas.

A 20-minute ferry ride took me to the island of Pasman where I played ‘boules’ and drank wine on Sunday evening with men in flat caps and battered suits. An old lady dressed from head to foot in black and wiry in build, put a smoked sausage in my pannier.

North of Zadar the scenery changes. The evergreen scrub and the pines disappear and bald, grey hills run down to the cerulean sea in a striking juxtaposition of colour. To the west, more islands, Rab and then Krk, loomed out of the Adriatic but the sky turned the colour of slate and I opted to press on.

Fifty kilometres from Rijeka, traffic increased and the rain started. Streams of water flew off my tyres, filling my nostrils and on the long downhills, I wobbled precariously in the pockets of wild wind behind lorries.

I left the Adriatic at Rijeka. Drenched, I pedalled north towards Slovenia, wondering if I had just lived my Mediterranean dream. And then I remembered one of life’s sad truths - that it is in the nature of dreams to remain magnificently flawless only for so long as they are unfulfilled.

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