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Pete was good looking, although his tongue was covered with crisps. He liked Abba, too, and we danced to Waterloo and drank Coke and hoped our Mums wouldn't come down from the bar and find Pete with his crisp-coated tongue in my ear. Behind us, the rocks led down to an Adriatic rippled like a freshly mowed lawn. The beauty of it was entirely lost on us; I preferred the Olympic size pool to the calm clear sea.

I was on a package holiday on a tiny promontory called Primosten, with my mother and younger brother, in a country called Yugoslavia ruled by a man named Tito. It was the mid-1970s, and I was thirteen.

That country no longer exists except in memory. Primosten is now in Croatia, which declared independence from Yugoslavia in 1991. The ensuring war almost destroyed the newborn country. Its most historic city, Dubrovnik, where I went on a day trip, was famously bombed. This fresh sliver of a country makes no geographical sense; it's shaped like a pair of open legs, with Primosten near the right knee and Dubrovnik at the bottom of the right big toe.

Twenty years later, I am returning to Croatia as a journalist. I am older, wiser, and have trained myself to cast a critical cold eye on absolutely everything, including my past self. I stare at the washed out photographs of this teenage girl, with her overlong hair parted straight down the middle. I look as if I'm walking around inside a huge hairy tent.

I was just becoming a teenager when my mother took us to Primosten on our first holiday abroad. It was not a revolutionary step: we were amongst 10 million visitors each year who once came to the area. Croatia had always been a wealthy region compared to the rest of the former Yugoslavia because of the tourism, and there were booming resorts all along the Dalmatian coast, Primosten among them. But the holiday industry has never fully recovered since the damage of the war. Now I am returning as a much rarer breed.

Until our Yugoslavian adventure, it had been summers at the British seaside for my family, with cold water, soggy sand, and fun being nothing more complicated than conning yet more coins out of my mother for the pinball machine in the arcade. It was childish stuff, and at thirteen I considered myself no longer a child. It was the first summer when I wore a bikini to show off what were about to become breasts. According to the brochure, Primosten guaranteed good weather, a pool with sunloungers which seemed an ever-so-adult form of seating, and a disco on an open-air terrace every night. It sounded like an Adriatic heaven.

We nearly didn't go to Yugoslavia. Just days before we were due to leave on our promised dream vacation, my brother, two years younger than me, broke his leg falling from his bike. But even my brother, his leg in a long cast, argued that we went. This was our first venture abroad; it would be, in the language of the day, 'fab'.

My brother, his leg in a plaster cast, kept a scrapbook of our first voyage out, in which he was the unfaltering hero. Without him, we clearly would have kept getting into terrible scrapes. 'After landing at Zadar my sister was searched,' he wrote in spidery joined-up writing. 'She had a packet of Polo examined by the customs man. He thought they were drugs. But I explained they were Polo and we were let past.'

We stayed in the Hotel Adriatic, just on the edge of Primosten. The promontory, jammed with red-tiled roofs, was once an island, but had for centuries been joined to the mainland by a narrow causeway. The hotel was a huge soviet inspired block with hundreds of rooms, a big pool with a futuristic slide away roof, and cheap gin for my mum's drinks. It was, after all, fab.

Now I jump from the rock into the painfully blue water, sinking through the taste of salt, and for a moment I imagine the person who will surface into the sunshine will be a long-haired teenager, thinner (God damn it), and certainly less cynical. I miss her, her unfiltered response to this world, this country, and these islands. I try and find her, within me, again.

But, however hard I try, I cannot just simply look at Croatia today. Instead, I examine, pry, and dissect everything I see. I cannot regain innocence; I cannot unknow what I already know. The horror of the war that this country has been through frames everything I see. I cannot just splash in that clear water. I have to find the scars and the cracks.

Dubrovnik had been shattered. During the war with Serbia, it was continually bombarded and the mighty medieval walled city suffered huge damage. Along with millions of others, I watched the shelling of Dubrovnik on the television, an 8-month siege from October 1991 to May 1992. Two thousand shells fell inside this ring of stone. On St Nicholas' Day, 6 December 1991, it came under the fiercest attack; 600 shells fell on the old town. The buildings I had walked around with my mother and brother as a teenager -the Sponza Palace (home of the state archives), the 15th century Rector's Palace with its ornate staircase, the Dominican Monastery and its cool cloisters, were all damaged.

In today's Dubrovnik, you can just make out the joins where new stone has been melded with old, like the scars of a past life. My mother, when I was young, used to call her emerging wrinkles experience lines, and that's what Dubrovnik has. On the Placa - the main, broad, café-lined street - I can spot it's chequered past in the cobbles, where the old stones, highly polished by centuries of feet, shine brighter than those that have been newly laid to fill the gaps.

Dubrovnik is defiantly alive. It refused to die in the bombardment, and now it refuses to become a moth balled museum piece. No cars are allowed inside the walled city, so people walk all over it, reduced to the size of so many insects inside its mighty walls. The city manages to be majestic without being intimidating, and the inhabitants of even its most ancient allies feel free to hang their washing out of their windows, blowing above the trickle of tourists who wander through the light-less back streets.

The city itself is so embraced by its mighty walls, up to six metres thick, that it is cradled and utterly cut off from the unregulated urban sprawl beyond. It looks as if it has landed on the edge of town, a massive medieval space machine constructed in a Hollywood studio. It is so enclosed that after a couple of hours aimless wandering the cobbled streets, round and round and round inside the circle of its walls, I began to bump into people I'd already seen, again and again, as if I had made friends.

These people are no longer Yugoslavians, as they were when I last met them. They are Croatians. Their country has been renamed, and so have I. When I came to Yugoslavia, I did so as Debbie. Now I am Dea. When I wrote my first book as a student in Edinburgh, my agent told me Deborah Birkett was a very boring name. I had to think of something different. So I came up with the shortened form of Dea, of which my agent approved. Recently, fed up with having a name no one can pronounce (it should rhyme with 'sea' or 'tea', not be said like 'dear'), I tried to reclaim my full name, Deborah. But editors were horrified. No one would know who I was. I will never be Debbie again.

I can hardly remember who Debbie was. But my brother wrote down and collected everything - the shower cap from our hotel room, the packets of sugar, a picture of the hotel pool's slide away roof, and even two sick bags from the plane, so he could stick one each way up in the scrapbook. 'Two sides of a sick bag,' he wrote underneath, omitting to mention that he had made use of far more on the flight out. Between the badly glued-in mementoes, I find small clues to that lost teenager.

I was obviously always an embarrassment to my brother. My mother, brother and I went on a coach excursion to Split. 'When we got back to the coach my sister said she had dropped her sun glasses in the town,' my brother wrote, next to the excursion tickets. 'So she made a trip around the town in about four minutes. The coach was about to leave when she arrived back panting. She had not found them. We climbed into the coach with everyone staring at us as we were holding the procedure up. We went to our seats smiling apologetically. There were my sister's sunglasses, she had left them on her seat. All that for nothing!'

After a week in Primosten, we joined a Jadrolinya cruise ship and toured the Croatian islands. Our ship was called Jedinstvo, meaning, ironically, Unity. I don't remember our route, but my brother diligently wrote it down - Sibenik, Kotor, Korcula, Bisevo, Hvar, Opatija, Rab. 'The captain sat on the bridge all day crocheting a mat and generally just lounging around. An easy job,' he declared, next to a copy of the lunch menu glued in to his scrapbook. My mother danced with the captain, clasped to his big chest. I remember him whispering to me, 'You are very beautiful, like your mother.'

Now I am dancing through the Dalmatian islands again, on a Jadrolinya ferry from Dubrovnik to the island of Korcula, which we had visited on day three of our cruise. Croatia is about water. This small country has a 1000-mile rocky coastline stretching from Slovenia in the north to Montenegro to the south. There are almost 2000 offshore islands, only 66 of them inhabited. Most men I met had, at some time, served at sea. Croatian cuisine consists almost entirely of sea delicacies - strange, tough but tasty Adriatic fish, squid and black seafood risotto.

Now my long tent-like hair is cut short. I lean over the deck rail, running my fingers through my spiky crop. These are the same rocky islands out to sea, changing colour with the passage of the day - grey before the sun is high, harsh yellow at midday, warm red at dusk. It's me that's different. If they had told me 20 years ago that Marco Polo was born in 1254 in Korcula, I wouldn't have cared. What was important to me then was the grand impression of heat, sea, and foreignness. Only now do I focus on detail. I look at the wrinkles on the old woman's hands who lets me in to the house that claims to be the great explorer's birthplace, so ordinary you would walk past it, and wonder where she was when I was last here. The older you get, I realise, the more important small things become, and the world shrinks into a succession of tiny delights. By now, the retracing has become a journey in itself; I am only interested in comparing then and now. I have lost all sight of Croatia today.

On the way back from Korcula I stopped in Cavtat, a small town of red hued buildings lining a small harbour. But on the hill behind, the monstrous Hotel Croatia shines down, all white, a fortress to Soviet-inspired 1970s ideals.

Hotel Croatia has all the things that once delighted me. It has a huge swimming pool and a disco. Around the pool, on sunloungers, I saw a few young teenagers sunning themselves, one in a brand new bikini. And for her, I imagined, this monument to a former era was still a little bit of heaven. I hope her brother is keeping a scrapbook.

Not enough teenage girls go to Croatia these days. We are haunted by the images of the war we saw in our sitting rooms, on our televisions. But Croatia is completely safe. There is no danger whatsoever in going there. There are no bombs and no bullets, just faint scars. But it is impossible to forget. We can rename and reconstruct, but we are all, in a sense, prisoners of our past.

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