Yesterday was a yacht. Tonight is a cave. A cave with spiders, sand, sticky, spiky weeds with evil, clinging seeds, peeing in bushes, eating picnics on rocks and spending hours watching the sky whilst waiting for glorious sunsets.
I love it when life moves so slowly that I can appreciate every tendril of cloud. Every nuance of color. Every shimmering ripple of the sea.
That's nearly my entire budget for Europe...
I want to wild camp, but I'm also a wee bit attached to the idea of keeping majority of my budget for Europe intact. To avoid being caught, Kristof recommended that Tessa and I take the ferry to the nearby island of Uglijan and sleep in a cave near a castle.
We looked at each other and made the "why not? Sounds like a decent enough adventure" face.
Tessa and I make this face at each other on an increasingly regular basis.
My half-fish friend jumped into the sea as soon as she pulled herself out of her yacht bed, face flushed with joy and feeling very much awake when she showered off at the back of the boat.
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| I love seeing people love things as much as Tessa loves swimming. |
Regretfully, we disembarked from Kristof's perfect, peaceful yacht in the velvet smooth harbor at 9:50 this morning. Our kind, captivating host had prepared for us a healthy breakfast of fruit, yogurt and tea and introduced me to some new Camino paths while we ate. It felt too soon to say goodbye.
I can still learn so much from him. I want... ach. I want some sort of mentor. I want a person like this to be my some sort of mentor.
We chose to cough up 15 kunas for the 10:10 bus into Zadar rather than hitching the 14 kilometers. We're learning that short distances can be quite a bit harder to thumb our way through, as people don't think it's worth it to take two vagabonds 15 km. They figure we can just get a bus.
For the first time in nearly two years of travel, I found myself without a place to stay the night. It was exciting. Exhilarating. Nerve wracking.
I loved and hated it.
Tessa, as always, seemed unperturbed.
We figured the best way to exploit our homeless predicament would be to wild camp in a cave on a nearby island about which Kristof had waxed on the night before.
Makes sense, yes?
So we purchased our picnic (lunch and dinner) and boarded the ferry at 12:15.
I tried to be assertive and make good choices about directions and tickets and all that jazz. But everything I said was absolutely, unequivocally wrong, so I finally just squashed my assertive side and let Tessa be the unquestioned leader of the day. We've decided to take turns wearing the pants in this odyssey, and the universe was definitely informing me that it was not my day to wear the pants.
Perhaps I'll wear the pants tomorrow.
After a brief 45 minute ride, we landed in the small town of Preko.
The sky rumbled ominously overhead.
"Are we going to get rained on?"
"Probably. But we'll be okay. We can always whip out Judy and hide underneath."
We tightened the straps of our respective elephants and began our ascent up the island mountain.
I am going to get rid of so much crap. I don't know how. I don't know what I have left in my elephant that I can get rid of, but I am going to find it and it is going to go.
I can't carry this. My life is still too heavy. If it takes the joy out of climbing a mountain, it's not worth carrying.
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| This person owns an island. We don't know who this person is, but we discussed the possibility of swimming to the island, knocking on the door and asking if we could join in on lunch. Right now, nothing really seems out of the question. |
We trudged and tramped along. My shoulders screamed and my hips protested angrily as the pads dug deeply into my "not skinny" flesh.
What else can I leave behind?
Then came the rain. An explosion of rain. Not just a delicate pitter, patter, raindrops on roses business. An "I will make you look like a drowned poodle" business.
It was roasting in Croatia, though, so Tessa and I were thrilled to death to receive a solid dousing on our sweaty way up the mountain. I simply snapped my waterproof cover over my elephant, threw my head back, whispered sweet words to my indignant shoulders, and pushed ahead.
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| The view from the top. |
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| "Is there a communications tower in the castle?" "Yes." "Why?" "We're in Croatia." |
We stayed at the top of the tower, napping and reading and nursing our angry body parts until just after four pm.
"Do you think we should go find our home?"
"Yup. Time to find our home."
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| Someone else didn't manage the poodle drowning storm as well as we did. |
So we scrambled down from the castle and set off in search of the cave on the side of the mountain. After half an hour of steep downhill and jagged, rocky flats, we found our cave. But there were tourists hovering about (damned tourists), so we chose to continue down the path, around the corner and out of sight.
I am not going to get a five hundred euro fine for wild camping after hiking this far to get to a decently remote location.
Tessa spotted another cave. Complete with small, abandoned mattress and old fire pits.
"Can this be our home?"
"Yes. This can be our home."
We ate another picnic.
Watched another sunset.
Enjoyed the quiet until it was rudely interrupted by a swarm of bumblebeetles (they weren't bees, but they had a similar sort of bumble).
Tessa reads Thoreau on her E-Reader behind me, propped up against our cave wall with the thin mattress a previous wild camper left behind. She sighs deeply and I squelch my impulse to ask what's wrong.
Tessa has a tendency towards deep sighing. This caught me off guard at first, but deep, contemplative sighs are simply a part of her respiration. I no longer swivel my head around and try to discern what could be the root of her deep melancholy (assuming it isn't aftermath of Ivan), and just accept that it's probably a simple lack of oxygen.
We laid out Judy and spread my yoga mat and the resident mat on top. Then our bivvy bags for extra protection. I opened my computer and cued up a Rick Steves podcast about WWII history in the Balkans.
"Tessa?"
"Yeah?"
"Are we in a cave?"
"Yeah..."
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