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Outside Magazine, July 2005

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Destinations: Croatia
Balkan Surprise (cont.)


	SEA CHANGE: A 17th-century church and Benedictine monastary on the island of Vis (Joshua Paul)

AFTER WEEKS OF GOING very slowly myself—lazily sipping espresso at café tables, lapping up the drowsy pace of island life, and too frequently accepting offers of home-brewed alcohols—I was in no shape for a hike.

Of course, by the time I realized that, I was following three fit Croatians up a stone path heading toward a mountain hut in 23,722-acre Paklenica National Park, whose 90 miles of hiking trails are less than an hour from the coastal city of Zadar. The path followed a sparkling stream overshadowed by Croatia's fourth-highest peak, Vaganski, a 5,767-foot limestone outcrop. We were sandwiched by soaring limestone walls spackled with the bolts of some of the 500-odd sport-climbing routes that drew 40,000 climbers last year.

As we walked, my three guides—Marijan Buzov, 30, a national-park ranger who recently started an outfitting business; his wife and business partner, Irena, 28; and their 33-year-old friend Jana Mijailovic—all members of the Paklenica Mountaineering Club of Zadar, explained the development of the Croatian outdoor scene while their dogs, Dingy and Frodo, flitted in and out of sight.

"Ecology was not a word we knew in the old

"Ecology was not a word we knew in the old system," Marijan explained, "but our natural environment is the one good thing we have left from communism: We didn't have the money to destroy our nature."

system," Marijan explained, "but our natural environment is the one good thing we have left from communism: We didn't have the money to destroy our nature, so we have that—clear water, beautiful parks and mountains—and it makes us competitive with other Mediterranean countries."

When we arrived at the hut two hours later, my guides began to extract onions, potatoes, cheese, ham, salami, baguettes, a whole chicken, and two six-packs of beer from their packs. I was doubly shamed, as mine contained little more than a notebook, a camera, a sleeping bag they had lent me, and some lint. Luckily, the hut was a well-provisioned two-story affair of brown logs, gray stones, and red shutters, with a smoking chimney and laundry fluttering on a clothesline strung across the second-story porch.

Inside was a square card table in front of a woodstove where four men of varying ages sat and played dice while drinking a constant stream of dark coffee and smoking an equally steady supply of cigarettes rolled from a shoebox full of loose tobacco. The ringleader of their typically operatic Croatian conversation, who was also the hut's caretaker, resembled a cross between Walt Whitman and Charles Manson, a smallish man with a quick smile and a kindly face framed by a graying goatee and a rat's nest of shoulder-length salt-and-pepper hair. He wore slippers even when venturing outside to fetch firewood or check on the water-wheel that powered the hut's few dangling lightbulbs. Occasionally, he took a moment out from the table to talk to his dog, and one could be forgiven for thinking he was asking her advice on some finer point.

"They look crazy," said Jana, nodding toward the table when she saw me looking at them. By then we were eating a delicious meal that she'd prepared for us by burying a Dutch-oven-like dish called a peka in the coals of the smokehouse outside for half an hour. "But they're really not."

As if on cue, the men broke into a chaotic song that mirrored their conversation, which was itself a well-practiced four-part harmony of shouting and laughing, gesticulating and knee slapping. It looked and sounded exhausting and seemed a validation of what I had come to see as the indivisible trinity of Croatian-male life: coffee, cigarettes, and conversation.

"What are they talking about?" I asked, expecting tales of sorrow, passion, ideals, politics, humor, or perhaps sports.

"Nothing, really," replied Irena.

The next morning, Marijan and I sat outside the hut at a picnic table, drinking coffee and discussing the past, present, and future of Croatia as the sun rose above us and illuminated the peaks higher in the valley. The dice players of the evening before had set to work clearing a nearby hillside of brush, stacking what they'd cut into big piles to be burned later. Their working pace seemed regulated by the same metronomic beat as their dice game: a few minutes of concentrated work followed by a cigarette break, during which they took their shirts off, sat in the sun on rocks and stumps, and resumed their conversation. I kept one ear on them as Marijan talked, but his purposeful English won out over their jolly mayhem.

"You know what's the really good thing about Croatia?" asked Marijan, surveying the scene while taking a long drag from his cigarette and offering me one. "People can still be surprised here."

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