Croatian Quickie

Trip Start Feb 15, 2006

Trip End Feb 14, 2007

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Flag of Croatia Zagreb, Croatia
Saturday, August 26, 2006

From Slovenia we left the EU and crossed into Croatia. I think they are not allowed in because they had been a bit tardy rounding up a war crime suspect.

We headed straight for Zagreb and arriving midday on a Saturday we found it shut. The main tourist office was closed so we had some trouble finding a campsite. However, we found an internet cafe and the good old internet told us how to get to the only campsite in Zagreb.

Taking the campsite bus and then a tram back into town, we walked miles trying to find a nice restaurant - the restaurants seemed either very touristy or completely empty with no atmosphere at all. We opted for a touristy one with bus loads of punters and just to show how soft we had become we opted for a taxi back to the campsite - big mistake it cost us something like 30 quid. So, we were none to happy when we were nearly run down by a gear crunching English camper van as we walked through the campsite to our abode. I couldn't understand how he had driven all the way from England and not sorted out his gears.

He pitched right next to us - the only other English vehicle we had seen for a month - and we are side by side in the Zagreb campsite. In the morning he couldn't get his camper to start. "Are you English?" says his wife - "Can you help us? My husband isn't very technically minded."

Now Gill doesn't take kindly to all this. Firstly he nearly ran us over last night, then he pitches right next to us in a relatively empty campsite and now he is interfering with our breakfast. I was a little more amenable and it turns out that he is Hungarian and his wife is English. They haven't driven from England but from Budapest, only about 300 miles away. Perhaps that wasn't far enough, after all, to learn how his gearbox worked.

Anyway, with Gill huffing away in the background, I fixed his van and they turned out to be a very nice couple. They sold Budapest to us. We had earlier decided that it was too far east and we were planning to head north to Vienna. Anyway, they gave us a camping in Hungary map - so off we set to Budapest. Vienna would have to wait.