Korčula island

At breakfast I chatted with the landlady. They have visited Sydney before during the 2000 Olympics. They know Croats in the my home suburb and the next one. And then my usual question: Why didn't Serbia let Croatia leave Yugoslavia peacefully? Well, she said, they were used to lording over us and they wanted the coastline. Yes, terrible crimes were committed by both sides.

At the rental office they wanted to hold Diana and Laurie's passports as security and that was not acceptable so they went to another car hire company. They first drove me out to Lumbarda where I had difficulty explaining to the matriarch at the Pansion that I wanted a room. I found that German worked better than Italian. Anyway I'm booked in for 3 nights.

Lumbarda is at the south-eastern tip of the island. We drove west along the southern coastal road and reached a vantage point where we could see Lastovo island, and in the distance, Mljet island.

At the western end we found a nice restaurant in the postcard scenery town of Vela Luka. (Luka means port in Croatian and similar languages, so it's common in place names.) 

On the way back, we wanted to take the northern coastal road, and succeeded, after a few false starts. Unfortunately the road petered out after Babina and we had to retrace our way to the backbone road. The maps we had were too optimistic.

Back in Korčula Town, we enjoyed an afternoon break of coffee and cake at a cafe. These cute kittens were playfully tussling on a nearby window ledge. We enquired at a travel agency about excursions to Mljet. Yes, they did run on Wednesdays, such as the day after tomorrow, but the agent could not sell us tickets until Tuesday.

The view from my Pansion is so clear and the air is so fresh that I can understand why German tourists want to come all the way here.

Dusk slowly descended on the town and tranquility ruled.

After dinner at a nearby family restaurant, I settled to reread Jan Morris' Fifty Years of Europe. I enjoyed her delightful observation about European eating habits: The Italians eat most sensibly. The British eat most unhealthily. The Spaniards eat most abstemiously. The Scandinavians eat most fastidiously. The Greeks eat most monotonously. The Belgians eat most indigestibly. The French eat most pretentiously. The Germans eat most.