Check in on our latest video blog about Cesky Krumlov. It's a cute medieval town, not just for the summer.
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Makarska was our first night in port and we met it with a soft, salty breeze and a cool welcome repose from the scorching sun. It’s a beautiful seaside town surrounded by steep, rocky cliffs and quite well-known for its nightlife.
A fishing boat restaurant getting ready to serve (eat there!)
We gathered on deck just as we came to port, as the policy of Sail Croatia seemed to be. Our guide, Nicoletta, told us about all the different places to go. Most of those suggestions had deals worked out with Sail Croatia, and we were given coupons for the additional draw. In addition, Nicoletta gave us a bit of confidence, advising that maybe some of those places weren’t so “local”, and it might even be better to eat on a sail ship that would come and dock later that afternoon (in the picture above). Nicoletta also told us about a cave club that we could go to at night, at the end of the beach. Deep Makarska club is literally a cave in the rock, one side the deep sea and the other a DJ stand with a rig, powering up at around midnight. They say though that the music is pretty much the same every night, so it’s not much of a local stay, but the tourists are sure to flood it. It’s of course, hard to imagine at such scenic places that people are blessed with being a “local” at all. This of course, leads me to my continued diatribe of what it means to be a “local” versus a “tourist”, and if doing “touristic” things or going to such places is in and of itself bad. The most beautiful places in a city are often the most touristic, mainly because they are the most beautiful.
There is a clientele for disaster porn, for people to brag about going to the most run-down and dilapidated places, where the only furniture is a lice-ridden cumbag surprise couch of sorts and a maggot eaten skull, the room smelling of dank mold, and occupied with a half deaf guy at the bar shouting the wrong order back to you repeatedly and a possibly dead guy in the toilet. I have been to those places, my facetious friends, and it’s not always worth it just for the cred of having gone “local”.
The patio at Riva
We took our chance with one of the officially advised places. I should know better from doing this, with as much as I travel, that places are usually advised to go to because they pay people to advise them. Then by capturing the repeat audience, their services and food slide, and soon they are the bona-fide “tourist trap” that you want to avoid at all costs, and it’s not the good and beautiful kind. I bring this up because there we were in a restaurant called Riva, sitting in an otherwise beautiful courtyard, waiting nearly an hour just for our drinks to come out, another hour and a half for our food. The food further fermented our foul verdict with its general lack of tenderness and precarious price that came to the equivalent of dining in a restaurant back in the US in some district of two-syllables like "LoDo" or "FoDo" and spaces between restaurants occupied by factory-design brobars. But if that's your thing, that's your thing.
On our way back, we ran into a couple of the people we had met on the boat. They went on about how amazing the fishing boat was. It was cheap, the fish was literally just caught, and it was utterly chaotic. The fishermen operated like the Soup Nazi from Seinfeld, barking out, and if you didn’t know your order, they’d shout at you until you just blurted something out. And the raki was the real deal, ready to be thrown up overboard. So if you’re in Makarska, take it from our fellow travelers, skip the restaurants. Follow the line, listen to the people ahead of you, and just repeat what they say. Remember, when you travel to unfamiliar lands, you might have to put aside your penchant for ordering gluten free, almond milk, ammaciato blockiato my priggiato.
The Makarska boardwalk at night
We went back on the boat to recuperate. Luckily on the boat was our great cheap beers on tap poured by the friendly boatswain. We went up on the top deck with our cold beers and listened to a guitarist playing at a bar down on the boardwalk and stared up at the stars, painted across with broad strokes and speckled with flecks of white acrylic. Despite the dinner, there were still few ways to beat the difficulties of life.
Ferries from Makarska sail out to Sumartin on Brac island and back up to five times a day in season. Check the schedule here for more. From Sumartin, it’s a skip to get to Hvar or back to Split.
The entrance of Winter Wonderland, London
Americans especially take rollercoasters for granted. As a kid growing up in Tulsa, Oklahoma, I remember the Wildcat and the Zingo at Bell’s Amusement Park. The Wildcat was real famous as this rickety old thing that had a penchant for riding right off the rails and sailing across the park. I don’t think that was really part of the ride’s original design, but it certainly worked like that.
Then I progressed to the real capital amusement parks: Six Flags Over Texas and later Six Flags Over Denver. Six Flags had those classy rides, the Texas Giant and the Texas Titan (video below), which were both at various times the world’s largest rollercoasters.
Point being, it never occurred to me that some people had never even seen a rollercoaster, and on top of that, many countries in the world don’t even have a rollercoaster. The only exposure to such frivolous fun was on TV shows about America, like Dallas or Dynasty, where there would be one or two episodes where someone got killed by a flying rollercoaster.
Georgia, where I have lived and where my wife is from, is one such country bereft of amusement. All they have is these weird little Soviet-esque children’s carnivals, where they blare out Russian children’s pop on the 9 on the dial until the parent’s turn to a sludgy mess of psychology and the children eat spoiled cotton candy and ride on some lame merry-go-round for the one-thousandth time. It’s more of a sad Biblical allusion to perils of unbridled amusement than the real thing. So when I got married to a Georgian, I had to check my white American freedom eagle stallion privilege and understand where my wife was coming from. A land of no rollercoasters. Whenever one was mentioned, her eyes would gloss over and imagine how amazing they are, and I would continually be bowled over by how she missed out on this one defining event of her childhood. It emerged on my list of things we had to do.
I had to find her a rollercoaster to ride. When we were in London, we lucked out.
Winter Wonderland
Every winter, they have a massive carnival, called the Winter Wonderland, filling up half of Hyde Park. Since England is on the southern point of an island, it tends to avoid the harsher winters that the Continent gets, in exchange for something far more mild. This means that rollercoasters and high speed bullet spinny thingies are not out of the question in winter. When I showed my wife some photos, she was immediately smitten and it became a must-see thing for our London trip.
A giant tribute to German Christmas markets
We got to the entrance and saw masses and masses of people. Most people out seemed to be Middle Easterners, as I guess most English folk might take the whole rollercoaster thing for granted themselves (“why would I go ou’ in tha' wee cold for wha’?” they might say, or rather something similar, as for some reason a Scottish accent was bleeding through in my head when I wrote that). That fact above seemed a bit funny to me, since it was a fairly Christmas themed park and alcohol had certainly an overt presence upon it. But it also goes to show that most people really aren’t as easily offended as American media would like us to believe and just want to have a bit of fun in the cold winter. Probably if I were in Istanbul and had the opportunity to go to a Ramadan themed park I'd go. Or I wouldn't because there wouldn't be any food or drink there... I say “alcohol had an overt presence” because it did. There was a bar that was serving up the mulled wine and proper stouts situated on a carousel as well as a ride that takes you up 100 meters into the air and drops you, with the name of “the Hangover”. The place wasn’t just for adults though, as there were plenty of kiddy related things to do, and even weirdly a haunted house that had nothing to do with Christmas or winter.
The Hangover and the drink-a-go-round
The crown of the festival was a huge rollercoaster with no less than four loops. We would not start my wife’s rollercoaster adventures on some pansy train. Go bust or go home, my friends.
The weird haunted house
The Munchen Loopen The rollercoaster was the same they use in Oktoberfest in Munich. The presence of rollercoasters and rides of such veracity at a beer festival was always mind boggling to me, but there didn’t seem to be too much vomit flying about as one might imagine.
The Munchen Loopen
I’m not sure where else this rollercoaster travels, but it at least made it to Winter Wonderland. We went on it. And the smile on my wife’s face throughout was reward enough and perhaps made the whole London trip worthwhile. There was one part of that taken-for-granted childhood I was able to dish out and serve, and the dessert was good eats, my facetious friends. Winter Wonderland starts every November and wraps up at the beginning of January (though closed on Christmas Day, just like the entire London metro system). Most rides cost from 6 to 8 pounds sterling and the festival is otherwise free to enter. It includes not just rides, games, and drinks, but also events like the Nutcracker on Ice and crazy circus acrobatics.
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