Mountain drive [Croatia, Day 11]

We picked up a hire car this morning, have booked it for two days and may extend to a third. After a bit of discussion and consultation of maps and guides we decided to explore the mountains up above Makarska and work our way back down to the coast around Brela, a popular resort spot which had been one of the drop-off stops of the way from the airport all those days ago.

We managed to carry out the plan, though actually finding our way up into the mountains and finding places whose names agreed with maps and guides caused some problems. We finally sorted ourselves out, found the road which led up from Podgora and spent a wonderful few hours savouring the grandeur of the Dalmations mountains around Biokovo and beyond. Biokovo is a national park which forms the dramatic mountain backdrop to Makarska itself, and we'd spotted a number of promising looking villages up the slopes when we'd viewed the area from our boat trips. The Rough Guide sings the praises of the unspoiled villages, and we were really looking forward to experiencing some glimpses of real Croatian life. It may well have been that the villages themselves were off the roads we travelled along, and that these are intended as the main arterial routes through the mountains, but we certainly didn't come across anything like we expected. We stopped at one spot which was a turning point on our route. We were prepared for the fact that communication would probably be a problem up here, away from the tourist strip along the coast, but the practicalities of ordering a couple of bottles of orange were neatly sorted out by the little old lady shouting upstairs to her son to come down and deal with us.

The drive itself was tremendous: steep winding roads with sharp bends everywhere. We had several stops to admire the grandeur of it all, but it's very difficult to show any of this through the camera's eye. This shot is just a tiny attempt to give some impression of what we experienced. The general plan for tomorrow too to make our way to Dubrovnik, two hours south of our base. We'll see if the plan becomes reality.