Advent 12 - Istria

I my head I have this idea of throwing a few cameras in a backpack and a spare pair of underwear, hitching up at the local airport (2 minutes away in my case), jetting off to some location spending 5 days photographing the sites and selling my award winning images.

In reality I have to rely on fitting my photography around family holidays with all the pressures that entails.

This year we decided to go to Istria, part of northern Croatia.

Why there? well because a) it was cheaper than Italy b) we could get there from our local airport so cutting out the most tedious part of the journey and c) it fitted our brief of being different without being too different.

Apart from that my knowledge of Croatia consisted of 1) it was a former member of the former country of Yugoslavia and b) in recent memory it had been involved in a war

Apart from that the country, people and culture were a total mystery. So after we booked we started a intense internet search campaign to work out what we were going to do when we got there (I know a little late for that).

And here comes the issue with my opening statement.

The best way to get around in a foreign country is hire a car (and generally cheaper than the package tours as well). Therefore I had plans to where we could go. The Plitvice National Park looked stunning, Lake Bled, just over the border in Slovenia was a place I had seen photographed many times and seemed on the map close by. Venice a place on my bucket list was just over the other side of the Adriatic  and was surely somewhere we should visit.

However I always make the same mistake. Living on a cramped island where you can throw a brick in any direction and hit some tourist attraction I had misunderstood the scale. Plitvice was a 5 hour car journey, Bled a similar distance (with the complication of border crossings). Venice could be accessed with a 3 hour catamaran ride. That would give us 2 hours and then 3 hour back. Not my definition of fun.

Not only that, but while competent, I am never totally comfortable driving on the 'wrong' side of the road. even with 3 pairs of eyes on me telling me when i am about to dive to the side of the road i am most comfortable I always feel a pressure to keep my wits about me at all time.

In the end we had to pull our ambitions in and have a limit of two hours driving time. This  meant we
only got to see a small part of what is a vast country.

But what a country it is. Unlike Crete, our other Mediterranean excursion, Croatia is verdant and well developed. We were based on Porec, but the toll road was well built and amazingly from a UK perspective virtually empty allowing us to go up and down the Istrian coast.

Inland, we started hitting these little fortified hill towns, perched on top of rock outcrops. My only complaint was  that Croatia road builders are not keen on laybys or viewing spots meaning that it was never easy to stop and take photographs.  My personal favorite was Grožnjan, a small hill town, taken over by an artistic community. An eclectic mix of new world and old world cultures.

Grožnjan

Vintage cameras in Grožnjan. They must of known I was coming...

Hum - apparently the worlds smallest town

However it is the coasts which Istria is famous for. Rovinj is called little Venice and it is easy to see why. A bit touristy for my taste, but the combination of narrow streets set against a blue harbour makes it a stunning location. The only pity was that I could not be there during sunset.

Rovinj

And sunsets are what makes this coast so  remarkable. The sun goes down across the Adriatic sea, and coming from a country where you may get 5 or 6 decent sunsets in a year, I was stunned to find a place you were virtually guaranteed a sunset event each night. In the end my family came quite used to me slinking out of whatever harbour side restaurant we had decided to neat at that night to capture the sunset, together with a small audience staring in silence as 1.989 × 10^27 tonnes of gas again slipped below the horizon.

Another average sunset

I took many photos of that event, but the one I liked most was this one using a tripod to scan across the horizon as the sun went down.

So how do I sum up Istria, from a photographic point of view?

Istria is a bit of a undiscovered country photographically, with most photographers going North to Slovenia or south to Dubrovnik. However there is a lot there and I wish I had the time and the courage to explore further inland. For example, the Ucka mountains were just out of reach and looked interesting and a potential great hiking spot.

And that is the problem with photography on holiday. However much you travel, you only just scratching the surface of a place, leaving you with maybes and what ifs.