07.12.09
The middle of croatia
After we left slovenia we took a rather unconventional route through croatia. Based on directions given to us by the many slovenians that stopped to talk to us we crossed into croatia at metalika and headed to the city of Karlovac (where one of the most popular croatian beers comes from and they have a beer festival but it was at the wrong time of year for us). The tourist information place in karlovac gave us an awesomely inaccurate map and we planned to cross to sisak and then into bosnia. We got a tad lost and ended up doing an extra 50km or so but it turned out to be a pretty interesting detour. We were seriously off the beaten track and it gave us the chance to see how things are in rural croatia away from anything that even closely resembles a tourist. Even people from the next villages don’t tour here. Then after Glina we got into an area that seemed to have really been hit very hard by the war and it doesn’t look as though it will ever recover. There are villages that where humanity is completely dying out and where nature is taking back the land. The hills were really pretty and it was a strange feeling to see the way that the people are dying out and the bush is closing in. For 70 km we saw so many villages where no people were under the age of 50 and those were the young people there. Most of teh houses were empty and falling down and many had had the bush swallow them up. Such a different experience to that in Slovenia but definitely an experience worth having. We met a nice couple in a bar in Karlovac that told us a fair bit about their country and they were very positive about much of it. I’m intriuged to see the coast now to see how different it is from the areas that man has done his best to irradicate himself and give the land back to nature.
