A Period of Transition

In the picture on the right, you see what the bulk of the landscape between Zagreb and Zadar looks like. After a horrendously irritating three hour effort to rent a car large enough for four people and four people's luggage, we ultimately settled on hiring a cab for the three hour drive. We drove across the Croatian countryside in an incredibly swanky van.

Leaving Zagreb, the land is low, full of rustic villages and dense, low grown trees. Tall forests like we have here in the states are very rare, and for the most part the topography more closely resembled desert mountain foothills with scrub grass and fields of glacier boulders and shattered rocks.

The road quickly becomes windy and rising however, and pretty quickly mountains abound, impressive rocky peaks, not those pansy rolling hills we get in the Eastern United States. The type of mountains armies died trying to cross.

Once in the mountains, the road enters a series of long tunnels, some several miles long that cut underneath the most obtrusive mountain spurs. The tunnels are really neat, filled with an eerie hum and a perpetual wind from enormous fans mounted to the cieling. Green lights line the walls, almost like our green stop lights, but of a slightly different hue.

Once you get through the mountains, it is a short, winding decline to the coast. The roads get so twisty that a proper sense of direction is nearly impossible, arching around as much as 270 degrees in some places. On the left is a picture of the average stretch of coast.

You can't see too well, but the architecture in this part of the country becomes classically mediterranean with white stucco walls and red tile roofs. Everything there is made of stone and even the newer buildings look like they're about a hundred years old.

Also, in the picture you can see how blue the water is there because the mediterannean bays are shallow and quite unpolluted. In some places you can see something like a hundred feet down - at least it looks that way. From the spot in the picture, it is just a short drive to the port city of Zadar which acted as our home base for the next couple of days, and pictures are coming soon.