croatia (from the famous brother)

Preamble
The author and his husband (together for nine years now, and married for four) recently traveled abroad for the first time.  Their destinations were London, Berlin, and Split, Croatia.  Their reasons for visiting the first two cities were not the subject of intense questioning by family and friends; London is a common enough destination, and most people accept an interest in visiting Berlin, especially when held by a young gay couple. 

After all, the city features a determinedly yet cheerfully tolerant citizenry; nightlife which should more accurately be called morninglife as no-one even leaves the house before midnight; and, for a single Euro, half-liter bottles of Becks which you can drink, walking at dawn past brilliant building after brilliant building, while unselfconsciously holding hands with, and occasionally kissing, another man.  Nothing in that last subordinate clause could be accomplished in Toronto, with the possible exception of walking down the street at dawn, but that leaves open the question of what you would do to stay drunk enough from 2 to 6 a.m. that it would be any fun.

Croatia, on the other hand, aroused interrogations of surprising ferocity.  "Why are you going to Croatia?", they were asked repeatedly.  "What's in Croatia?"  Having chosen the country on the basis of an offhand recommendation from a casual friend, and having failed to do much additional research beyond that necessary to choose a hotel, they were unable to marshal any particularly convincing, or even articulate, responses.  "Beaches?", they would say vaguely, knowing that few European countries lack beaches of some sort.  "Sun?", as though sunlight was a rare luxury item, only to be found in a few select locations.  No party walked away from these conversations satisfied: the discussions that did not end on this dilatory note returned to the safer shoals of London, and Berlin.

Yours Truly felt, after visiting and returning from Croatia, that some response was needed.  In the spirit of Hilaire Belloc's Cautionary Tales, then, here is: 

Croatia: "Ovo Je Ludnica!" (Google It)
or
A Balkan Honeymoon
or
Rock, and Also Water
or
There, and Never Back Again

Geography
The physical terrain which, after the usual rounds of geological and historical peristalsis, would become Croatia, was revealed at the end of the last Ice Age, when the glaciers decided to recede and the land began springing upwards at the positively jaunty rate (in geological time) of one centimeter per year.  As Douglas Adams would say, this made a lot of people angry, and has been widely regarded as a bad move; those same people have demanded an explanation from the glaciers but were foiled by their increasing scarcity.  Croatia looks like—well, if you took the Niagara Escarpment, especially around Wiarton, stretched it vertically by a factor of one-and-a-half, airbrushed out all the trees, and dropped it just across the Adriatic Sea from Italy, you'd have it.

Native Species
Croatia is home to many species of plants and animals, very few of which Yours Truly is able to identify properly.  The plant life is an odd mix of desert grasses and fruit and veg: there are small spiky shrubs which look like barbed wire, peach trees, enormous purple wisteria, large spiky shrubs that look like barbed wire, olive trees, tomatoes, cedars, and barbed wire.  The last is not strictly a plant, but there is enough of it that I can only imagine it has multiplied and spread from its original emplacements.  There is also the mysterious fruit known as the šipak, which we have only seen in illustrations on packaging and which, without the benefit of scale, could be a tomato, a cherry, a persimmon, or a rosehip.  None of these possibilities are congruous with the full range of products, from sweet, to savoury, to tea, that we have seen featuring the šipak.

The animal life is best reviewed in the context of its habitat.  In Croatia, this habitat is also the country's most abundant natural resource.  It is rocks.  Not rock, singular, but rocks, plural.  We will return to animals after

A Brief Digression on Rocks
To put it plainly, there are many, many rocks in Croatia.  Just as the Inuit have a hundred words for snow, Croatians have a huge multiplicity of words for rocks.  Most of them (indeed, most words, period) are completely devoid of vowels; Croatian Scrabble would need an extensively revised and rebalanced scoring schema.

There are big rocks and small rocks and all sizes in between; there are sharp-edged rocks, sharper-edged rocks, and rocks that would provide a superior shave to the most advanced razor to come out of the Western military-cosmetic-industrial complex.  If you are foolish enough to walk barefoot on a Croatian beach, you will find it principally composed of the sharper of the above types, with the occasional rusty bedspring included to keep you on your (julienned and bleeding) toes.  There are rocks that were part of somebody's house, and occasionally rocks that were part of somebody.

It's an item of interest that in Croatian, the only taxonomic group of near-synonyms anywhere near as large as that for rocks is that for subtly different kinds of rubble.  Indeed, on many occasions, the sets of words intersect.  Rubble is also plentiful in Croatia.  The beaches are made from it (many of the rocks are actually chunks of concrete, usually still with paint or adobe on one side), the roads are made from it, and the houses are re-made from it (as well as UN-issue red cinderblocks).  Walking along the beach in Croatia (wearing thick-soled, sensible shoes, as cautioned above), you are as likely to encounter an upturned refrigerator or a piece of broken church as a seashell or piece of driftwood.  In fact, one could assemble a full set of large household appliances (fridge, stove, dishwasher, AC, furnace, washer/dryer) from the rusty derelicts the author passed by.

Animals, Again
We will proceed in an orderly fashion, from the bottom of the evolutionary chain to the top.

1) INSECTS:  None.  This is one of the country's few upshots, so it bears repeating: there are, basically, no insects in Croatia.  The author is unsure whether this is due to a long-term program of chemical insecto-genocide, or the kind of bizarre chain of natural circumstances that, for instance, leads to the absence of racoons, as a species, in Europe.  It is also possible that, in a diaspora apparently mirrored by other things like courtesy, smiling, sandy beaches, and attractive people, the insects simply left.

2) LIZARDS:  Croatia is is home to a species of small lizards or salamanders which will be instantly familiar to anyone who has visited the tropics.  They enjoy sunning themselves on top of rocks when alone, and scuttling beneath them when approached.  Their tails fall off if they are threatened with capture.  As there are no insects, they seem to chiefly feed on members of their own species who are smaller than they are.

3) RAT:  Singular.  The author only observed one rat while in Croatia, but its size (akin to a medium-sized housecat) demanded its inclusion here.  It also scuttled underneath a rock when approached.

4) BIRDS:  Seagulls, principally.  The seagulls in Croatia are much larger that Canadian seagulls, to the point that the first few times the author observed them in flight, he believed them to be sea-hawks.  They also have exceptionally long necks.  One can only presume they evolved these to see over all the rocks.

5) DOGS:  Principally of the Attack variety.  Croatians have attack dogs the way Canadians might have lawn ornaments.  Your intrepid author and his partner had the good fortune to encounter one when they accidentally emerged from a pedestrian passage underneath the highway into somebody's front yard.  The Boris-scale, unleashed, barking nightmare that confronted them was fortunately ill-trained enough that it responded to Ryan's calming hand gestures, and a hasty exit was made over the garden wall.  The postgame analysis of what would have happened had the dog not been satisfied with frightening us off settled on Ryan victorious, but not without injury.

6) PEOPLE:  In four sub-species:
a) Croats.  Croats are a startlingly surly people.  This is confusing, until you realize that they do, after all, live in Croatia, which would be enough to turn anyone into a snarling ball of depression.
b) KreuzfahrtschiffTouristen (Cruise-ship-tourists).  A Standard, indeed almost arche-, Type.
c) German tourists.  Sunburnt families wearing fewer clothes than you would prefer.
d) Confused young people.  In short, acting like people who have just tasted the Vegemite.  Their confusion is reciprocated by the Croats, who, like the young people themselves, cannot figure out why they have come to Croatia.

Gay Life in Croatia
Don't ask, don't tell, don't go.

Just don't.

Conclusion
Why go to Croatia?  Hopefully, this guide has provided enough information about Croatia to allow the reader to answer the question for himself.  In the interests of balance, it should be noted that Yours Truly(s) were able to create plenty of fun for themselves as far as drinking, hiking, swimming, tanning, and reading to make it through their four days and three nights.  However, it also bears noting that, in a land of not-insignificant physical beauty (it is, after all, the Mediterranean in summer), the most heart-stoppingly beautiful thing we saw in Croatia was easyJet Flight EZ945 to London Gatwick.

[On The Road-13-August-2007]