Our Brief Taste of a Croatian Summer Holiday
We’d have loved to kick-start our Croatian holiday adventure on the island of Hvar and then stopover in Brac before turning in at our base in Split, but my fiancé and I’s initial disappointment at having to head straight to Split very quickly turned into great satisfaction in the comfort immediately made available to us. Although we made sure to travel light, a further 2-5 hours added to what was already a long flight would have only served to compound my jetlag.
My fiancé had enjoyed a good night’s sleep on the flight so there were no jetlag issues on his part. I on the other hand still can’t quite manage to get a decent night’s sleep 30,000 feet above ground, no matter how comfortable the airline is. In this particular instance I’d enjoy no such comforts in any case because most of the money set aside for our vacation went into the luxury villa we reserved, which would be our base for the entire week-and-a-half long stay. We figured we might be tired between all the travelling and activities we had loosely planned, so it was very important to have a very comfortable place to retreat to.
Comfort is perhaps the least-fitting word to depict what could be better described as premium European luxury in accommodation, so much so that the next two days we spent on the premises had us wondering whether we didn’t perhaps run the risk of getting too comfortable within the villa and missing out on what Croatia has to offer beyond our hideaway. We could very well have spent our entire week-and-a-half not venturing beyond the property’s seemingly endless list of amenities, but part of the reason why we chose to stay in Split was so that we could add a Mediterranean flavour to our Croatian getaway.
Split is strategically located on the south coast of the Croatian mainland, affording us easy access to the tourist-friendly islands of Brac and Hvar, in addition to Bacvice beach. Now my fiancé and I have different ideas about what the perfect holiday getaway entails, but we were on the same page about not wanting to waste away the holiday sunbathing, so we only hit Bacvice for some cafe-snacks before embarking on a 1.5 hour ferry ride to Hvar. We entered the island at Jelsa where we were in for some great sightseeing, which only got better as we explored the more affordable dining spots in relation to those located in Hvar Town, about 27 kilometres west.
I felt the nightlife and clubbing scene was a bit pretentious with the international deejays, yachts and dancing that largely resembled people merely going through the motions. By then though (when night fell), we’d already satisfied a very large portion of our wanderlust for that day, before checking out the club scene at the Carpe Diem. We had visited the St. Stephen Cathedral, cruised the Pakleni archipelago, hiked to the Zlatan Otok Winery for an early dinner and taken in some of the best scenery I’ve witnessed in a long time.
Every return to our villa induced a feeling of a brand new experience and I could definitely have become accustomed to the comfort and charm of calling a luxury villa my home, if only for a little while.
The conclusion of our Croatian escape left me feeling as if I could have further immersed myself in the culture and racked up more unique experiences, but I guess that’s the purpose of such a getaway — exploring that much more of what a destination has to offer during what always seems like a limited time.