Wednesday, 27^th April, 11

We left Lastovo at 8 am for the seven hours voyage back to the mainland and the Neretva River delta. The crossing was uneventful except for the sighting a lone common dolphin that came to say hello, rode our bow wave three times and then peeled off to explore other diversions. This interested me I have read that common dolphins are no longer seen in the Adriatic. The sea was mirror calm so the boat was steady and I managed to get a great deal of work done while underway.

By the time we anchored off the delta, the weather had turned cold and rainy even so we decided to try to explore the delta by tender. A closed lock gate barred the entrance to the channel but when we arrived exactly at 5 pm the gate was opening as it does every hour on the hour. No sooner had we negotiated the small lock than the rain started to fall in big heavy blobs, so we scuttled back and pleaded with the keeper to let us retrace our steps. He let us through and rather sheepishly we returned to the warmth of the mother ship.

I called the contact number I had been given for the bird watching guide that had been booked. I had been trying all day to reach the man and finally I spoke to a woman who promised to get him to call me. After some hours he had not called back so I asked Victor to call him for me. The man was brusque to the point of rudeness and seemed entirely disinterested in helping; he said that the man who was meant to take us out tomorrow was sleeping – this seemed an unlikely excuse. Eventually, and after much cajoling, he arranged for a guide for tomorrow at 3 pm. On calling this guide we found that he speaks no English; I think we can manage with a bird book if he points out each species. This saga illustrates the rather negative and uncooperative attitude we have encountered to date. I think it must be a hangover from a state run economy where no one learns to be customer focused or how to deal properly with clients in a welcoming, friendly manner; their attitude seems to be, “I don’t care either way”.

Thursday, April 28, 2011

At last, a brighter and warmer morning so we decide to make another attempt to go up river in the tender. This time we take Viktor to translate. He is such a great find, charming, smiling and helpful at all times. He tells us that he prefers to be a Croatian in Croatia and a Bosnian in Bosnia. The first man we encounter, fishing from his traditional wooden boat, won’t talk to us on camera. His reason being that he was formerly a Captain in the Marines. Apparently many former soldiers have been taken by the police and extradited to The Hague to stand trial for war crimes.

Derek, ever the bold one, stops the boat and talks to a gnarled old lady standing outside her house on the riverbank. She has a characterful face, deeply crevassed and ancient looking; she seems eager to talk to us – that makes a change. She tells us that she farms mandarin oranges and indeed there are orchards all along the riverbank; neat rows of trees on square plots separated by drainage ditches. She informs us that before the locks were made the banks flooded regularly in winter making farming difficult. Sadly, the effect of these drainage schemes is to spoil the riverine marsh habitat so important for young fish and for birdlife. The only birds we are seeing are herons, an egret, a moorhen scuttling into the reeds and a small bird with a very loud song perched high on a waving reed.

Eels come up river in November to spawn and are netted with great nets strung across the river. The young elvers hatch in the spring and when they are big enough they migrate thousands of miles across the Atlantic Ocean to the Sargasso Sea, only to return to their birth river when they too are of breeding age.

We just got back to the lock in time for the twelve o’clock opening. As we were about to enter the lock, I saw a snake swimming close to the boat and, from its zigzag markings; I knew it was clearly a viper. Viktor identified it as a horned viper, a common but very poisonous species. It disappeared in a flash, swimming in serpentine fashion back into the reeds.

At three in the afternoon, our guide Drazan appeared to drive us around the delta and to look at birds. He came with an ornithologist who spoke no English. We drove up onto the hills overlooking the patchwork of Dutch-style polders, sections of reclaimed marsh that our now salt free and lie just below sea level. The roadside is still a blaze of colour from broom and salvia. From up high, we got a great panoramic view of the wide expanse of the delta interspersed with islands of jagged limestone boulders and banks of reed beds.

Our bird guide proved to be knowledgeable, able to identify everything with its Latin name; otherwise conversation was limited to mutterings in Croat that were unintelligible. Among the more interesting sightings were a little bittern, black winged stilt, ten Avocets and the sound and sight of many raucous great reed warblers that vied for dominance from their reedy cathedrals all along the river bank.

We are taken to some electricity pylons and atop two of them we see two dead Eagle Owls, a pair that had been electrocuted where they had perched simultaneously on two adjacent pylons. It was angry making to see two such magnificent birds killed for the want of a better-designed pylon. The birds were able to touch the wires and the metal frame of the structure simultaneously thus bypassing the insulators.

We saw locals paddling their traditional river skiffs, some now fitted with outboard motors. Whenever we see an interesting character, we stopped to chat. An elderly lady that we spied fishing with a reed pole greeted us with a broad smile on her weather-beaten, leathery face. She was wearing an old grey skirt and a stained flowery smock, on her head, a floppy fisherman’s hat. She quickly removed the hat to show off her new blue-rinse hairstyle of which she was so proud. She chatted away with Viktor translating thrilled that she might be on TV. At the end of the piece Timot asks us to leave in the boat so that he can film us going. The lady was visibly alarmed thinking we were leaving Timot behind. I told her that he was on special offer for one day only.