Sunday, 29^th May, 11; Opatija. Risnjak NP for the night.

I decide to re-arrange our itinerary. We were so disappointed to see so little of the National Park yesterday that I decide that to go back today as the forecast is for sunshine.

The park authorities have set up an ambitious program for us today. First, we are driven to within about 100 meters of the summit of Risnjak Mountain in a four-wheel drive vehicle; we climb the last bit on a path that is about a kilometer long. The land falls off steeply to first one side and then the other. A cuckoo sings persistently on our way up through the woods, otherwise there is little sound of bird life. Shafts of sunlight penetrate between the tall trunks of the beech trees and reflect off limestone boulders that lie dotted in amongst the forest floor. Underfoot the deep, squashy leaf litter, dampened by the rain, smells deliciously autumnal. The trees have a strange curve in their trunks just above the ground surface, this we are told, is because of the weight of snow in winter pressing against the trees and distorting their growth.

There is a hut near the top; the views are well worth the hike. We spend about two hours admiring the mountain scenery and the forest spread out below us. The lush alpine meadows above the tree line are divided by rocky crags of hard, white limestone. It is a truly “Julie Andrews” moment.

We go back down to the main Park reception area for a late lunch of venison goulash that is surprisingly delicious. The helpings are sufficiently generous to satisfy even Timot’s prodigious appetite.

After lunch, we take a walk in an open meadow surrounded by pine forests with many different species flower and a few remind us of a wild flower meadow back home. We laze in the long grass letting the warm sun bathe us, inhale the fragrances of the meadow and let our lunch digest.

Our guide takes us by car on a journey through the woods on precipitous gravel roads. After about an hour we come to another open forest clearing about three hundred acres in area with a lone wood cabin in the centre. This is to be our lodging for the night and we have come to see a very rare and special creature.

The facilities are primitive, no hot water and no means of heating food. Our guide leaves us and we are alone with the stillness of the forest. As the evening draws in we prepare to watch and wait. The air grows chilly and we put on warm clothes but are careful to stay inside and out of sight less we should put our hoped-for guest to flight.

At eight o’clock, Timot perversely decides to make one last sortie outside to film the sunset. No sooner has he set-up his camera and tripod than our visitor strolls into view. He is about 400 meters away across the open clearing and has left the shelter of the trees and has started to cross the open meadow.

He is an enormous old male brown bear. He ambles directly towards us, we can see his grey chest and neck and the tuft of brown fur on his back that looks like a mane. He raises his sensitive snout to sniff the air; by this time he is only a hundred meters away and in plain view. He disappears behind a clump of trees only to re-appear five minutes later even closer to where we sit with bated breath. He seems unconcerned but must have either seen a movement or smelt something alien in the air as he trots rapidly towards the tree line and then disappears from view for good.

By now it is about 8:45 pm and the light is fading fast. But we have had a great sighting and Timot has shot some excellent footage. We are too tired to have any appetite for the cold pasta that we brought with us. We are elated and happy as we climb into our cot beds for warmth. I sleep fully clothed with three blankets. The hut is very cold, it has no heating and the air is cool at night here in the mountains. We would not have missed this experience for anything; it is a high point of the trip for all of us.

Monday, 30^th May, 11; Opatija; Galeb

In the morning, we get up early and eat a bowl of cereal before setting off down the hill back to the coast and Kalani. As we descend the air warms up and by the time we reach the coast we are suddenly back in Mediterranean summer.

We arrive back in time for a mid-morning coffee and an early lunch.

On our tour of Rijeka two days before, we had noticed that there was a rusty hulk tied up in the main port; our guide told us that it was Galeb, President Josip Brod Tito’s State motor yacht. It is enormous, about 200 meters long, covered in rust and peeling paint. The riveted steel plates betray her pre-war vintage. The Captain had invited us to come back and see around her – an invitation not to be missed. We duly arrived as bidden at 2 pm.

Galeb (or Seagull) is in very poor shape, covered in rust inside and out; most of the interior has been stripped out. She arrived in Rijeka only the day before we first saw her. She had lain rotting in a local ship-yard because her owners could not afford the enormous cost of repair. The City of Riejka has bought her and hope to raise the money to restore her for use as a tourist attraction. I think they must have underestimated the cost involved in such a project – in my view all she is fit for is scrap.

The Captain’s initial warmth stemmed from his belief that we are all from South Africa. Once he started to realise that some of us might be British, he was distinctly less friendly. I discovered that his dislike of the British is because he blames us for the deaths of Croatian prisoners at the end of the war in the infamous incident highlighted by Mr Tolstoy in his book. In it he accused Lord Aldington of perpetrating a war crime. His lordship won his libel action against Tolstoy but our Croatian captain is clearly unconvinced by this version of events. When I tell him I am half Scottish, he thaws again. He is an older man, tall with grey hair and wearing a dirty pair of blue overalls. His manner alternates between friendly and suspicious but he has a twinkle in his eye and I am never sure whether he is being serious or just teasing.

He shows us to the private staterooms of President and Mrs Tito. They had separate bedrooms, which is not altogether surprising given their 30-year age difference. Between the two bedrooms is their private sitting room decorated with period 50’s fittings and furniture all now rather faded and dirty but which must once have been the acme of contemporary design. The scale of the private apartments is modest given the size of the Presidential ego and the size of his yacht. The room reminds me of those advertisements of the period that depict an ideal father figure, perhaps with a pipe, and mother in an apron smiling as she uses the latest domestic gadget. The man always looks middle aged despite his youthful skin. The impression of Tito’s sitting room is one of solid middle class suburban comfort although this very room must have entertained many heads of state such as Pandit Nehru and Abdul Nasser. You can learn a great deal about a person by the way they decorate their living space.

The engine room is on two levels and is like a dystopian vision of a worker’s factory in a communist manifesto. Apparently 38 sailors toiled in its steamy bowels. I cannot imagine how much diesel it must have burned per hour. The Captain tells us that the engines are still in good working order but, as she was towed to her berth, I can’t imagine how he knows this to be the case.

The rest of Galeb is a sorry sight, the decks are made of softwood planking and scorched dark brown in many places, all the machinery is rusting or has been scavenged for scrap or spare parts. Areas of the deck have been covered in a thick layer of reinforced concrete. I can’t wait to leave such is the smell of dereliction and decay.

Our Mate, Viktor, is with us and it is not long before Captain scents that he must be from either Serbia or Montenegro; another black mark against us. Victor wanted to come with us as he was stationed on Galeb when she was being used as a training ship for the Montenegrin forces in 1996. Viktor had joined up in an effort to get out of Bosnia and served only for about a year after the war had ended. He was emotional when he found his cabin with the very same bunk bed that he slept in still in situ.

I was not sorry when finally we got away and started for home.

Tuesday, 31^st May, 11;

We spend the day at anchor in Rabac, Istria, catching up on work. Both Derek and I have a great deal of administrative work and emails to answer, so a day’s break from our punishing filming schedule is most welcome.

We are anchored opposite Cres in a rather ugly bay with three huge concrete hotels. They look as though they were constructed during the enlightened era of the worker’s paradise as a reward, or possibly a punishment, for diligent manual workers.

Unfortunately, this is the only convenient anchorage on this exposed stretch of coast, so we will have to put up with it. I think the bay was chosen because there appears to be a sandy beach and they are a rarity on this limestone coast where the shore is either rocky or at best a pebble beach.

Wednesday, 1^st June, 11; Bay of Rabac, Istria to Cres Town

We spend the early part of the day on board catching up on our “missing shots” list and filming introductions to the crew. At about 15:00 we set sail for Cres Town on the long thin island of the same name.

We anchor in the wide bay outside the pretty little Venetian town; a huge rusting floating dry-dock is anchored close by and spoils the delightful panorama, it is painted in ugly garish patterns along both sides. We try in vain to position ourselves where it will not intrude visually but, try as we might, we swing at anchor and it always comes back into view.

Thursday, 2^nd June 3, 2011; Cres Vulture Center.

This morning, we venture into town to meet Marin, the son of the founder of the Vulture Eco-center, who has come to meet us. Pavement cafes ring the inner harbour; in the center of the open space they describe, where the harbour ends a fountain, that looks like a dandelion flower in seed, sprays forth its spume. The town center is for pedestrians only; it has a relaxed charm and lacks pretension. Many of the houses are painted in bright colours and some buildings have Venetian features; there is a small loggia, now a fruit market, and a handsome clock tower in the Venetian style. People pass by on bikes or on foot dressed for hiking with sticks like ski poles and backpacks. There are young girls in tight bum-hugging shorts and strappy tops. This is an island for bikers and hikers and students on a budget.

Marin arrives to drive us to the center; it is about half an hour north of here. We are told that Cres is the largest island in the Adriatic despite being only a few hundred meters wide in a couple of places. En route, we pass the 45^th parallel, the point that is equidistant from the equator and the pole. It makes for a significant change in climate and vegetation. South of the line, the vegetation is typically Mediterranean while to the north, in the Tramontana, the climate is more continental and central European. Both zones have some different plant species and, for those they share, the flowering dates can differ. The northern forests are composed of chestnut, oak and laurel bay while the south of the island is mostly pine and maquis.

The island is actually the top of a long mountain chain. Our car climbs rapidly from the shore and soon we stop to look back down on the bay. The calm water is rippled by the occasional light gust of wind that seems to paint the surface of the sea with light affectionate brush strokes.

The center, Caput Insulae, is at Beli, a tiny village of about 170 houses perched above the sea. We are greeted by the founder and man-in-charge, Dr Goran Susic, a biologist with a doctorate in ornithology. He is about fifty and stocky with dark hair going grey. His charm and enthusiasm for his many projects are at once apparent. We like him instantly and he is a mine of information about not only his beloved Griffon Vultures but about local ecology, history and legend.

The center is designed to be a “visitor attraction” for tourists with all that that implies; horrid signs everywhere and dejected looking birds in cages. Fund raising for vultures is an uphill struggle so Goran has to be self reliant; he now gets seventeen thousand visitors a year. It is still not enough and his work involves a constant battle to raise the 100,000 Euros a year he needs.

The real work of the center is impressive; birds are being rehabilitated, taught to fly and then released into the wild. Misguided tourists frighten young vultures into premature flight so they fall into the sea from their nests on the cliff face, unable to fly. The center rescues about ten such birds every year.

I have so many questions to ask and Goran has so much to tell us that neither of us know where to start. Goran explains that the Griffon Vulture is an endangered species. When he came to Cres to start the rescue center about 17 years ago, there were only twenty-four pairs of birds and now there are eighty. He claims to have achieved this through a holistic ecological approach. They are using volunteers to remove alien vegetation and they have set-up vulture restaurants, sites where they provide meat for the vultures to feed them. The local population of animals that sustained them over the centuries has now all but disappeared as the population on the island has plummeted. Beli now has only twenty permanent inhabitants; everything closes in winter including the food shops. Those that have remained work in tourism and the land is untended. The farming that remains is mechanized but with no farm animals. The sheep population is but a fifth of what it used to be. Dead sheep provided the vultures with most of their food. The even more endangered Black Vulture died out on the island fifty years ago; Goran hopes to re-introduce it.

He has created nature eco-trails that wind across the island for miles dotted with beautiful stone sculptures and many labyrinths of imaginative design. These are patterns of stones laid in plan on the ground. Goran has a mystical Buddhist approach to the earth. He believes in contemplation and stillness and he tells us that these labyrinths fascinate people and help them to slow down and breath in the soul of this beautiful place. Inside the labyrinth, he says, time is “Kairos” time – the moments in between- while outside it is governed by “Chronos” - the clock or sequential time.

He walks with us down an old stone track into the almost deserted village of Beli. We sit under a lime (linden) tree in flower alive with the buzzing of innumerable bees feeding on the soporific pollen and nectar; butterflies dart from flower to flower, the flash of their copper coloured wings glinting in the sun as they pass from shadow into light. We stop here to eat the sandwiches Bruce has made for us and to talk further with Goran. Derek, particularly, relates to him on the subjects of philosophy and spiritual matters - both Hermann Hesse and the Upanishads are firm favorites. I am more interested in talking to him about his work with nature and the land.

We plan to return to Cres for a longer stay, there is so much of interest here and so much to explore; it would be a simple life, walking, swimming, painting, reading and exploring the diverse ecosystem. There are over 3,000 different species on Cres about the same number as in the whole of UK; there is a new flower or tree at every turn.

Goran cannot stay with us for the afternoon so he takes us down to the little harbour and points out the cliffs where the vultures nest. We do not much like the thought of the long walk and the hill climb necessary to get within camera range, so Timot suggest we try to rent a boat. The lady behind the co unter in the beach bar is skeptical but is persuaded to telephone a local boat owner. He says he will take us out in his small boat for a couple of hours for 500 Kuna – about £65. We say yes enthusiastically.

After about half an hour, it is now four o’clock, a very red-faced man appears and we gingerly step into his small fishing boat. He speaks no English but a little Italian, which helps. We set off for the cliffs, soon he is earning his fee pointing out vultures on their nests and some perched on rocky ledges. They are wonderfully camouflaged against the cliff and the vegetation. After a while, our eyes adjust and sometimes we can spot them first. Thankfully, the sea is only a little choppy but Timot need to be put ashore to get a stable platform from which to shoot. This we do and he manages to get some good shots from a precarious perch on a rocky ledge. Finally, a bird decides to fly and we are awestruck by its size and grace. Timot gets a good shot of it in flight with its nine-foot wingspan and splayed primary feathers like fingers pointing at the dying sun.

We return to the little harbour well pleased with the footage we have obtained of these remarkable birds. Someone from the center is waiting in a ancient Lada to drive us back into town.