To Baška and Back

As we rather did the tourist thing, here is the tourist craic. Krk is the joint largest island in the Adriatic (formerly largest, but Cres has lately been up-sized) and is part of Croatia, although in the past it seems that everyone had a go, including the Liburnians, Romans, Avars, Venetians (twice), Austrians and Italians (twice). With roughly 19,000 inhabitants, it is also the most highly populated island in the Adriatic. A bridge connects Krk to the mainland which makes it mightily convenient for travel; it was initially christened after Tito (Titov Most), a name which appears to have fallen out of favour. It has the 16th largest arch bridge span in the world (a somewhat specific measurement) and the longest when it was first built. At 1,430m it is one of the longer bridges about, although this is dwarfed by the longest bridge in the world - 164,800m in China (China seems to hold the monopoly on long bridges, taking seven of the top ten places).

Enough about bridges... 

The most apparent aspect of Krk to us was that it was very, very, very hot, all the time. And quite popular with tourists. We stayed with Danilo, Andrea, Natasha, Jan and children (again, wildly hospitable and wonderfully fun) for a night in Šilo, a cute seaside village, and then headed south on a surprisingly wiggly, vertiginous road (Islands have mountains too?) to Baška where we had spied some small climbing spots with excellent information from Climbing in Baška.

Baška has two very large, swanky campsites that were both hopelessly out of our price range. We were therefore relieved to discover that lurking in a grey square of nothingness on the 'Camp Zablaće' mega-map was a small and very friendly campsite, Kamp Mali. We slotted into a discount pitch between two German campers and felt quite content - especially after next door gave us a pizza after they over-ordered.

And the climbing... 40ºC+ was really a bit much for climbing. We tried valiantly, but, heat, melting, blahhhh. Spent most of the time on the beach. Nekked. Bunculuka has some nice strong routes on rock that is best described as 'bulgy', however, the hour's walk in mid-afternoon heat kinda killed our psyche. Luckily, Bunculuka is a little cove-campsite combi for those who prefer to holiday 'as God made them'*. So we spent most of the time on the beach. Nekked. The rocks underwater were sharp and bedecked with the occasional sea urchin, and our ungainly scrabble to get out of the water was watched with amusement by a non-nude walker. The other crag we tried was most remarkable for the sheer scree slope that formed the hairy approach and the one route we climbed, Laško. We duly celebrated our aescent, and perilous descent, with a 'Laško' pivo (beeeeeeer!).

In the throws of a rough climbing trip it's a bit of a treat to have a trashy beachside resort 'holiday'. Can't imagine a better way to round it all off than a sweaty drive off the island and up through Croatia, only to end up at the Slovenian service station. AGAIN!

* More like 'as God shaved them'. There didn't appear to be anything resembling 'natural' about the amount of pubic hair on the patrons of said 'naturist' resort.