Blog One: Rovinj, Croatia

Rovinj, Croatia [12-20 September]

Our four stage journey started at Seton Place at 07:15am, took us Ryanair to Brussels, then on to Pula, car transfer from Pula to Rovinj, and finally boat to the Island Hotel Katarina, where we arrive about 11:00pm.

According to a large sign in the dining room, Island Katarina Hotel identifies as the second best hotel in Rovinj. Presumably it reckoned it was the best, until its futuristic, super environmentally friendly, trendy sister hotel, the Grand Park opened quite recently across on the mainland. Indeed it was a TV series on great hotels, in which the Grand Park and Rovinj itself featured, which first put Rovinj on our radar.

We waste an hour or so of our first morning waiting for the safe in our room to be repaired – essential to store our laptops and my camera and lenses securely. The technician comes along with his “stupid tourists” face on and instructs me to watch as he demonstrates how to operate the electronic locking and opening system. I look over his shoulder as he fails to get it to work. He eventually leaves and promises to bring a new safe. After he has fitted that one, we fill it and successfully lock it. I then realise that he hasn’t bolted the safe to the wardrobe shelf, so it can just be lifted out and removed, to open later at one’s leisure. We are about to take this up with Reception when we realise that bolting the new safe to the shelf would be pointless, as the small shelf itself lifts easily out of the wardrobe, with the safe on top. We give up at that point.

The weather forecast is decidedly depressing for pretty much our whole time here, but happily it’s wrong. Violent thunderstorms during the night sandwich a single day on which it is too rainy and windy to go anywhere outside. Happily (for me) that coincides with Hibs v Aberdeen on Hibs TV, so I don’t miss an enjoyable win.

Other days are all lovely and sunny, which allows us to laze about and swim in the unusual and huge hotel pool – a picture of faded elegance rather than a shiny modern space – and to explore the hugely picturesque Old Town across the water.

The hotel owns the whole island, which has areas of pebbly beach, pine forest and paved walks as well as the classy Batimar snack bar down by the waterfront. We realise that the reason Batimar is so good is that the sunbathing area, with the very posh loungers beside it, accommodates well-heeled clients from the Grand Park, who pay to be ferried over in a slick launch. They can then lounge, drink and eat whilst staring back across the bay at their own grand hotel, which doesn’t have a similar waterfront area. Everyone to their own, I guess.

Our first foray into Rovinj in the evening sees us strike lucky. We decide to be smart and circumnavigate the queue outside the Stella di Mare restaurant, by sitting in the bar next door and asking a friendly waiter to tell us when a table for two might become free. As he is just about to do so, the owner of the restaurant appears and gives the waiter a bit of a telling off for accommodating us. He then realises we have probably heard that so he comes across to the bar, takes Fiona by the hand, and leads her through the whole restaurant to the best table in the place, down by the floodlit waterside. I follow in madam’s wake and suggest that the owner might like to keep Fiona, in return for a bottle of his best Merlot and some of his delicious looking panacotta. He fails to respond. Well, I have to admit, the panacotta is really excellent.

The food, the place and the welcome are so good that we return more than once during our eight day stay. One of the friendly waiters tells us that in a previous storm, two tables were swept into the water. He and a colleague jumped in to retrieve them, and he was promptly carried away by the waves. Despite that fact that he says he is a rudimentary swimmer, he washed up right across the bay on Katarina Island, where our hotel is, and had to spend the night on a bench on the small pier. A small embelishment perhaps, but a good story all the same.

On one evening where thunderstorms are consistently predicted and the wind blows up a choppy crossing to the town, we decide to stay on the island and sample the hotel’s dinner buffet. Fiona is immediately scandalised by the tiny measure in her glass of red wine, rapidly followed by the pedestrian nature of the food and the day-glo ice cream. The huge dining room is sparsely populated – now we know why.

She appears close to exploding and witheringly declares the cheese to be “pointless”. Her mood is not improved by her having added to her dental woes by chipping a tooth on a sherbet fruit earlier. Naturally the thunderstorm fails to materialise. She declares the evening “a waste of calories” and we retire to our room. Even if Adriatic waves are collosal and lifeboats have been deployed, we’ll be taking the boat to town for subsequent dinners.

We explore the Old Town by climbing up the winding, impressively cobbled narrow streets until we reach the large church at the top. Its interior is hugely ornate and very muggy, so we don’t hang about indoors too long – there is a good breeze which takes the edge off the heat and humidity. Rovinj strikes us as being a wee bit like Mykonos Town a few decades ago – very quaint streets, expensive shops, and every available space being converted into a bar or a restaurant. It is still lovely and laid back however, with a wide range of ages and styles of tourist winding their ways about.

Other than eating and drinking, and climbing up to the church, there’s not a whole lot to do in the town, and we take a long boat trip up to the Lim Fjord, which is a pretty stretch of green/blue water passing between attractively wooded banks. It seems to be a popular and highly touted trip, but if you’ve been to Norway, or even our own North of Scotland, it may seem a little unspectacular. It’s a nice chilled way to spend an afternoon, however, with friendly staff dispensing copious free drinks along the way.

In the middle of our eight day stay, the temperature drops overnight from a hot and muggy 29 degrees to a cool and breezy 13. The relaxed time we’ve been having is impinged on somewhat by the need to each do a Covid test, supervised via video link, and get a certificate issued to us, as part of the requirements to board our cruise in Trieste in a couple of days.

Although we have been careful – if we don’t get on the ship, we have an eleven day hole in the middle of our trip – it is a tense half hour until both tests come up negative and we are emailed our certificates for embarkation!

My dozen favourite images from our stay in Rovinj are included in the gallery below. Click on a thumbnail to see a bigger image. If you’re using a mobile phone, turn your screen sideways to see the bigger image to best effect.

Image Gallery