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outrageous than anything else , with an automatic , sliding glass door and a weird , casino-like ceiling ; I imagined some bijou wedding chapel in Las Vegas .
The sky was grey again and it had started drizzling by 8am that morning , third day on the road . I went south , over the hills towards Rijeka , on the Adriatic coast . The landscape reminded me of some places in Wales with all the little forested hills and river valleys , the weather probably helped there , but it was all change once I dropped down into Croatia at the Adriatic .
It was still raining on and off , down at the coast . All the land was high up above the cliffs and scrubby hills , but it was definitely a Mediterranean landscape at last ; the air was quite warm , around eighteen or nineteen degrees and I took a detour right through to Rijeka ’ s central waterfront . The old buildings were quite Italian in style and the newer blocks still looked reasonably neat . This was a bit of nostalgia for me as I ’ d been this way several times during the mid-nineties , when I drove in humanitarian aid convoys , and I wanted to see how the recovery , after the wars , looked .
Once I ’ d found the old Adriatic Highway , I was able to follow it halfway down the coast to the turn off for Zadar . This really is a great road ; you must start from high up , and even in the cloud and drizzle the views of the coast and offshore islands are inspiring .
After quite some distance the route dropped right down to the sea and ran along the coastal strip , where there were lots of little stone houses in groups of fours or fives , each with its own private jetty or mini stone harbour for a small boat - all the buildings were either new or beautifully restored .
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