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| In case you thought you were somewhere else... |
Today, with Lucy's hives under control and my headache finally gone, we got an early start with our rental car and headed to the Brijuni Island National Park. It's a 90 minute drive to Fazana (close to the bottom tip of Istria on the Italy side), then a 20 minute passenger ferry. One isn't allowed to go to the island without either a hotel booking or an excursion ticket which includes both your ferry ride and a group tour on a bus, very convincingly made up to look like a little train. We were on the first ferry of the day, along with several European golfers wearing very loud plaid pants and huge rolling golf club case contraptions. There were no other tourists, however, because the tourist boat and the mandatory guided tour wouldn't leave until 11:30, and we wanted to be able to explore some of the island independently, at our own 3 kid pace. Overall, the extra time we had turned out brilliantly. We had the run of the island, except that we were walking all over this 2km square island with five packs of peanuts, a Milka bar, a banana with a large bruise, and two bottles of water from 9:00AM- 3PM.
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| On the ferry to Brijuni |
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| Jellyfish kebab |
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| Tito's swamp viewing hut |
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| The most recently dead sea urchin |
We were walking so much we hardly noticed we were starving to death. That's because the island's history is fascinating. Besides the 400 dinosaur prints (we managed only to see one well-labeled print on the pier), the island has Roman ruins, gorgeous inlets and beaches (the kids were beside themselves when they found three perfect sea urchin shells), a Josef Broz Tito museum featuring a lot of taxidermy on the first floor and on the second floor, a lot of pictures of Tito doing his work and hobnobbing with the rich, famous, or head of state. It's got an ethnographic museum, a chapel from the 15th century, research gardens, a 1,600 year old olive tree, paths carved through limestone quarries (much of which became famous buildings in Venice), a smattering of crumbling villas and dated hotels, a sort of safari/zoo area, a parrot named Koki trained to speak by Tito himself (but he was sadly for the kids still in his winter residence), a large golf course (when it was built, it was the largest in Europe), a souvenir shop, and a coffee shop where the closest thing to food was a bowl of sugar packets. But no restaurants.
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| In front of the 1,600 year old olive tree |
Beside all this, Brijuni was Tito's private island residence six months of every year for about 30 years. It's where he conducted the business of the non-aligned movement, it's where he hosted rich and famous people (Sophia Lauren, Queen Elizabeth, Josephine Baker, Elizabeth Taylor, Eleanor Roosevelt, etc), it's where he had his own little disneyland/horticultural utopia with the exotic flora and fauna that world leaders brought to him when they visited.
Before Tito's era, the island was a malarial swamp. In the late 19th century, a rich Austrian industrialist named Paul Kupelwieser recognized the beauty of the area and bought the islands with the intention to turn it into an aristocratic playground. He hired a guy to find a cure for the malaria (that guy -- Robert Koch -- did get rid of the malaria on the island and later got the Nobel Prize for his research into tuberculosis), and Kupelwieser took out all the swamps but one so we would know what the place looked like before being gentrified. In that one remaining swamp, we sat in an adorable thatched hut that Tito used for viewing the turtles and ducks he apparently loved, but we would have missed it had we only taken the group tour.
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| A small part of the Roman villa |
The islands have been inhabited since prehistoric times, and we got to walk around the remains of a Roman villa (we would have only seen this from the tourist train on the group tour, so this was another benefit of going early). While walking around the ruins, we encountered several green salamander/lizard things. Jonah and Lucy in particular were completely in awe of these little reptiles. They asked me if they could get a pet salamander instead of a dog. Interesting! Lizard. Dog. Lizard. Dog. They have already named her Lizzie. Thanks, Brijuni! Now I don't have to get a dog and a new vacuum cleaner.
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| The Tour Bus Train Caboose |
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| Lanka, a gift to Tito from Indira Ghandi |
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| See explanatory note below |
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| See Tito photo from same exhibit |
So that's a lot about the island. We were so exhausted by our morning perambulations that we were happy to meet up with our 11:45AM tour group at the ferry and climb into the tourist bus made up to look like a train. It took us to a lot of the places we had walked to, but several that we hadn't. In particular, the kids loved seeing the safari which had descendants of all the exotic animals that had been gifted to Tito, plus a lot of endangered Istrian animals like oxen and a special breed of sheep. When the formal tour was over, we stopped for coffee and hot chocolate at the bar, probably putting in more sugar packets than we needed to, and were on the 3:00 ferry home with our tour group and a lot of windblown golfers.
