Croatian Island of Mljet
The Croatian Island of Mljet was our home for almost a week. We picked this island to visit because it is one of the less developed islands along the Croatian coast. 23 miles long, 2 miles wide, about 1000 residents, maybe a dozen little villages, only one hotel, one national park.
We picked a very secluded village to be our home base. Okuklje. Don’t ask us how to pronounce it. We settled on ‘O kook le shoe’. It would be harder to get more isolated.
Inquiring with the boys our 6 day stay here has been their favorite. For me it sort of embodies several of the main themes or reasons for why we wanted to take this trip. Wanting to find someplace off the beaten path, exotic but still with a market for bread, salami and Pringles, totally quiet and beautiful where our main activity is right close to home. In this case the main activity for our home in Okuklje was our personal seaside ‘dock’ where the boys fished and swam pretty much all day.
We were able to walk down just one flight of stairs to go fishing. While we slept in the boys would go down to the water in the morning to fish with a few scraps of bread or a little left over squid from dinner the night before. It was nice.
We put together a long video of our stay here to show to Elliot’s third grade class. We’ve been checking in with them a few times a week… our adventursome stay here merited a longer video. You can watch it if you want to see a bunch of our adventures or read on and skip the video!
Shortly after our arrival we dispatched the boys to meet and greet a few of the more curious locals. Elliot especially is a great ambassador. It seemed that the main tourist season is just about to kick off. You could sort of feel the tension building for the residents… we might have been among the first outsiders to invade their tranquil harbor. The village small as it is has 4 restaurants. They cater to sailboats and yachts that moor in the protected harbor the night. The restaurants have little spots where boats can dock… each boat that arrives is greeted by a waving restaurant employee, they try to entice each boat to choose them. Competition is fierce, especially early in the season when there are fewer boats each night.
The house right next to ours turns out has a pizza joint on the first floor. We watched each day as the people who lived above on the shop on the second floor made preparations for the shop to open up! We were excited. I sent the boys to ask the owner when he was planning to open. Each day the answer was always a couple days… we were bummed that they didn’t open before we left.
However, the owner of the place did show us how to get the best fishing bait yet! (Spoiler alert we still didn’t catch anything)
So, the bait is… sea cucumber guts! Seriously. You swim out and catch (elliot grabbed with his bare hand) one of the plentiful sea cucumbers. We watched Ivan do this… you then slice the thing length wise and then scrape out the guts with a spoon! The boys were thrilled. I’m sorry I don’t have a picture of this but watch the video for gory details.
On Mljet you need wheels. We rented a old VW Golf cabriolet. It was awesome, zippy, dinged up and had 140,000 km on it.
We day tripped to the Mljet National Park one day. It was about a one hour drive on a super windy road… The highlight of the park are two small ‘lakes’ that are connected to the sea by a narrow channel… so they are still salty. The are connected by a narrow channel that you can swim thru. If you hit the channel at the right time the tide is so strong as to create a current that sweeps you thru like a lazy river.
In the middle of the bigger of these little lakes is an island and in case you didn’t know, in Europe when they have a small island on a picturesque lake on it goes a church, obvi.
We rented bikes and peddled around the lakes. Very nice, untill the end when Elliot bit it 1km from the end. In what can only be described as a sympathy crash Lidia also wiped out at the same time… it was a bummer end to a fun day.
Most of the beaches in Croatia are rocky not sandy. In fact we got a good tip that we’re guessing really saved us some grief. My cousin Petr’s wife Julia said we absolutely couldn’t go swimming unless we had these special water shoes. As we learned they save your feet from getting all cut up on the rocks and more importantly, protect you in case you step on a sea urchin. Those spiny things are everywhere!
We spent a couple days lovely days on the island’s only sandy beach. You can rent chairs and a shady cabana. They boys played for hours in the calm sea. Searching for sea life and rolling around in the sand.
We met some friendly Brits who moved in a few doors down from us. They had a boy about Jonah’s age and a younger and older daughter. The boys hungry for a playmate glommed on to Simon who was happy to join in some America style roughhousing. Lidia and I, hungry for adult conversation invited the mom (Vicki) and dad (Ben) over for drinks on our patio, two nights in a row infact. It’s cool to meet cool folks in weird locations!
So there you have it… Mljet. Lovely and probably the place we’d go back to if the rest of the trip falls apart!
One hidden benefit of taking such a long trip is that you can take a chance on spending 6 nights in such a remote and unheard of place. No one with two weeks in Croatia is going to go spend half their time in Mljet. Again our good fortune to be able to be out seeing the world in this fashion is plain.
Thanks for reading! Here are a bunch of other pictures of our island say that didn’t make it into the blog!
