Croatia - A Nothing Much Week

Omis. Apparently it used to be a pirate town. It’s nowhere near as exciting as that these days, but it’s still a nice enough spot to spend a few days of your holiday. The only place I have seen pirates is the numerous curio shops, all trying to sell t-shirts sporting a very Calvinesque pirate boy and an exhortation to come over to the dark side. Or something like that. Maybe it’s something about the Dark Rider. I’ve been tempted by the t-shirts. I dare say that if I had more than a 15kg baggage limit on Ryanair for my next flight, and didn’t have to lug all my stuff around on my back, I might have fallen prey to the tourist bug and bought a pirate shirt.

Omis has a small fort. I visited it for the view across the town:

The fort of Omis, just about invisible against the mountain:

Side view of the fort:

The fort is small but impressively situated.
It was built on a knife edge ridge, which makes it extremely difficult to attack.

We’ve been here for a week. The camping is cheap so it’s a nice break for our wallets. I have discovered that tinned lentils are actually quite tasty and they’re also nice and cheap. My other cheap lunch is tomato sandwiches. Bead, butter, slices of tomato and a sprinkling of salt. (Thanks for that idea, Grampa!) And I have discovered a reasonable take away joint where the cevapi (cevapcici on a bun, with salads and sauces – kind of like a Croatian schwarma only tastier) is only 15 Kuna. That’s about R21. Not too shabby for supper. N has discovered the pizza place next door to the cevapi place. It sells big pieces of tasty pizza for 10 Kuna (approx R15.) He is now constantly torn between cevapi and pizza. So Omis has been relatively good for our finances.

We haven’t bothered with the beach here. We were drawn by the climbing. There are a couple of crags very close to town (5 minutes walk, on the flat, from our campsite) with easy climbs.

View of the main crag from the town:

We were hampered in our climbing plans by my wicked cold. I spent a few rather miserable and snuffly days feeling weak and unwilling to do much. After that we ventured to the crags once or twice.

The main crag:

This is the first time I’ve climbed since The Ankle Incident. I can’t use it at any funny angles. I can’t stretch it. I can’t smear. I’m working a lot harder to get up much easier climbs than I used to. And I absolutely cannot afford to fall on it. So it’s top roping only for me. It is, none the less, truly nerve wracking.

Me teetering nervously about on a fairly easy climb:

N has to climb a bunch of tediously easy stuff to set up the top rope for me and then it takes me an age to squeak and yelp my way up. I really shouldn’t be climbing at all on this ankle. Because if I do fall on it again, I am going to make it a hundred times worse and that will be it for climbing for a few months. Eek. But that said, I think its doing me good to climb. It’s working the ankle in ways that it otherwise would not be worked – at all sorts of funny angles, and I can feel it strengthening up a bit. So that, at least, is positive!

Contemplating life at the end of a top rope:

The other thing that has put a bit of a spanner in our works is the wind. Over the last 4 days the wind has come up in a big way. We’re hoping this is just a localized thing and it will let up once we leave Omis. No wonder tourist season ends at the end of August! The tent has taken a serious weathering. The three guys next to us did not fare as well. Their tents couldn’t cope and kept capsizing. They had to move to a more sheltered area of the campsite.

Yesterday we went climbing despite the wind. We got to the main wall and found a bunch of other people. We weren’t feeling very sociable, so we carried on to the crag around the corner. We were slightly more in the wind there but preferred the wind to the crowds.

The view from the less crowded crag:

We climbed a couple of routes which turned out to be harder than we (I) really wanted. I was climbing the third route of the day in the howling wind (hair slapping me in the face, chalkbag being sucked dry, trying not to get blown off my holds) when there was a loud crash and thud. N bolted towards the cliff and I squooshed myself as close to the rock as possible. The wind had blown a rock off the cliff, which crashed through the tree next to us, thudded onto the ground and rolled into the road. That was it for the day. It was just way too close. I finished the route, eyeing the sky above me suspiciously, and we packed up and left.

It has been a bit of an unexciting week, hence the lack of blogging. The camp site is fine. The town is fine. The climbing is ok but hardly mind-blowing. We’ve just kind of muddled about not doing much at all. I think it would have been different if I didn’t have a gimpy foot and a wicked cold. N has done a lot of work. I’ve finally done my tax. A million curses on poxy SARS. May the fleas of a thousand camels, blah blah. I SO resent giving them my money. I’ve put a few photos on Face Book. The highlight of the week has definitely been my wifi discovery. I discovered a spot where the wifi is free. N and I have been heading off there religiously for the last couple of days to upload photos and download some large files. We will be heading off there very soon in order to post this and retrieve our email.

"Borrowing" the internet:

We leave Omis in a day or so. The plan is to climb tomorrow morning. Hopefully the wind will be somewhat less vicious and we won’t have rocks blown onto our heads. We don’t know exactly where we’re going when we leave here. Perhaps to the Zadar region and then we’ll look for camping near the Paklenica national park, where is rumoured to be some of the finest climbing in Europe. Such fine climbing will be a bit wasted on gimpy here, but I’m sure there will be some easier stuff that I can use to strengthen up the foot a bit more.

Perhaps I have been slightly unenthusiatic about Omis. Let me not totally mislead you. There are some pretty places here. The port was lovely at sunset: