Pag - Rijeka

I caught a bus from Pag headed to Rijeka. While on the bus still on Pag island I noticed a huge number of stone fences and started thinking about these fences or wall. I have no idea what these are for since there does not seem to be any livestock and they don't seem to farming in the area with the fences/walls. If the stones are from the area that they were farming and it was just clearing the stone they carried them a long ways and it seemed to me there were not many fences where they are farming. I was thinking it would take years to build one of these fences that was 500 yards by 500 yards and there were 1000s of these types of fences and still no shortage of rocks in between the fences. This is just one of the many questions I come up when I travel and don't know who to ask.

The bus went on a ferry to go to the mainland on the northern end of Pag island and I took a couple of pictures so you can see the barren Pag.


Pag Island from the Ferry

The land on the mainland after Pag was a really striking it was rocky mountains that went down to the sea. I took a couple of pictures from the bus and the following is one but bus pictures never seem that great.


Picture from the bus.

The rocky mountains running down to the sea seemed to run until we hit the town of Senj and after that the mountain seemed a lot more gentle. The buss passed Rab and Krk islands and looking from the bus Rab appeared a lot like Pag rocky and barren. Krk appeared to have a lot more green.

After arriving in Rijeka I went on to Lovran and found a room. Lovran is a small town about 20 kilometers from Rijeka across the water. The buildings in Rijeka and all along the coast to Lovran seem to be different than what I have been seeing along the coast of Croatia. The buildings are more like buildings in Zagreb and Budapest. They are grand buildings with large bricks or blocks and have a lot of figures build into the building. Sometimes the figures appear to be holding up a part of the building.

The following day I caught a local bus into Rijeka and saw most of the city sights except for the Trsat Castle and Church because the castle was closed on Mondays. I visited the Naval & Historical Museum or at least I am pretty sure that was what it was. There did not seem to be a lot to see and I seemed to surprise the lady at the entrance. She had to check on something before letting me in and when I tried to buy a ticket it turned out it was free. There were a few ship models on the ground floor and nothing that seemed to have any naval of history theme on the other floor. The best part of going in was seeing the building. The rooms were grand with load of marble and huge amounts of space. My travel guide said it was once the Governor's Palace. It felt strange to walk around since I was the only one in these rooms other than a cleaning lady and the way I was greeted when I first came in but I enjoyed looking around.


Naval & Historical Museum

For some reason I was not in a great mood at all this day and was not in the right frame of mind for public transport. I took the local public bus back from Rijeka towards Lovran going through Opatija on the way. Public busses should have big windows that open. The bus was crowed really hot and there was no moving at all. I'm also sure that the people around me would say that it stank. Sorry but when it is a hot and crowed place I sweat. I was also not happy that the bus seemed to be used as some sort of school bus with loads of teenagers. Not really the type of people I should be around when I am in a pissy mood. It was not helpful that the teenagers were having what seemed to be a battle of music. One group was playing really bad techno type music with whistles and buzzers and the other playing what I would call Celine Dion sings in Croatian. I had planned on walking around Opatija after Rijeka but being a bad mood had just decide to just go back to my room and take a nap. The bus stopped in Opatija and the bus emptied all the teenagers out. Yeah!! Don't speak to soon, as soon as they were all out about the same number plus 50% more got on. I got out at the next stop. I decided it would be better to walk the remain 7K back to Lovran.

I made a good choice with walking. The walk along the water was really nice and the long walk seemed to really improve my mood. Once I made it back my landlady had left me cherries in my room from their tree. The cherries were really great.



Shoreline that I walked.