Croatia: Spellbinding. Intoxicating. Hysteria-inducing.

In September, I went on holiday with my friend Daisy. It was a fun trip, so I thought you might like to hear the highlights. I’ve been trying to write the opening paragraph. My notes read as follows:

Punched in neck. Larry Grayson. Wine under fluorescent strip-lighting. Leaky shampoo.

Hmm. I’m suddenly concerned that the trip might have been more traumatic than I recall. Especially given that all this happened before the plane took off.

The plan had been simple. Take backpacks to show everyone how young and intrepid we are. Get to the airport nice and early to smugly enjoy over-priced pre-holiday we-deserve-this drinks.

The reality had not quite lived up to this. During their affectionate farewell at the train station, Daisy’s boyfriend somehow punched her in the neck. The check-in man had inexplicably felt the need to say, ‘Shut that door,’ a reference both Daisy and I were mortified to be old enough to recognise. The ridiculous queues at both Security and the Terminal 2 bar were so upsetting we ended up knocking back vile white wine under the oppressive glare of canteen lighting at the airport equivalent of a truck-stop. And the less said about the toiletry explosion in my luggage the better.

Not the most auspicious of beginnings to our adventure. Positively rocky, you might say. Don’t worry; it picks up later on.

We started with a few days on Korčula, a beautifully picturesque island off the Dalmatian coast, followed by a 3-night sojourn in Dubrovnik. Let’s start with Korčula. First, the history. Marco Polo might have come from there. Well, he definitely visited once, and there is a family named Polo who have lived there for years. And apparently, that's proof enough.

And now the culture. Korčula Old Town is a mini-Dubrovnik. We wandered the narrow streets, marvelling at the stunning buildings of butter-coloured stone. We swam in the clear calm waters of the Adriatic. One evening, we climbed up an erstwhile wartime lookout tower that now serves great cocktails. Oh, and then Daisy fell off a commemorative cannon.

The next day we got caught in an almighty downpour over lunch. Naturally, we did what any self-respecting Brits would do, pretended it wasn’t raining and carried on eating. It’s a shame we didn’t notice our guidebook swimming in a nearby puddle. The pristine guidebook Daisy had been lent by a kindly old professor colleague. I can only imagine his pained wince when she returned it to him.

And then on to Dubrovnik. Ah, Dubrovnik. If you haven’t been, go. It’s great. There is seafood. There were peacocks. Ice-creams are apparently bigger there than anywhere else. In the evenings, live music plays in the square, inspiring couples to spontaneously begin dancing. One night we were taking a turn around the port and were delighted to hear some kind of male-voice choir taking advantage of the acoustics inside an old stone bastion to sing Croatian folk songs. We rounded the corner to find the a capella group was made up of youths in hoodies, bewitching an audience of middle-aged tourists. A magical moment.

And that’s the thing. Croatia was full of incredible enchanting moments. We were sipping prosecco one afternoon at a bar ingeniously carved into the rocky walls of the city, taking in the sunset and watching dolphins plashing in the sea below. Daisy was so overwhelmed she proposed to me. Well someone should, she said. It feels like the thing to do.

It was an idyllic week, albeit one that occasionally seemed to be masquerading as a farcical comedy of errors. I leave you with the final episode of our adventure. We called on the owner of our rented apartment to return the key. A mysterious character, she seemed to spend her days chain-smoking, incessantly laundering towels and buying up Smurfs 2 merchandise for her grandchildren. Unexpectedly, she invited us in to try a cake she had made.

Ooh, what kind? asked Daisy, politely. You will see, she muttered darkly. And see we did. It was rum cake. Or Rhum Cake, as I prefer to imagine it spelled in Croatian. And more rum than cake, if you ask me. British to the end, Daisy and I both studiously powered our way through the rum-soaked confection that resembled flammable custard more than anything else. And then happily tripped off to catch the bus to the airport, slightly drunk and inadvertently interrupting someone’s wedding photographs on the way. Sounds about right.

Panda Down Unda

G’day readers!

I have recently returned from being on HOLIDAY. A full-on actual far-away TRIP. A travelling ADVENTURE, you might say. To a whole other HEMISPHERE. Australia, no less. Please bear in mind that I haven’t been away from England for more than 3 days since 2006. So you’ll forgive me for being a little over-excited about the whole thing.

My brother lives in Sydney, and I went over for a couple of weeks to see what all the fuss is about. We also did a bit of a road-trip, from Cairns (you know, where Kate Ramsay in Neighbours went for an early-mid-life-crisis last year) to Brisbane (you know, where Scott and Charlene in Neighbours moved to circa 1989).

Now, don’t worry. This isn’t going to be one of those poetic travel-guide pieces, full of descriptions of sunsets and fauna and boomerangs and whatnot. You know the sort of thing. Oh the bridge, oh the clown-fish, oh the creeks, oh the Opera House, oh the koalas, oh the dingoes, etc etc.

Instead, I thought you’d much rather hear about a few of the choice characters I encountered, the people who splashed local colour into my very own mental scrap-book of Australian memories.

Yes, here for your reading pleasure, I present my run-down of Australian Oddballs and Weirdos. Enjoy…

1. Crazy Tropical Fruit Man. Whilst I was having lunch at the Daintree Tea Room Restaurant, where you get to eat outside in an actual bloody rainforest, the manager came over looking somewhat worried. ‘I hope it won’t be a problem, but I’m just about to give these people a talk about tropical fruit.’ Ah, I thought, that explains the table of massive weird fruit in the middle of the dining-area. ‘Er, no, of course not, go ahead,’ I said politely. I glanced over to the table he had indicated, and saw a group of slightly puzzled faces eyeing him warily. They didn’t appear particularly pleased at the prospect of their Exotic Fruit seminar, or indeed to have been expecting it at all. ‘Does everyone have to have one?’ I asked my brother, mildly panicked. We didn’t hang around to find out.

2. Small Urinating Child. During our foray into the rainforest, we visited Bruce Belcher’s Daintree River Crocodile Cruises (well, who wouldn’t?) to spend an hour on said river in search of said crocodiles. At one point, we were instructed by our guide to stare desperately into a clump of bushes to see ‘Scarface’, a big scary male crocodile. The poor little 2-year old girl with the couple next to us freaked out completely when all the grown-ups fell into a hushed silence and promptly started weeing. Her Mum whisked her up as though about to hold her over the side of the boat, realised that could be considered bad parenting in a you-tried-to-feed-me-to-a-crocodile kind of a way, and let her finish her wee on the floor of the boat instead. We then all spent the rest of the trip avoiding piss-rivulets. Nice.

3. Crazy Drunk Wallaby Man. Magnetic Island is a beautiful tranquil place, a peaceful haven where you can really get away from it all. It’s also inhabited by a whole host of completely mental people. Including the lunatic who lives amongst wallabies, feeding them, talking to them, generally living at one with them. I’m not sure if he thinks he is a wallaby, or some kind of King of the Wallabies or maybe he has appointed himself Official Guardian and Overseer of All Things Wallaby.

4. Witch. Mid-road-trip, we rocked up one day as darkness fell at a rough-looking truckers’ motel in the middle of nowhere, hoping for a room. It was like Bethlehem, but with portacabins. As we parked up, next to the burned-out relics of old trucks and the vicious-looking roaming herd of wild turkeys, we seriously considered abandoning the idea. Especially when the proprietor-lady turned out to look exactlylike the witch from Simon and the Witch. And the first words out of her mouth were ‘Oy, you!’ (although to be fair, my brother had just barged into her laundry-room). However, as luck would have it, it turned out to be brilliant. Mostly because the steaks they served in the restaurant were bigger than my head.

5. Porridge-Debate Ladies. On the final day of my trip, I was sitting on the Sydney-Manly Ferry, eavesdropping to the conversation going on behind me. In which 2 older ladies were furiously debating how you make porridge. First, they argued about oat-milk-water ratios. Then there was a dramatic hob vs. microwave interlude. And then it emerged that Older Lady #1 makes her porridge the night before and then reheats it on the hob the next morning. Which surely just means you end up with one congealed oaty lump. Older Lady #2 was completely aghast (as was I, come to that). The only thing they could agree on was that you should buy the cheapest oats available. As Older Lady #1 put it, oats is oats.

Well, she’s right. They are.