Wild About Croatia

Travel writer and author of My Family and Other Enemies, Mary Novakovich, explores her homeland, including the hinterland of Croatia most foreigners never visit. 

Music: © Barney and Izzi Hardy

Transcript

Peter This week, we're talking to the travel writer and author Mary Novakovich about her decades of journeys throughout the Balkans to discover the country and the people of her family's homeland.

Felice Mary, thank you very much for coming on our podcast today.

Mary Thank you for having me.

Felice You were born in Canada, but you actually wrote a book about Croatia. Can you tell us why?

Mary Well, yes, my parents were born in Croatia, and initially they came to England separately after the Second World War, and my father in the '40s and my mother in the '50s, and eventually they ended up in Canada, where I was born. But I left there decades ago, and I first went to Yugoslavia, as it was then, in 1976. And that's what kickstarted the whole travels, many decades of travels, to what is now Croatia, and also the other countries of the former Yugoslavia, Serbia and Bosnia and Montenegro.

Peter So can you give us a bit of a geography lesson first of all, because many of our viewers are in North America, and actually quite a lot of our viewers in Europe aren't quite clear where Croatia is. Just explain.

Mary You've got Italy coming out, and then right beside that, on the other side of the Adriatic is Croatia, and it's wedged in between Slovenia and then Bosnia – the other countries of the former Yugoslavia, and beneath that is eventually Albania and Greece and all that forms part of the whole Balkan Peninsula.

Peter And it was, of course, the scene of a terrible conflict in the 1990s. Can you just give us a simple version of what that war was all about? Well, not what? Who fought who?

Mary Yes, everyone fought each other and nobody came out very well. Essentially very, very briefly, if I can. President Tito, who essentially had held Yugoslavia together from 1945 until he died in 1980, after that, the foundations on which Yugoslavia were built were very flimsy, as was discovered, as it's piled up.  The economy, crashed, and everyone wanted to go their own ways. They didn't want to be tied anymore within Yugoslavia. It was first Slovenia that wanted to go, swiftly followed by Croatia, but they think they declared independence in the same day.

Essentially, they didn't want to be ruled by Serbia, and particularly by Slobodan Milosevic, who was the de facto dictator of what was slowly becoming Serbia as opposed to Yugoslavia. So they then went off and the war in Slovenia lasted eleven days. The war in Croatia, which ensued, lasted technically for four years. The problem was, is that there was a sizeable Serbian minority within Croatia, and they were very fearful because the last time Croatia was an independent state was during the Second World War, when they became a Nazi puppet fascist state.

Peter And your family was part of that minority, the Serbian in Croatia?

Mary Yes, we've been ethnic Serbs in Croatia for many generations. Several hundred years, I reckon.

Peter So having got that out of the way, I'm sure it's all clear to everybody. In 1976 your family in Canada decided to pack you off to see grandparents, I guess, or great-grandparents, and off you went.

Mary Yes. It wasn't actually grandparents or great-grandparents. It was an aunt and uncle I'd met once who had come to Toronto. I don't know who cooked up the plan to send me off to Yugoslavia for that summer, but I ended up in this small village in a region called Lika, which is the hinterland of Croatia, right in the centre, and it's known for its Pliticka Lakes National Park and as the birthplace of Nikola Tesla, the scientist, but not much else. I didn't really know anything about it, despite being brought up as a child of Lika, and that had always been part of our identity. But I hadn't actually been there, and I didn't realise quite how rural and rustic it was until I ended up in this tiny village in the mountains in the middle of nowhere.

Peter And did you speak the language?

Mary After a fashion...I thought I had. My cradle tongue was Serbian and didn't really speak English on a full time basis until I was in school, but I hadn't realised how much English had crept into my Serbian until I was there, and realised I couldn't understand my aunt and uncle. They couldn't understand me. Even my grandmother, who ostensibly didn't speak English, spoke a lot more than she let on and understood a hell of a lot more than she let on.

So I had a terrible time. I was lonesome, I was homesick, I was in a place that was just so rustic that I was thanking God every day that we had the only house in the village for miles around that actually had an indoor toilet, which was quite an important thing. But eventually the fog lifted and I was able to understand – children's brains are like sponges, they can pick up languages so quickly. I then repicked up Serbian and I was thinking and dreaming in Serbian by the end of the summer.

Felice How long were you there for that time?

Mary A couple of months in July and August. So it was. It was a good amount of time.

Peter So then you went away again and you went back to Canada. And then the family moved to England?

Mary No, I did individually.

Peter You moved to England. Because you don't have a trace of a Canadian accent.

Mary Well, it's been about 35 years, so it's just time really.

Felice Can you tell us about the book? Tell it as though because we've both read it, but tell it very briefly to people who haven't read it and might like to.

Mary I've set out to explore my family history in the region of Lika, and it was always over a period of travel, starting in 1976 with that summer. Then I went back to Lika for the first time in 2004, and I was doing a walking holiday with my mother. I was doing an article for the Telegraph. In each subsequent chapter was another one of my travels in Lika.

The following time was 2009. I did an extended road trip with my mother, which ended up being extremely bad tempered and quite tumultuous and quite traumatic in many ways, and then subsequent travels to Lika with my husband, which were much more relaxed and enjoyable.

But each trip I was discovering more of my family's region, and I was revisiting Lika. I was getting more and more stuck into the culture, into the landscapes, into the food, getting to know the stories of my family, friends and neighbours and relations and seeing how the region was changing over the years, and not always for the better. Because people, families splinter, people emigrate, people die off, which a lot of them had done over the years. But each time I'd gone back, I either top to tailed it with travels in the region. So, for example, I would be going to Lika via Sarajevo, Bosnia, or I'd be going via Ljubljana in Slovenia, and I'd be tacking on travels in other parts of Croatia, going down to the coast a few times around Zadar, the lovely island of Krk.

So it gives a snapshot of my travels within the region, within Croatia and neighbouring countries, all at the same time, because each time I was there I managed to combine it with a lot of work trips, because that was one way of being able to travel. So I'd be doing a city guide, for example, to Ljubljana and then get a car and then go down to Lika, and that sort of thing.

Peter So I guess it was very much a journey of self-discovery, of finding out who you were, where you'd come from, which we all need to do.

Mary It was exactly that. It was reiterating what I'd known and rediscovering, and discovering new things. Because each time I'd gone back, I was older and I was a different person in a lot of ways. I reacted to things differently. Something as basic as a food. When I was there as a child, I was a terribly spoilt brat, and I wouldn't eat half the stuff that was being given to me. And the only time I'd gone to what was then Yugoslavia where it took me a while to get used to the food. It was different from the version of it that my mother and my grandmother were making. It had mutated somewhat after decades of being away from Yugoslavia, but that was the only time.

After that I just plunged into the into the food. I love the cuisine. I love finding out more dishes and also being in a place where everything was growing around you. Everything's organic, everyone's got huge gardens and orchards and you just go – there's a trout farm two seconds away from my aunt and uncle's house – you just go and get your lunch and pick stuff off the tree and foraging. The older I got, the more I really, really enjoyed doing that sort of thing.

Felice When did you start planning your book? When did you think of the idea?

Mary Well, it was the first, the one very long section from the 2009 trip with my mother, the terribly bad tempered road trip. When I had done that trip,  at that point I had intended to write the book based on that trip, and I'd actually written about 25,000 words, and then I realised I wouldn't have enough material.

So then we went two years later at that time with my husband, and at that point I realised there's just not enough substance to it. And then I just sat on it for ten years, and it was only when I was at a party and I met the man who then became my agent, and we were talking about my various travels to Lika, because I had at that point it was 2019, and I had just come back from Lika again.

He said, 'I think you've got enough here for a book,' which was brilliant. And then that was just months before lockdown, before Covid came...and like the rest of the population, I sat and wrote a book during Covid. During lockdown, I was writing the initial chapters and the proposal was submitted and was able to. We were able to get a contract in the end in late 2021. And then it came out in August 2022. So it was something I've been living with for fifteen years or ten years or whatever, and I was so pleased when it finally came to fruition because I had been sitting on it for such a long time.

Felice Something people often ask me, is how long did it take you to write your book? I mean, how long would you say, can you work out?

Mary Well, during Covid, a lot of publishing companies had scaled back their editorial teams hugely. So Bradt Guides, who published my book, they'd obviously like everybody else, they had a smaller team and they didn't have many big editorial windows. So when I signed my contract in December 2021, really sort of getting into January 2022, they said, 'Well, we can fit you in if you if you send us your manuscript on the 1st of April.' So that gave me three months and I had written about 25,000 words over the lockdown period and that left another nearly 50,000 words to write, so that's how long it took me. It took me three months to write 50,000 words. In addition to all my other travel writing that I do and all the other work I do.

Peter But that's certainly a short time to write so many words.

Mary I think having a deadline, I mean, you know, we're all journalists here. We know what we're like when we haven't got a deadline: absolutely rubbish. Give us a deadline and we're fine.

Peter This is absolutely true, of course, for all of us. We always leave it to the last minute. So in this case, you had the last three months, so to speak.

Mary That's right.

Felice And reading your book, I found that one of the main characters in the book is actually food.

Peter Tell us a bit about the food?

Felice I wondered whether you might think of doing a recipe book or adding recipes – if you ever thought of that?

Peter I don't think that the cuisine of Croatia is particularly well known outside Croatia.

Mary It's not, no. I have actually been able to pick up the odd Croatian book, mainly in the English language, so that I don't get anything wrong, and I have picked up a few over the years and there aren't that many really. But I wouldn't be able to write recipes; I'm not a food writer in that respect. I like writing about food, but I wouldn't be able to get measurements and whatever, and the few books that I do have cover all of Croatia. They'll cover all the food of Dalmatia, for example, or Slavonia, which is very Hungarian-slanted. Northern Croatia, which again has a lot of Austrian and Hungarian influences, and then other parts of Croatia are more Italian influences. And just anything that's along the Adriatic coast will have Mediterranean influences to it, so an awful lot of seafood.

Peter So give us an example of what were those foods that truly horrified you back in 1976?

Mary Well, I'm trying to remember now. I didn't like fish at the time. I was definitely not eating fish I wouldn't eat. I didn't actually eat fish any sort of seafood until a few months after that, and that's because my brother had sneaked it into a spring roll – some prawns.  And I didn't actually eat any proper fish for years after that, so it took me a long time to get into that.

Peter I suspect it was the sheer strangeness of being in this very strange country. And what to you, perhaps to all of us, pretty primitive circumstances. You mentioned the one indoor loo; the one indoor loo in the whole region. The whole thing was just strange.

Mary It was strange. And it was also because I'd grown up in the city, and here I was where there weren't any cities. There's not a single city in Lika. Actually, now, I think the biggest town is about 6,500. So it's cities, towns, villages, hamlets, homesteads, all that sort of thing. And, and just having that much space and having that much wilderness and huge forested mountains and lakes and rivers filled with freezing water, I discovered. And that was just very, very alien to me. I didn't grow up in a place where I was able to escape to the country. I didn't have any of that. So that was all daunting in a lot of ways. Then I got used to it, as kids do. Throw them any way and they'll get used to it.

Felice I really like the part in your book where you got lost and you say, 'I could have done with one of those trusty sickles,' and you only had a Swiss Army knife. So that was quite exciting. Any other things go wrong?

Mary Well, yes. There was one time when I was there as a kid because I was such a wuss and quite feeble and, you know, just trying to wade through the river Una, which was a beautiful, beautiful river. But it's all, you know, huge boulders and rocks and pebbles. And I had very sensitive feet because I didn't grow up swimming in pebbly beaches like all my cousins did in Lika. So just even crossing the river, my feet were freezing and I was falling off the rocks. And finally one of my neighbours who was my age. She was eleven at the time and but tiny girl, she actually carried me across the river because I was such a feeble, pathetic little creature. It was like, oh my God, I can't do this. He couldn't cross otherwise, so she actually carried me, which the family still hasn't let me forget after all these decades.

Peter I think you had quite a scary experience when you took the wrong road later on with your husband?

Mary That was really quite frightening. We were driving from Sarajevo to Lika and this is 2013. So we didn't have Google Maps. We didn't really have Google Maps for Bosnia, even now. There's others now, but there wasn't then. We had printed out various directions, none of them transpired with what was actually the reality. We ended up on a road that was going up a mountain, because the other side supposedly was going to be a border crossing, and the road just ran out. There was nothing there: not paved, no asphalt, no nothing, not even a dirt track. It just stopped. And we were halfway up a mountain, a storm was brewing, there was nobody else around for miles. We didn't know where the road was supposed to be.

My husband did a very careful, 15-point turn on this really narrow little mountain road to get back down again. We still didn't know where we were going and the heavens had opened. The thing about that journey is that we were driving through a lot of the villages that were completely destroyed during the Bosnian War, and that was very disturbing to see, because even though the war had finished eight years previously and it was still a lot of bombed out villages, just completely abandoned, burnt-out tanks, terrible, terrible graffiti everywhere and completely pelting with rain.

It really was scary. We were thinking, there's no one around for miles. Finally we managed to get to the road that we were supposed to get on to, and ended up in a town where we finally found a town and went into the cafe. 'Where's the border? Are we going the right direction?'  'Yes, carry on going. You'll get here.' It ended up being the border that we didn't want because we thought there was a closer one.

We finally get to my uncle's and he said, 'Oh no. That other border that's been closed years ago because people were smuggling, and the one you needed to go through was the one that you did go through – a town called Knin.'

So that was everything about it. Just the worry of being somewhere in the middle of nowhere with no phone signal, and a rental car that could easily conk out and with no help in pouring rain, with nobody around for miles and not knowing where we were going.

Peter That the first time you discovered what had happened during the war? What had been left behind from the war?

Mary It was in Croatia. I've been in Belgrade before then, and obviously I'd seen the destruction of the radio building and the embassy during the NATO bombing in 1999. But that was my first time back in Croatia in 2004, when my mother and I were walking around the Plitvice lakes, and we did walk past quite a lot of burnt-out buildings. Because in 1995, when the war was essentially brought to an end, when the Croatian Army was able to arm itself properly and then root out the Serbian rebels, Croatian and Serbian rebels who've been holding onto various territories, and so they called it Operation Storm, it took place over a few days in August 1995. Essentially they drove out all the Serbs and burnt all their property.

Serbs have done the same thing to Croats in 1991 and 1992. Just what happens, you know. It's just scorched earth. We'll drive you out and we'll kill people who are left behind. Which is what they did, rape, kill, burn the houses and then destroy the livestock. Just destroy everything. And we'd seen a lot of that. And graffiti on houses saying, 'Please don't burn us. We're a Croatian house,' or 'Please don't burn us, and we're a Serbian,' or whatever. That was very disturbing, because these people would have been my family's neighbours and relations, and because a lot of them had actually fled before the war really started, or they left before Operation Storm in 1995. They then came back to find their homes in ruins and they had to start again.

Felice The other thing I noticed in your book, you said that there's quite a lot of older people there now in that area, and you say, what will happen to the village houses when the grandparents finally go and the children grow up? Is the area going to end up deserted, or do you think tourists will find the area? What do you think will happen?

Mary It depends on the area. Parts of Lika… if you go to the western side, a place called a couple of towns got beaches. Still a big place, but there are very few Serbs left there. But apart from that, on the western side, Otocac is one of the bigger towns – which all that area, the Gacka Valley, because the Gacka River, that's become sort of like a large adventure playground. You've got a lot of people who are renting kayaks they're going cycling, hiking, there's a bear sanctuary there which gets a lot of visitors. You're not far from the coast. You've got adventure parks, the sort of treetop parks and things like that. A lot of campsites being built, a lot of eco villages, ethno villages they're calling them now, and they're doing the sort of more rustic tourism which people are really loving. It's really beautiful. There's a lot of space and Lika could do with a lot more of that.

The villages on the eastern side, where they had a lot more of the fighting in the '90s, it's not quite as it's slowly getting there, but not quite as rosy. There's a lot more for them to come back from. And yes, people's houses. I've had relations whose summer homes – they're all from Belgrade, but they had summer homes – and they've died in their homes aren't really being used anymore. So what's going to happen to those in the long run, I don't know.

One thing that did happen relatively recently during Covid is that a lot of people on the coasts discovered or rediscovered Lika and were buying property there because they were seeing people being lock down. They wanted space and they found a region that was just full of space, and there's quite a lot of space to go around in Lika. I don't think we need to worry about overtourism there just yet – unlike Dubrovnik, in Split and places like that.

Peter And are there still racial tensions that you talk a lot about...which number plates you got in your car? Explain that.

Mary Yes. When I was doing that trip in 2009, I was warned by quite a lot of people. We were driving from Belgrade to Lika with Serbian plates – Belgrade plates, specifically: BG, it says on it. And people were saying, be careful, because in certain places, because they'll throw stones at the windscreen, they'll slash your tyres. I didn't take it seriously until everyone was telling me, 'No, be really careful where you park it and avoid certain places.' And there was actually a man in not in Lika, but in Istria who had gone around in vandalised Serbian cars.

Most people, the majority of people, they just think 'We just want to get on with our lives. We don't want to keep on fighting our neighbours. We just want to get on with things. We want to have a normal country with normal people.' But unfortunately, you still have a lot of nationalism on both sides, Serbs and Croats, and a lot of things that still haven't quite been resolved.

It's not as easy to be Serbian in parts of Croatia where there's a lot of bitterness. So there are still some...it's faint, but I'm only speaking from my own experience and what I've been reading. I could run into somebody, a Serbian person in Lika and just say, 'Oh God, I had the police after me again, or I had this happening or whatever.' I don't know that. Or they have their neighbours having a feud. I honestly don't know. I'm just going by my own experience. But there are people who still don't like Serbs and Serbs who don't like Croats. There are so many other countries around the world where they've had ethnic tensions.

Felice The thing that really gave me the creeps was when you went swimming with water snakes. I just couldn't do that. Was that in a river or the sea?

Mary It was under a waterfall, that's it. Yes. It was a blisteringly hot day and we found this beautiful waterfall and the water was very cold, but it was bearable. And it was just absolutely wonderful. But just a little thin, tiny water snake that wasn't venomous or anything. There are very dangerous snakes throughout Lika, but the ones in the water are perfectly harmless.

Peter You talk quite a bit about snakes in the book, actually, and there are quite a lot of nasty vipers around, are there?

Mary Oh, there are some in parts of Croatia – they've got snakes which aren't venomous. I know there are some, but you tramp noisily where you're going through and they just, they scarper. They're not going to hang around. But when there's long grass and if you move very quietly, then look out for them.

Felice What about other wildlife? Are there bears or anything like that?

Mary Oh, yes. Yes, there are bears. In fact, I almost one almost ran into me in my car. I was driving back to my uncle's house in Rijeka and one of these sort of winding mountain roads that sort of cuts into the mountainside. And I could see something moving ahead, crossing the road. Too big to be a dog,  a really big brown furry thing. And I realised, 'Oh my God, it's a bear.' My mother and I are. 'Oh my God, it's a bear.' We were so excited. And then, after it lumbered across the road, I think it was an adolescent, it wasn't that big, but it was definitely a bear. My mother said, 'Thank God he didn't walk into us,' because we were in a little tiny, red, tiny Chevrolet Spark tiny rental car, and it could have been run over by a massive deer. Yes, it could completely destroy a car, and a bear could have done that to us too. They do have a lot of bears that are killed by very fast, big speeding cars, unfortunately. So you have orphaned cubs who end up in this bear sanctuary I mentioned earlier. In fact, the Lika symbol is a brown bear. So it's very much part of the culture and the mythology of the region.

Peter Now, returning to Lika with your mother, I think your mother came back for the first time.

Mary Oh, no.

Peter Has she been back?

Mary I think the first time she'd been back after she left was 1980, which was just after Tito had died. I think that was the last time she was there, until we both went on that walking holiday in 2004.

Peter So talking about tension, there was definitely a lot of tension on that trip, wasn't it?

Mary The one we did in 2004 was relatively civilised. We were travelling the whole time with this wonderful, lovely guide, Natasha, who was our guide for all the walks that we were doing. There were some sort of simmering tensions, but we managed to sort of damp them down a bit. But when we did the road trip five years later, that was a foul tempered time. My mother was...she wanted me to write a book. She was really excited about me doing it. And when it came to the idea of being in the places where she'd always told me these stories when I was growing up and what had happened in the family, she just clammed up, didn't want to tell me.

Then she would spend the entire time being insisted on being driven around from house to house to house to house to house, visiting all her friends and family, which she'd seen only the year before and insisting: lunch here, coffee there, lots of plum brandy every single time. Except for me, of course, I was driving. Weeks had gone by. I had hardly any material. I was just visiting all these people, seeing all these places, but not getting my mother's stories. And really, it was getting blood from a stone. It was really hard.

I did get some really, really important, incredible stories from her, as well as from other people. But it was such hard work and we were bickering all the time and yelling at each other because mothers and daughters, we even, even when I was in my 40s at the time, and she reacts in a way and I immediately turn into like a sulky adolescent, it's really hard not to do that. And also, I think with hindsight, she she's always been a difficult person, always been a very short tempered, very stubborn.

But she was becoming so irrational on this trip, and I was wondering when, years later, when she was in the early stages of dementia and I was wondering if she was very early stages then, just because even for her, she was being completely over the top and completely irrational. And it was really hard to to keep my patience with her. But I did see a lot more of the region with her. Then two years later, I went back with my husband and did the things in two days that we couldn't do in three weeks with my mother. Now let's see...overtourism, maybe something like that.

Felice Croatia is very popular for tourists, the seaside Croatia. What do you think of that? What's your opinion?

Mary Well, I've seen so many changes in Croatia over the decade. I've been visiting and getting to know all the different coastal regions and islands, and it's become a victim of its own success in a lot of ways. And. And here I am, yes, I write about Croatia a lot. I've been to Croatia six times just this year, so I have my little fault as well. Part to blame in there as well. But places like Dubrovnik, I was there during lockdown and it was beautiful because hardly anyone was there. Normally 10,000 people come into the old town every day and cruise ships, and even though they cut back the numbers, it's still an absolute nightmare in high season. I'd be there in low season and it's been very pleasant. I've been there early season and you could just see, okay, it's getting very busy.

Split is just completely heaving with people because everyone's going to the islands, as well as spending a few days in split, it's become a very popular place for British stag and hen parties. And so there'll be a Split for a few days to go to Hvar, which is the most visited island in Croatia. And that again has been turned into a mini Ibiza in a lot of ways, just so many people. And the development has been allowed to run pretty much unchecked in a lot of ways, so you will have a lot of properties being developed that shouldn't really be there.

And some parts of it they belatedly realising maybe we should do something about it, because generally the thinking behind everything is like: more numbers. I was talking to the mayor of Dubrovnik a few years ago, and he was saying his predecessor was proud of the fact that every year they allowed more cruise ships coming in and more numbers into the tiny old town, which I think Unesco was almost threatening to withdraw its World Heritage status because it was just too many people.

And a similar thing happening in Lika, the only overtouristed part of Lika is Plitvice Lakes National Park, and I've been there a few times now over the years, and the last time was five years ago, which I did a chapter in my book. They have allocated time slots, but it was still completely packed, absolutely rammed full of people. A lot of the walkways are raised wooden walkways over the water, so you can't get around people because otherwise you fall in the water. People were there with pushchairs. Even though signs are everywhere saying you can't bring pushchairs, they would bring pushchairs, people with selfie sticks and just stopping every two seconds, having groups of eight, ten people having to stop and take their photos again. It was getting so congested in so many parts of the lakes that it became quite a trial just to be able to see it, and it's one of the most beautiful places on the planet. It is stunningly beautiful,  the sixteen lakes have all these different shades of turquoise and blue and green and the waterfalls, and it's just absolutely beautiful.

But seeing it and we were there in June, so it wasn't high season yet, but it was absolutely rammed. But you then have to find other parts of the Plitvice lakes where you don't have all the tourists – and on those ones it's better if you go with a guide because you've got some, as we did the time before, that they can take you along the trails that people don't don't normally follow. And then of course, all the whole industry built around Plitvice, loads and loads of hotels. Outside there are only three allowed actually within the national park. Everywhere else there's loads of campsites and these sort of ethno villages and hotels and guest houses and apartments, and everyone is always there. But you can see Plitvice only so many times because it's really expensive to go in. I think it's something like, I don't know how much it is now, I have to double check…€35, €40 to get in. Maybe more than that in high season. But there's a lot more to see in the region. We have all the other rivers, you have all the other trails, hiking trails. You don't have to go just to the lakes and then get swept up in all the hordes.

Peter So if anyone wants to visit, like, where do you fly to?

Mary Oh, you can fly to Zagreb. And the first place you get to quite soon is Plitvice Lakes, about an hour and a half, I think, from the airport. It's also not far from Zadar airport, which is quite handy place if you're flying from Stansted, for example, because a lot of Ryanair flights go from Zadar. And and that one again is only about an hour and a half from Lika. And so those are the two main airports.

Peter And you need to hire a car?

Mary I would suggest that yes, bus services are really going to major cities. But if you want to go in the countryside you can't. You have to have a car or pay for a very expensive private taxi.

Felice Are there trains? Are there stations all over the place?

Mary Well, technically there are trains between Zagreb and Split going down the coast, but nothing really in Lika anymore. And the trains, the Flixbus network, has been mushrooming in Croatia. That's one very good way of getting around from city to city, or bigger towns. But as soon as you get into the countryside, you really need to have your own car.

Felice Well, that's been great. It's been fascinating hearing about your book. Thank you very much for coming on our podcast, Mary Novakovich, can you tell us the name of your book and where people can buy it?

Mary Yes, my book is called My Family and Other Enemies: Life and Travels in Croatia's Hinterland, and you can get it everywhere. You can get it on Waterstones and Amazon and Stanfords Travel. You can get it online. I recorded it came out two years ago, but I recorded an audio version a couple of months ago, so it's now on Audible if you want, or an or Apple, whichever way you get your audiobooks. So and there's also the Kindle version.

Felice And do you have a website if people want to find out more about you?

Mary My Linktree website has got links to all of the shops that we're selling. The main ones, are American ones, including Barnes and Noble and all that, and also my own website. But that's the easiest one to find. So it's Linktree/Mary Novakovich.

Peter Mary is not your real name, as you discovered.

Mary I'd always known that I was christened Maria rather than Mary, but my father anglicised it on my birth certificate, which I really wish he hadn't. Because even if he'd changed it to Maria, it would just more interesting than Mary, Maria, spelled Marija. So that would confuse people.

Felice That's brilliant. Thank you so much. That's all for now. If you've enjoyed the show, please share this episode with at least one other person! Do also subscribe on Spotify, i-Tunes or any of the many podcast providers – where you can give us a rating. You can subscribe on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or any of the many podcast platforms. You can also find us on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. We'd love you to sign up for our regular emails. By the way, we're no 7 in the Top 20 Midlife Travel Podcasts.

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