Woke to glorious weather – clear blue skies and a good few degrees warmer than yesterday, definitely T-shirt weather.
The site is right next to the salt pans that occupy the end of the bay along with a lagoon. These features attract lots of interesting bird life including Little Eagrets, a number of which we saw on a stroll around the area. We also watched people working on the salt pans but rather than collecting salt, they were working in a layer of silt or mud in the pans. Later we discovered that the local fishermen prized the mud shrimps as bait for larger fish and this is what they were harvesting. After extracting some shrimps they carefully smoothed over the mud with a special flat spade-like tool.
On then to Piran just along the coast, which was mentioned in our guide books and looked very attractive from Strunjan.
Parking at Piran turned out to be somewhat fraught and we were only allowed to stop in bays designated for coaches at a cost of over Ł3 per hour. We therefore visited Piran at speed, feeling like American tourists doing Europe in a week. It was very pretty and full of designer Italians posing like only Italians can. Italian is the second language in this area and the locals seemed to have adopted Italian fashion as well. Definitely worth a second visit some time but only if we can find somewhere cheaper to park Henrietta.
Lunch was taken next to the bay just South of Piran that was full of hundreds of salt pans. This was obviously being done on an industrial scale with huge piles of salt protected under tarpaulins.
On then to the Croatian border a very short distance away and this time we sailed through without incident.
Suddenly the countryside was looking very Mediterranean, with rolling hills, vines and many olive groves - our first sight of olive trees on the Odyssey. There were many newly planted olive trees and my cynical side made me suggest that these were in preparation for Croatia's entry into the EU and the subsidies that they would then receive. A very pleasant drive followed until we approached Pula when the roads became a little busier. We had identified at least 5 campsites in the area that were open at this time and had selected one, Campingplatz Pomer that was shown as being reasonably close to Pula, which we wanted to visit. However, the ACSI guide turned out to be wrong on a number of counts. The Pomer site was a long way outside Pula and was, in fact very close to a number of the other sites. It was also closed! We then did a tour of a number of other campsites that were either in the ACSI guide and shown as open or ones that we saw signs to. We finally found an open site at our sixth attempt – Camping Village Stupice at Premantura. We had decided that we would have to wild camp (banned in Croatia) if that site was closed. The site had 1000 camping places but was very quiet at this time. This gave us a huge choice of pitches but most of them were in thick pine wood and negotiating the trees must be quite interesting. We decided to head for the sea's edge and found a peninsula that stretched out into the sea and was devoid of trees. The next problem was that there was hardly a level pitch on the site, most of them were on a considerable slope and we spent a little while trying to find a reasonably level spot. We negotiated around piles of stones that I decided were the remnants of camp fires. We settled in this position with a wonderful view of the sea on three sides – including small islands and a view of Medulin across the bay. Set up the satellite dish in preparation for tomorrow's rugby.
Photo: Little Egret at Strunjan
The site is right next to the salt pans that occupy the end of the bay along with a lagoon. These features attract lots of interesting bird life including Little Eagrets, a number of which we saw on a stroll around the area. We also watched people working on the salt pans but rather than collecting salt, they were working in a layer of silt or mud in the pans. Later we discovered that the local fishermen prized the mud shrimps as bait for larger fish and this is what they were harvesting. After extracting some shrimps they carefully smoothed over the mud with a special flat spade-like tool.
On then to Piran just along the coast, which was mentioned in our guide books and looked very attractive from Strunjan.
Parking at Piran turned out to be somewhat fraught and we were only allowed to stop in bays designated for coaches at a cost of over Ł3 per hour. We therefore visited Piran at speed, feeling like American tourists doing Europe in a week. It was very pretty and full of designer Italians posing like only Italians can. Italian is the second language in this area and the locals seemed to have adopted Italian fashion as well. Definitely worth a second visit some time but only if we can find somewhere cheaper to park Henrietta.
Lunch was taken next to the bay just South of Piran that was full of hundreds of salt pans. This was obviously being done on an industrial scale with huge piles of salt protected under tarpaulins.
On then to the Croatian border a very short distance away and this time we sailed through without incident.
Suddenly the countryside was looking very Mediterranean, with rolling hills, vines and many olive groves - our first sight of olive trees on the Odyssey. There were many newly planted olive trees and my cynical side made me suggest that these were in preparation for Croatia's entry into the EU and the subsidies that they would then receive. A very pleasant drive followed until we approached Pula when the roads became a little busier. We had identified at least 5 campsites in the area that were open at this time and had selected one, Campingplatz Pomer that was shown as being reasonably close to Pula, which we wanted to visit. However, the ACSI guide turned out to be wrong on a number of counts. The Pomer site was a long way outside Pula and was, in fact very close to a number of the other sites. It was also closed! We then did a tour of a number of other campsites that were either in the ACSI guide and shown as open or ones that we saw signs to. We finally found an open site at our sixth attempt – Camping Village Stupice at Premantura. We had decided that we would have to wild camp (banned in Croatia) if that site was closed. The site had 1000 camping places but was very quiet at this time. This gave us a huge choice of pitches but most of them were in thick pine wood and negotiating the trees must be quite interesting. We decided to head for the sea's edge and found a peninsula that stretched out into the sea and was devoid of trees. The next problem was that there was hardly a level pitch on the site, most of them were on a considerable slope and we spent a little while trying to find a reasonably level spot. We negotiated around piles of stones that I decided were the remnants of camp fires. We settled in this position with a wonderful view of the sea on three sides – including small islands and a view of Medulin across the bay. Set up the satellite dish in preparation for tomorrow's rugby.
Photo: Little Egret at Strunjan
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