Zagreb, Croatia

I was feeling a little bit ill from the cold and rain of Plitvice Lakes but not nearly as ill as my beloved van was feeling as the battery died in the dark in the middle of Zagreb. A call to the Croatian equivalant of the AA and a quick diagnosis with a multimeter revealed that the alternator was not charging the vehicle battery and it had been drained completely. After a jump start and giving it some juice from the recovery van, I was assured that the battery would be charged enough to park up for the night and get it started in the morning to get to a specialist. After negotiating some steep climbs, long miles and truly horrible road surfaces, the van had let me down for the first time.

Cold and dejected, Vanny and I limped our way to the hostel and I set about meeting up with my friends from Sarajevo in order to forget about a pretty miserable day. After a somewhat blurry but fun-filled night of beer and shots of rakije lined up on (what I vaguely remember as) an oversized cricket bat, I felt even more ill the next day and it didn't help the van to start. I had a plan though, and a quick trip to the buy some jump-leads meant I was able to start the van from the leisure batteries under the passenger seat and get the van to the specialists who set to work on fixing my broken alternator. Two hours and £200 later, the part was disassembled, mended, cleaned, and reassembled. I was back in business and ready to enjoy the city at long last.

Most people seem to wrongly dismiss Zagreb as a travel destination, instead viewing the city as either an airport hub or a stopover on the way to the coast. It is a great city though, where the sparkly blue trams zig-zag between the old mustard coloured buildings. It is truly a place where the old and new meet head on. It didn't take much of a ramble around the city to figure out that the weekend (including St Martin's Day, the excellent patron saint of wine) was the Zagreb Wine Festival and a big marquee was up in the city's central square. While it can be a bit quiet in the afternoon, come the evening and a bit of live music it is a completely different place.

It was here where I bumped into a couple more Zagreb students as well as two local celebrities. TV presenter Barbara "something" is well known in Croatia for her travel show and appears in real life to be about 30% human, 10% collagen, and 60% silicon! Her friend just happened to be the gay former deputy prime minister for the country too.

As for the city, the northern old town is divided into the two rival hills of Gradec and Kaptol which are topped by St Mark's Church and the snappily-named Cathedral Of The Assumption Of The Blessed Virgin Mary respectively. Both are stunning buildings on the outside and a bit plain inside. Just to the south of the church is the excellent and slightly odd Museum Of Broken Relationships. On passing, I just had to go in and find out what the hell that even meant. It turns out to be a great mix of donated items which sum up a broken relationship between two people and while some are funny, others are sad, some are donated to help somebody let go of the past, and yet more are just bizzare.

Zagreb has shown me enough to realise that it is certainly a brilliant destination in it's own right.