Winnetou & Old Shatterhand in Croatia.

Sunny islands, masts & sails, endless skies, and bright waters created a sudden surge of sweet saudade for O2. It is soul-soothing to know though, that she’s also having a blast on the other side of the globe, happily sailing through New Caledonian tropical waters, with her new owners steady at the helm. In the meantime we are huffing and puffing over layers and layers of crushed seashells and skeletons of ancient marine life that once formed the bottom of the ocean.

We overheated during a 20 km hike through Paklenica National Park, where we went cosplaying as Winnetou & Old Shatterhand until near dehydration. Meanwhile, the young sporty crowd around us didn’t seem to be bothered by either the heat or the height. In lizard-like fashion, they took turns clambering up the enormous limestone walls that millions of years ago had been squeezed skyward by violent tectonic collisions, creating the dramatic karst landscape that had nearly done us in. Just two more skeletons bleaching in the sun.

But we always try to balance self-inflicted physical castigation with a nice meal afterwards and a few days of gentler tourist excursions. So after our seafood platter for two, off we went to the Zrmanja Plateau Winnetou, another “visually stunning filming location.” And stunning it was indeed. Especially since Vinnie drove us to the parking lot and all we had to do was take a short walk and be awestruck at our leisure.

From there, the road took us to the touristy Krka National Park. We had rather low expectations, fearing the crowd. But what a delightful experience it turned out to be. The pristine 73 km long Krka River – since 1895 producing hydroenergy and now still connected to Croatia’s power grid – cascades through a protected Garden of Eden, where boat rides take visitors to waterfalls, and dragonflies like fairies, in shades of green and metallic blue, flutter and dance above crystal-clear waters teeming with fish. Green & brown frogs croak as white swans sail by with their tiny chicks in tow. Wild ducks are swept away as if in a cartoon, only to swim back upstream against the current again and again so they can keep grazing the succulent green.

Granted, at moments it was a somewhat crowded Garden of Eden, but a true Croatian fairyland it is. The place exhaled peace and harmony, as though war, habitat loss, pollution, and climate change existed only in another planet’s bad dream, not on Planet Earth.

After all this natural splendour, it was high time we paid a human masterpiece a visit: Dubrovnik. Humans built it; humans nearly destroyed it. The harrowing wartime stories of violence and destruction are told through the lenses of world-renowned photojournalists in the War Photo Museum. The whole idea behind the photos is “to expose the myth of war and the intoxication of war, to let people see war as it is: raw, venal, and frightening…” The Yugoslav Wars – the Croatian Homeland War and the Kosovo War – spanned the entire nineties. It’s even more of a shock to our European minds to be reminded that it happened in our own backyard a mere 35 years ago.

The problem is that the people who most need to see it are the very ones who refuse to look.

What a relief and a privilege it was to shake off the horror by simply stepping outside into the light, buying a rum-raisin Italian gelato, and getting lost in the medieval maze of real-life Westeros. (Many iconic scenes from the TV series Game of Thrones were filmed in Dubrovnik, including Cersei’s Walk of Shame.)

We do believe we are ready for some more karst now. All right Montenegro, bring it on !