Leading Rant
Long has that been lost.
Many say that it was destroyed, or never made, save in legend.
Well, sunnuvagun - it was not destroyed -
just shipped round the world, and reassembled stone by every last stone
step in Split, Croatia.
The long-lost Endless
Stair of Moria (aka Kazhad
Dûm) now climbs Marjan
Hill, a beautiful park - complete with a zoo - overlooking
Split. They unwound some of the coils,
so the stair snakes rather than spirals up from the city
center, but my sore feet will vouch that they did not lose
a single stone step.
I didn't have my camera with me. I went up unplanned on a
whim this lovely Sunday afternoon. So no photos of the stair
itself, the city, the sea, islands etc, or the back-lit flora, a zany
liminal mixture - exuberant
stands of agave,
huge stalks soaring skyward, prickly
pear, hemlock,
some kind of pine,
also
skinny
little trees with sumac-like
leaves. And I ain't
climbing back up there again tomorrow, nor any time until my
feet and hip-muscles are both unsore. Hey, I'm not
even
going any further back down from this mid-way cafe terrace.
Just
sip a mineralna voda
and savor the view of water, mountains, and city. And unladen
feet.
A Day Trip to
an Island
![my complete clothing supply minus what I was wearing stack of freshly washed tshirts and jeans](pix/2008/img_6619.jpg)
Friday, mind at
ease from having a
freshly-laundered stack of clothes, I decided to take a day trip to one
of the many offshore
islands here. I chose Brač
Island, and its ferry port town Supetar, which
nobody but me seems to have thought of calling Supe-dupe-tar, which
is surely just as well.
The ferry that plies the run to Supetar looks ordinary enough
from the outside. But the inside lounge actually looks kind
of
old-fashioned classy.
![The birds is coming gulls with ship's wake below](pix/2008/img_6663.jpg)
![eye to eye sea gull, more or less at eye level](pix/2008/img_6666.jpg)
Isn't it great when sea gulls ride the wind-wake of your boat?
You'll never get an easier photo of a sea gull.
"It's Spring, it's
Spring. The bird is on the wing!"
"Don't be absoid! Da wing is on da boid!"
"My favorite bird is the tree frog
It’s a harbinger branger of spring
It’s a bird with hardly no feathers
and a big songer sanger of sing."
![the mainland shore town backed by rocky ridges](pix/2008/img_6671.jpg)
Strangely, for most of the way to Brač island, the mainland actually
gets closer.
This ridge system is in - or maybe just near - a national bio-preserve
that includes the highest point in Croatia. My faithful
companion The Rough
Guide has a sidebar about it, but that would be straying
from today's subject.
Anyway, if the mainland is this near, we are almost at our island
destintion.
![Venetian turf-marking woman climbing stone steps in front of Venetian bell-tower](pix/2008/img_6694.jpg)
I thought it was
just that I had arrived during siesta, but I looked it
up afterward - Supetar
is
a sleepy little town. It sez so right here in the Rough Guide, which
would hardly lie about something like that.
From the look of that bell tower,
I'll bet it used
to belong to Venice.
![Sundown for two couple silhouetted against harbor sunset](pix/2008/img_6900.jpg)
And so, as the world
sinks slowly into the red, we leave our sleepy island
paradise, and return to our bustling Croatian metropolis, secure in the
knowledge
that even though the TV swears that Zagreb and Frankfurt are deep
into winter,
it is shirt-sleeve weather on the Adriatic. And that's the way it is,
November second, two thousand eight.
Ferevvinssake
get that
endless campaign over with!
Contents Copyright 2012 Jeff Bulf