Wednesday 3 July – day trip to Pula

Pete and I took the bus to Pula, 45 minutes away, and the family drove.   Pula is a city of about 60,000 and has around 400,000 tourists every year.  It has a long history of settlement dating back to before 6000 BC, and like Rovinj has been administered by everyone from the Romans and Greeks, Byzantines, Venice, Austria, the allies in WW2 and finally became part of the new Republic of Croatia in 1991.  There is an old town but it was too hot to visit, we made do with the aquarium and the amphitheatre.      The road between Rovinj and Pula was trees for miles but looking more closely there were lots of small olive orchards, market gardens with things like tomatoes and beans, spuds too.   The soil was very red and rich-looking.   We didn’t take the expressway, stuck to the local roads through a couple of typical small towns dominated by the churches, and houses had the typical soft paint colours or raw stone.  Houses have wooden or metal outward-opening shutters, quite different from the roller-door type shutters we saw in Poland and Italy, and much more ‘friendly’-looking.      I saw one sign pointing to ‘Feral Restaurant’ so I’d probably avoid that one.   And a tyre repair place called a ‘Gumicenter’. 

We met the family at the aquarium so took a taxi from the bus station, had a very good driver who pointed out the city sights on the way including a few high-rise apartment blocks which he said were from Tito’s time, now there’s a limit of five to six storeys.   We had a brief glimpse of Roman temples and archway (and apparently there is diving onto Roman galley remains on the coast as well as villas that turn up under farmland), and he pointed out doors at the base of a cliff as we drove by – bunkers in wartime, but now used for growing mushrooms for the restaurant trade. 

The town is built on seven hills and on one of these we found the aquarium which has been adapted from the 1886 Verudela fortress and they have done a stunning job.  There are tanks in the side rooms extending from central corridors on two levels, there’s a long sloping tunnel leading down to what might have been a moat but now has a café and playground so we made use of both, and you can go onto the roof for a panoramic view over to the city.    Kelly Tarlton’s with a big walk-through Perspex tunnel it’s not, but it is well worth a visit all the same.   They have everything from a turtle rescue centre, a fish nursery, dangerous fish (stone fish and piranha), a snake, lizards, and of course random fish of all shapes, colours and sizes.  

We had lunch at a café in the park surrounding the fort, then met up again at the amphitheatre in the middle of town, you couldn’t miss the three-level, cream stone monster.   It was built in Vespasian’s time in the first century AD and could hold 20,000 spectators.  It’s one of the best preserved Roman amphitheatres and is the sixth largest in the world so it is impressive.   It was incredibly hot and the kids didn’t last long so they left us to have more of a look around and we went down to the lower level where the animals would have been kept.  And I found today’s cat before we left, just waiting for me near the exit.   

The evening was spent packing up and getting ready to leave Rovinj for Lake Bled in Slovenia, the end to five very good days and I’m sure anyone would be happy to spend a few days in Rovinj, and Apartments Tanja was a good choice of accommodation.