My brother and I had visited this island briefly in 1974. In those days, there was no organized lodging. When we stepped off the boat from Mali Lošinj (this place had been recommended by a college friend), we saw.....nothing. We asked ourselves, "NOW what? the next boat isn't for two days!" Some ten year old girl nearby heard us and said, with a prominent New Jersey accent, "oh, you guys are American? I guess you need a place to stay. Come on," and she led us to the house of the woman who organized lodging. Jabbering away in Croatian, she sent the girl away, and she returned a few minutes later with another woman, and told us we would be staying at her house. It cost us something like $1.50 a day for the two of us. I asked her where she learned her English. In northern New Jersey, it turned out, where she was from. I asked what in the world she was doing on Ilovik, in the middle of the Adriatic. It so happened that half the island had emigrated to New Jersey, and the parents sent their kids back to the island for the summer so they would learn Croatian (they were all fluent).
As for the woman who was taking us in, since neither my brother or I had even heard Croatian before, was asked if she knew any English. No. French? No. Russian? No. Spanish? No. Italian? No. German? Oh, sure, since she was originally from Frankfurt. Problem solved. She had come as a student painter some 15 years before, and married a guy from the island. Their two children were, luckily, also fluent in German.
I remembered this place, and suggested it to my wife after we got married. We had met in 1974, but never found the time to actually get married until 1982. So we took an overnight train from Munich to Rijeka, a boat over to Cres, a bus down to Mali Lošinj, and looked for a place to stay for the night. Oh, crap. Not a room to be had. Some shifty teenager figured out we were in a bind, and found an even shiftier-looking man who offered to take us in his boat to Ilovik for $12 or so. Almost dark and exhausted after the 24 hour trip, we said what the hell. The rat stopped his motor about 100 meters before the Island and asked to be paid. I pulled out the agreed amount of Yugoslav Dinars, and he said that was for me. My wife would cost the same amount again. I made it clear in Russian (Croatians can understand it to some degree) that he had not said that at first. He said either pay, or I take you back. I contemplated tossing him and his old lady overboard, but didn't. We found out later, that the people of the island would have given us a medal for doing it. This guy was famous for being a crook, and cheated everybody.
Anyway, so now at 9:00 at night, we arrived on the island, and asked for the tourist bureau to find a room. "Did you make a reservation?" Huh? WHAT reservation? Since when did one have to make a reservation? Since about three years ago! Well, we had no way to know this, and were sitting on the dock of the bay, so to speak, with my wife cold and miserable and pregnant. SOmeone summoned the island sheriff, who had had political training in the Soviet Union before Tito broke with Stalin, and I could communicate with him in Russian. He said, "come with me, there might be a solution." We followed him to a small square in another part of the village I had never seen when I was there last. It had benches on all sides where the elderly residents came to gossip every evening. These were people who used to take in boarders, but due to their age, didn't any more. The sheriff asked if one fo them might make an exception for us. Most said no way, but one couple wavered, but said they had no way to communicate with us as they spoke neither German nor English and we spoke neither Croatian nor Italian. My ears perked up. I said, "wait, I speak Italian!" We were in, and had a place to stay.
Later on, we found that the brash son of the family my brother and I stayed with 8 years previously, now 18 years old, wanted to build a small airport on the island and develop the place as a resort. We said, he would destroy the beauty of the place. He said, so what? They'd make lots of money! So the perverted mentality was already seeping in, even in 1982. I never went back, so I never heard how far his plans to destroy his home went. But I can tell you that even in 1982, larger private yachts full of disgusting rich Italians were showing up for overnight stays on the island, monopolizing the one restaurant were we could eat, and basically pissing off the islanders. Before World War I, this island was part of Italy (which is why the elderly people with whom we stayed spoke Italian), and the Croatians had always had issues with them. None of this was going on in 1974, and we could only imagine what the place would turn into. Preferring to keep our memories, we never returned to the island.
Our daughters did give us a 4 day weekend in Dubrovnik for our 65th birthday. It was my first time back in 40 years. My brother and I had visited Dubrovnik in 1974, and it was already a tourist haven then, just more so now. It is still beautiful, but depressingly tourist-oriented.
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