Down the Danube: Croatia

For two weeks in September-October this year, the Far Outliers took a Viking cruise down the Danube River from Budapest to Bucharest. Here are some impressions from each of the countries we visited. A photo album from the trip (Danube 2024) is on Flickr.

Our first stop in Croatia was at the Slavonian border city of Vukovar, site of the bitter Battle of Vukovar, attacked by Serbs in 1991 and held until 1998. Many buildings still bore the scars of the heavy shelling from that battle. Our guides expressed considerable bitterness about those times, but also acknowledged the many atrocities committed by Croatian Ustaše allies of the Nazis in World War II.

Several Croats expressed nostalgia for Tito's Yugoslavia, when travel abroad was possible and economic benefits were more evenly distributed. Many Yugoslavs also emigrated during those days. I remember from my visit to Australia on the way to Papua New Guinea in 1976 that many Greeks and Slavs were immigrating there at that time. That's where I first learned how to say 'thank you' in Greek, after I bought a gyro sandwich from a Greek shop. A few of my PNG friends had been to Australia, and were shocked to see white people doing janitorial work, as many immigrant Slavs did in those days. I asked our Croatian hosts which part of Croatia had the highest emigration in those days and they said the Dalmatian coast, where economic opportunities were limited before it became such a tourism hotspot.

The only excursion we signed up for was to Osijek, where we split into smaller groups for home visits, then visited the ornate Cathedral of Saints Peter and Paul, where a singer with an angelic voice sang for us.

Unlike Hungary, Serbia, Bulgaria, and Romania, Croatia adopted the Euro, so many of the overwhelmingly American passengers on our Viking cruise used the ATMs to stock up on Euros, which were more widely accepted than U.S. dollars by most vendors in those countries for small cash purchases. Credit cards are also widely accepted.