Hvar Island, Brusja to Dubovica

Hvar Island, Brusja to Dubovica (10/17)

Today's walk was book-ended by taxi rides: a ride to get me to starting point and another ride to transport me back to Hvar when I was finished. This was a point-to-point walk and the ending point was about 10km or so from Hvar Town.

Another muggy day, with a lot of dew on everything at my starting point, the village of Brusja. There was still residual fog in the air as well, so somewhat hazy for the first 30 minutes or so.

My taxi driver told me on the way up that the route was marked with (now familiar) red and white painted route indicators, sometimes a bulls-eye like circle, other times stripes, and sometimes L-shaped to indicate a turn.

After only a couple hundred meters of walking I was off pavement and onto graveled roads. These were sometimes rough, but generally very walk-able. There's a lot more agriculture on Hvar than on Brac so I spent a lot of time walking between small groves of olive trees and the occasional vineyard.

Today I came to realize 2 very interesting things. First, olive trees must be pretty tough. They grow here, where there's very little rainfall, most of which comes in just a few months in the winter and the soil is very thin. I've seen olive trees growing out of a pile rocks! 

Second, there's the rocks. Everywhere on all the island the rocks are piled up or fashioned into stone walls. This started 900 years or so ago when people first settled the islands which were covered in stones. In order to clear some space to grow grass for sheep or to plant olive trees or grapes, the people cleared away the stones. I have a hard time wrapping my head around that: all manual labor to clear the stones. The big ones were broken up into small ones, again all by hand.

My cab driver on Brac said that a man might work for a year to clear the stones from 45 square meters of land! Think about that, an area 7 meters by 7 meters, taking a year to clear. Over time, more and more stones were cleared so that now the piles and walls are everywhere.

Tough people and tough trees.

OK, back to my walk.

My route was generally downhill to the sea, with the occasional up hill to keep my attention. I passed by a couple of rural villages, now mostly abandoned (Malo Grablje and Zarace) and both historical/cultural sites for Croatia.

I did have to walk on the shoulder of a busy road for 1.5km or so, before my final descent into Dubovica. Since I arrived ahead of my expected time, I found a spot in the shade, read for a time, then took a nap before walking back up the hill to my pick-up location.

Today I had mountains, farms, and sea shore; a good day. Tomorrow I'm off to Korcula Island for my last couple days' of walking.

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