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Ali wakes after a long night's sleep, fit and hungry. Before we leave Ali + Grete visit the little vegetable stall opposite the campsite, just the other side of the fence from our pitches.
We slop out and set off for the island's capital, Pag town. The road goes through more stone walls and flat fields until we join the main road. The views are fabulous; aqua-marine sea, bare, buff mountains and greyish green salt pans. We arrive in Pag, find parking and the girls go to explore. Pag is a small town stretching across the inlet via a small, bridged island and beach. It is famous for hand made lace and a particular cheese made from the milk of sheep that graze on the salty grass of the lowlands. They return with a few samples of lace bought from an elderly woman's home; a 5" square which took 3 days work and a couple of small bracelets. The cheese we must buy from one of the factories up the road on Kolan.
We leave Pag, cross the estuary on the causeway and in less than two miles we climb to a height of 700 ft where we stop in a layby with Pag town dwarfed below us. The white stone houses with peach coloured rooves sit at the bottom of a huge, almost barren ridge. Behind are the grey and green mountains of mainland Croatia. The bare, buff rock and the blue and jade waters remind us of Lake Myvatn in Iceland, only here it is 26C.
We carry on climbing and get into rocky country. We are passed by a British motorcyclist who waves madly and cheerily at us on the way to Kolan where we find the Paski Sir cheese factory. 45 minute tours of the plant are offered, but we opt just to taste a few samples and buy some of the firm, tangy cheese which slightly resembles Parmesan, together with local olive oil. From Kolan we head on to Zigljen where we are just in time to catch the 15 minute ferry to Prizna on the mainland. On the ferry we meet the British biker who passed us and have a good chat.
The road from the ferry climbs and climbs from rock into lush woodland until we descend again to the ferry port for our trip to another island; Rab. As we drive from the ferry the scenery is much greener with olive trees, bamboo and pine wood from which we hear an incredible volume of crickets rasping.
We reach the site at Rab where the prices are high, the staff unhelpful and the pitches an unmarked free-for-all, with Germans colonising large areas far beyond what they have paid for with boats and motorbikes spread out and no consideration for any one else. After so many good and excellent places it was inevitable we'd get a bad one sometime, so our planned two nights will be one and once parked we determine not to let it spoil an otherwise fantastic day. We also elect not to pay extra for electricity.
In the evening a thunderstorm rumbles around while we have dinner of big beef-steak tomatoes bought this morning from the stall stuffed with mince and topped with some of the Pag cheese.
The rain and thunder continues most of the night - pity the tents around us!
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