Traipsing Around: Travel and Psychogeography: Still

I really like it here. I have settled into the steady rhythm of not doing much at all. I wake ridiculously early with the Sun. I have a simple breakfast (bread, ham, cheese and tomatoes). I walk to the campsite café to get coffee. Then I walk the few kilometres to Stoja, a town overlooking the busy port of Pula, with 3 bars, a small supermarket and a bakery. I shop and then get a coffee in the bar next door. Sometimes I buy a beer. The two women behind the bar know me a little by now and the old boys nod hello or say dober dan or dober outro (phonetically, Hello or Good Morning) as I walk in. It is strange being in a country where the language is obviously Eastern European but in a Mediterranean setting and said with the animated expression of the Italians. The best of all possible worlds.

Sometimes I get in the car and drive lazily along the coast, following yellow signs, driving through fields of olives and vines with young leaves and fields ablaze with fresh, blood red poppies, stopping randomly at small, picturesque fishing villages with narrow cobbled streets, often with a church on a hill overlooking the harbour. Or places that were once fishing villages and have now given over to tourism but which this early in the season are only really trying half-heartedly.

Today I think I will go in search of that Roman town, Nesactium. On the map I have, it’s shown as a bright yellow square with a part picture of an amphitheatre in black, located near a small hamlet called Valtura. In reality, it’s at the end of a single lane road, which leads onto a dusty, bumpy track, that leads to a ruin on a small hill which has been tidied up a bit. There is a single room museum, but it is closed between 12 and 4pm and the old chap who looks after it leaves before time on his noisy, smoking scooter, helpfully locking the gate behind him so I have to climb over it when I leave the site. There is something satisfying in wandering around the ruins. This once important commercial, legal and religious centre, the exporter of wine and olives to Ravenna across the Adriatic and further on, to Rome, a symbol of Roman power and authority, but now a metaphor for vainglory and an empire lost. It puts things into a certain perspective. I wander around in the overcast humidity, passing through doorways, wondering how many people have done so previously, who they were and in what circumstances, crossing the Forum floor, where laws have been passed and judgements made, looking at the piles of rubble at the edge of the site, wondering whose hands made those red clay bricks and carved the tops of the broken columns.

In the evenings, with some yearning, I return to my place on the rocks at the campsite and watch the seagulls and cormorants skimming the waves and the rippled outline of shoals of fish and scan the water for dolphins. I have no thoughts about life, the universe and everything. It is easy not to think at all. It is good just to be.