Two months have pasted since I visited my friend Alen on Northern Velebit. He decided to move there with his 3 kids. They live there for more than two years already accompanied with a doberman, a cat, a horse, few cows & a bull, surrounded with the pure, wild nature along with the poisonous snakes & wild beasts but still enjoying!
There's a video of me driving my Twingo down from the mountain top:
During my stay over there, I shot some incredible photos but didn't have time to process & publish them, cause I wanted to make it look high quality... So, here we are!
Firstly, I came to a small fisherman town / village called Jablanac. It was my first time there & I was thrilled with it's beauty! It was one of those places where the transition between the communism to the democracy was intensively sensed. The town was pretty empty, with a lot of abandoned properties but still few people living there all year long. The "aboriginasl"... So I talked to them about the past. They all praise marshal Tito - the old Yugoslavian president, one of the greatest political leaders in the history of mankind!
The huge property on the left was a hotel before the privatization process in the 90s when almost all the factories & huge ex-Yu companies were destroyed by the so-called "democratic-capitalistic" saviors of the Croatian people... The same thing happened here too, as everywhere else around Croatia in those years...
The funny, or maybe the sad, thing was in the center of the town - there was another abandoned property which used to be a store (small supermarket; cro. market = store, supermarket). I found out later from the aboriginals that this property is owned by the government & on the inside a poster could be seen which promotes the today's Croatian president Kolinda... The poster says: "Za bolju Hrvatsku", which means: "For better Croatia"... What a tragicomic charade!!!
The town has 2 religious buildings - a church in the center & a chapel on the graveyard above the town from where I could enjoyed the sight. I admire in the religious buildings in the architectural way cause I'm not quiet a religious type in the way to visit the churches or any other kind of a temple. The Gods kingdom is everywhere & anytime so I can say my prays when & wherever I feel like!
From the graveyard you can see this, if you look towards the sea:
On one of the house, with a big, capital letters it was written: "Šta te briga?!", which means "Why do you care?!". Unfortunately, I didn't have a zoom lens to take a shot of it...
On the way to the graveyard, climbing the stairs to the top ("to Heaven"), I stumbled upon another ex-Yu remains - Rade Končar's product:
I find it very interesting cause today Rade's descendant recently bought the biggest Croatian shipyards & now he's trying to destroy them which is another result of the privatization. A lot of workers will be released & his plan is to turn the shipyards into the touristic settlement. He also has all the support of the Croatian government & also EU government. This is just another step towards the further weakening of the Croatian economy & destroying our independence so that we can easily become slaves to the West.
But I also found an incredibly beautiful wooden sailing boat in the Jablanac port - I could not resist the photo-shoot! Wooden boats are something that I admire much more than the architecture...
I can't say which one is more beautiful to me - the sailing boat in the distance or the small domestic, Croatian-made on the right...
There was another important & possibly funny notice - this small town has more police per capita than some big city! If you see these two Škoda cars, be careful cause they are undercover police: