“And who are you going to stay with in Croatia?” my mom asked me, at around 1am, Paris time. I was supposed to be packing or cleaning. I left my apartment for the very last time, and set off for the airport at 4:30 on Monday morning.
“Nobody. It’s just me.” Knowing her, knowing me, I’m assuming that she expected me to have found another random internet friend living in another random country. Plausible, but not the case this time!
I confess that coming to Split on my own was not necessarily my most brilliant of random decisions. I’m good with solo traveling and aimless wandering, but some places are more conducive to that than others. My verdict on Split, Croatia, is that you should bring friends.
Still, I’ve enjoyed the sun and the beach. That’s mostly what I wanted anyway — to go pass out on a beach in a country I’d never been to before. Mission accomplished, I suppose.
During Tuesday’s aimless wandering I passed one of hundreds of tour-advertisements and decided that I needed to do some sort of activity. The cheapest option was river rafting, so after about thirty seconds of careful thought, I decided to go river rafting.
My sole prior experience with river rafting has been in the form of my many times riding Roaring Rapids at Six Flags. I’ve ridden that ride at several of the many Six Flags locations — I’m practically an expert.
This is not one of those stories. The, “Nicole tries to do a thing and is hopelessly out of her depth and fails and makes an ass of herself,” stories.
This was a relatively calm river, so there wasn’t really any room for me to do anything catastrophically stupid, getting myself and/or those around me injured/maimed/whatevered. This also made it a weird thing to do on my own; there was a lot of sitting and chatting time.
The group I shared the raft with? French family. It was all I could do not to burst into fits of maniacal laughter when they got into the car that took us to the river. Only the mother spoke any English, and her English was only slightly better than my French. EVEN IN CROATIA THE FATES HAVE DECIDED TO TORMENT ME FOR MY FAILURE TO LEARN FRENCH.
However, because I am in Croatia, the rules are a little different. I can speak in my horrible broken French and nobody looks at me and says, “Is that really all you picked up after only a year in France?” It’s a lot easier when I take off my hundred pound cloak of shame.
Better yet, our Croatian guide spoke decent English but only a little more French that I do. This was genuinely a good and entertaining thing, because he spoke slowly enough that, once I got the hang of his accent, I could understand everything he said in French. As such, I found myself on a river in Croatia, given instructions in French.
During the endless drifting-through-the-water time, he mostly just chatted with me in English. The wholly expected first question to the girl traveling alone is, “Where is your boyfriend?” to which I gave the evasive answers that I have gotten so good at.
(Sidebar: I wrote about being a solo-traveling female for Renee’s blog and of everything I’ve written this year, it’s probably the piece of writing I am most proud of. Shameless plug.)
This turned into a relationship advice conversation, complete with tales from his marriage. He even offered me “advice like from an older brother” on choosing a husband.
Now I’m being a bit of an ass, because I sound like I’m mocking him, and I don’t mean to. He was thoroughly entertaining, and spent half the day singing. He never sang the same song for more than one or two lines. I got to teach him the word “medley.”
The high point of the day was probably when he started singing, “In the Jungle,” and I joined in, followed by the French family, who sang along in French.
Being perfectly honest, yes, it would have been nice to have a friend. It would have been nice to have my camera to show you how beautiful everything was, so I could share it all now. But, I also enjoyed having this moment that belonged to me and a bunch of people I’d never met and will never see again.
It’s not as if I barred my friends from joining; the circumstances just didn’t work out. This is when I could go, but none of them could.
So given the go-alone-or-not-at-all choice, I stand by my decision. Sitting in a raft, on a river in Croatia, singing a bilingual version of a Disney song? Definitely an A+ life choice.
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Other A+ life choices? VEDA! Fellow bloggers, head over to We Blog, We Vlog to join the absurdity. Watch my “introduction” video if you feel up to it.