ANIMAL FARM

I found La Casa Matiki (cheesy music alert: Turn down the volume if you don't want to draw attention to yourself) while surfing Istria's tourism website. It was listed under agro-tourism, and with a car, I thought, why not stay in a more rural spot. We're glad we did.

But when we got there NO ONE answered the doorbell. And I struggled with various permutations of the given handphone number and finally got through. The owner, Sonja, needed an interpreter to explain that she was at a family gathering but would be there to open the gate for us. Right, meanwhile, we were hungry and tired - having had only a little sandwich each and driven several hundred km! We chewed on the trail mix HB brought and watched a chicken squeeze out of the gate and onto the road. Why did the chicken cross the road?

But once we were shown our rooms, we were pleased indeed. We had to drag our luggage to the top floor, but the room was spacious and had a kitchenette, although we didn't need that because we wanted to try Sonja's homemade conserves.

Sonja must think we were greedy pigs. At breakfast over the next two mornings, we gulped down our meal she couldn't put food on the table fast enough. The first day, we thought all we would have was bread, jam and coffee. But she was going to prepare eggs for us too. From the coop which the previous evening's chicken flew from! And Sonja simply walked out the front door to pluck rosemary from the herb garden (see the round flower bed above?) to flavour the eggs. Nice! We had marmalade, strawberry and apple-and-pepper conserves to go with the bread (we ate up her stock pretty quickly she had to go somewhere to replenish the bread basket!).

We finally went to see her farm animals on the day we were checking out. It was on another piece of property further down the road. The beasts were so tame all of them were begging for bread when we stopped at the gate. Paco, the crazed canine, terrorised the sheep as we walked into the pen. Donkeys, sheep, horses, chickens.

The chickens live in a coop on the main property. The eggs they lay are tiny, but the yolks are huge!

Then Sonja led us on a short walk. She picked up a stick and we looked at her. "For snake," she said. Oooh, that got HB worried. As luck would have it, she and Paco spotted one slithering away. That was about the only snake encounter we had despite all the scare-mongering later on our trip. Sonja showed us a little hut which she said was typical Istrian. It's a couple of hundred years old and is used as shelter for farmers out in the fields.

All in all, it was the most memorable stays in Croatia, We wish we had alloted more days on the Istrian peninsula, if not for anything else, it's to try out the swimming pool on the property! Pretty inviting when the sun is high in the cloudless sky.