Monday 8th September

We arose early and assisted the English couple change a wheel in their car.  We were highly amused by the antics of the Wardens pet pip, Alsatian, and kitten who kept playing.  The English couple gave us a lift to Zagreb, stopping for half an hour in Maribor for the tyre to be repaired. 

The journey to Zagreb was awful, and lasted five hours for the 90 odd miles.  The road was terribly dusty and almost disappeared in sections.  We had to tie handkerchiefs around our mouths – and we became completely covered in a film of white dust, which even got behind our sunglasses! We eventually joined the main highway from Ljubljana to Zagreb, and found large parties of young people (male and female) working on the road, equipped with many Yugoslav flags and communist banners.  Only the right hand half of the road appeared to be complete, although it was clearly shown on the map!  Eventually even that half petered out, and we were forced to go cross country to join another road into the city of Zagreb. 

We booked into the Studentski Dom (hostel) and then washed all the dust off.  we went into the town for sight-seeing and a meal.  We saw St. Catherine’s Church, the Cathedral, the Arts Pavilion, and the Stone Gate.  We paused at the delightful shrine of the homeland where Maurice lit a candle.

We said farewell to the English couple in the evening, as we intended to leave early in the morning.

There is a complete lack of cars in the country, fortunately, and this allows the crowds to swarm the streets without troubling traffic.

Everywhere in the shops we saw portraits of Marshall Tito! In our hostel also - a bust of Tito on the landing!

The people don’t appear to be as poor as I had expected, and most of them were smartly dressed.

We were amazed to see quite large crowds, and queues at all the bookshops – obviously everyone must thirst for knowledge!

* We found it impossible to explain to the Yugoslavs that we hitch-hiked all the way from Germany.  They did not understand what hitch-hiking was – and of course they could not believe that we had walked all the way!  They really believed that the English couple had driven us all the way – although we continually denied this!