Reserve ten nights on Cres and Lošinj in the Kvarner islands

To reserve a ten night Kvarner islands trip through this office you give us the month, we hold two rooms on two islands, and each company that runs a piece of the ten days writes its own contract with you and bills you under it. Five of the nights sit above the harbor in Cres town and five in Mali Lošinj, with the crossing of the isthmus at Osor between them. One full day and one morning have a guide standing there at the start of them. The other eight are yours with a map, a bus sheet and a number that gets picked up.

Cres is long and narrow, 41 miles from the north cape to the channel, with one road running its length and about 2,900 people living on it. Almost all of them are on the east coast in three towns. The west coast is cliff. The middle is grazing cut into fields by wall, and you can stand at a gate up there on a Tuesday afternoon in June and hear a bell, a hawk and nothing else for ten minutes at a stretch.

Lošinj at the other end is the opposite arrangement. Six thousand people live around one deep bay, the harbor works from May to October, a ridge stands behind the town at 1,929 feet, and the shore is held by a planted forest of roughly 200,000 conifers put in by hand from the 1880s onward to shade the coves and keep the ground from moving. You cross from one island to the other over a bridge 36 feet wide.

Cres, from Beli in the north down to the channel

Beli is 35 residents on a rock at the north end, up a road that climbs in switchbacks off the main line. Behind it lies the oak and hornbeam wood the islanders call the Tramuntana, crossed by marked paths and by walls that predate the paths. The guided morning on day three runs about five miles through it with a man from the village who knows which cisterns still hold water in August and which have been dry since he was a boy.

The vultures are the reason most people come up here. Roughly 70 pairs nest on ledges twenty to forty feet above the sea, and the young leave in the last week of July with a nine foot span and no idea what they are doing. A fair number land in the water on the first flight and cannot lift off wet. The small center in the village dries them out, feeds them three or four weeks and puts them back, and entry to it is inside the figure on this page.

Water on both islands comes out of Lake Vrana, which sits in the middle of Cres behind a fence. It is 243 feet deep, its floor lies about 200 feet below the sea a mile away, and it is drinking water, so there is no swimming and no path down to it. Valun, sixty people at the foot of a steep road, keeps an eleventh century stone in its parish church cut in two alphabets at once, Glagolitic and Latin, because the village was using both and neither had won. Cres town, where you sleep the first five nights, has a market on the quay on Wednesday and Saturday mornings and a harbor that has gone quiet by half past nine at night even in June.

The day on the water, and the company that holds it

Day seven is the one day of the ten with nothing left to you. A small vessel taking twelve leaves the harbor at half past eight and is tied up again by five. The company that runs it holds that passage under its own licence and invoices you directly under the contract it writes. This office arranges the day and handles none of the money in it.

The water between the two islands holds a resident group of about 200 bottlenose dolphins, logged one animal at a time from a research station on Lošinj that opened its files on them in 1987. The crew does not steer at them. If animals come in on their own the engine drops to idle and the next twenty minutes belong to whatever happens. In the second half of summer the boat also stays well off the cliff faces on the northeast side while the young vultures are still sitting on the ledges, and the landing in the protected cove needs a permit that the operating company holds in its own name and renews each season. Nothing there is yours to apply for.

Bura decides this day more than the calendar does. The wind comes off the mainland range out of the northeast, has been clocked in gusts past 90 miles an hour on the channel, and while it blows the crossings stop and the bridge at Osor stays shut. If your water day is called for wind, the operator moves it to the next workable day inside your ten, and if all ten run out it takes that portion off what it bills you.

Lošinj, the ridge, and the eight days nobody meets you

Buses between Cres town and Mali Lošinj run three times a day on weekdays and twice on Sunday, and the last one leaves before six in the evening. That timetable is the shape of your free days, which is why we print it marked rather than talk about it. If you want to be somewhere at an hour the bus does not serve, take a car for two or three days and hand it back.

The climb up the ridge starts in Nerezine and gains 1,929 feet from sea level in a little under two hours, with a chapel at about 1,640 feet where the ground levels and the chain of islands to the south opens in one view. Veli Lošinj is twenty minutes on foot around the shore from the larger town, with a harbor closed by a breakwater built in 1856 and a church tower built thicker than the church behind it. The sand island an hour out to the west is 90 feet of sand sitting on limestone, about 150 people in winter, no cars on it at all, and steps instead of streets.

Dinner at the guesthouse in Cres is at seven or it is not at all, and the woman cooking it wants to know by lunchtime. In Mali Lošinj you eat whenever the kitchens are open, which in August is late. Those two facts govern more of your ten days than anything else written here.

What the ten nights cost, and how a real figure gets made

The figure on this page is per person on two sharing for ten nights, and it carries the two rooms, the two guided pieces, the transfers and the bag move. It is not a quote. Costing a named set of dates and getting every line onto one sheet takes two to four working days here, because the guesthouse in Cres answers mail in the evening after the kitchen shuts and the boat company answers when it is back on the quay.

Pine Gazette Bookings LLC owns no vessel, no room and no vehicle anywhere. Every bed and every mile described above belongs to a company on the islands, and that company sets its own terms, writes the contract and sends the bill straight to you. There is nothing to pay at this end and no way here to take it. No airfare is sold from this office either, so the leg out of New Orleans, LA and back is entirely yours to arrange, and we build the ten nights around the dates you land on.

The Pine Gazette is the name used by Pine Gazette Bookings LLC, an office at 2450 Severn Avenue, Suite 312 in Metairie, 70001, and the booking is written in Louisiana for ten nights run wholly in Croatia. Call +1 (504) 832-6194, or send the month and the two names to bookings@thepinegazette.com and say whether the Lubenice descent is in or out, since that single answer changes four of the ten days. If a distance, a date or a figure above has gone stale, corrections@thepinegazette.com reaches the person who keeps this page right.