There are some places you just can’t get away from fast enough. Others, like Croatia, you find it hard to let go of. I’ll be the first to admit it; the place really got under my skin.

In Rudine, staying at English Mark’s place, the weather was scorching. We lay for hours on end on the verandah, unable to move. Every evening, an elderly village woman would drop by to see if there was anything she could clean or cook for ‘Mister England’.

We’d find ourselves playing in the dirt in the baking sun with four-year old Croats (only after we made them put the guns away) from whom we were attempting to learn Croatian. One night at the sole café in town, we had one of those surreal moments with the locals that you sometimes stumble across in a foreign culture and utterly transcend the language barrier (otherwise known as an ice-cream fight).

Our most active periods were in the dead of the night when the weather cooled down to a bearable temperature. One night we trekked down to the water in the pitch dark to sleep on English Mark’s boat in the hope of catching some off-shore breeze.

‘Now, I’m not going to turn the flashlight on,’ English Mark had said, ‘because that will ruin your night vision’. The night sky was amazing – ‘The first star is always the North Star – unless its Venus, and that can just bollocks things right up.’

It’s not that the beaches are perfect white stretches of sand (they can be pretty rocky) or the island settlements are perfect little gingerbread villages (they’re more tumble-down than anything). But something about the place – maybe the fact that you can hitch into town and dine at the same restaurant that the Croatian president eats at for like $8 Australian, or that you can bump into the commander of the Italian navy at the beach bar, as we did, or that you can fashion your hedge into the shape of Roger Rabbit and the village kids will love it even though they’ve never even seen the cartoon - that just gets under your skin.