We’re on the island of Hvar, in the Adriatic Sea off the coast of Croatia. Up the hill from the town of Stari Grad, where we’re staying in a small bungalow at a campground five minutes by foot from the waterfront, we hiked for an hour in the late-morning ninety-degree heat to a tiny village called Rudine. We passed olive groves and small vineyards bordered by piles of small limestone blocks that passed for walls. Fennel, rosemary, and laurel trees grew wild. The wind blowing across the dry scrubby hillsides smelled like God’s spice cupboard. Fig, orange, and pomegranate trees sprouted up everywhere. Enormous spiders lurked at the centers of webs whose support fibers stretched literally fifteen feet at times. We surprised praying mantises a couple of times. The sound of cicadas, near and far, filled the hot wind.

Thirsty from not having saved any of the water we’d packed when we set off, we followed hand-painted signs directing us to the Mini Market Žukova. We arrived to discover some umbrellas and a small white collapsable hut erected in a driveway. When we rang the bell, a woman came running from playing with some toddlers in the back yard. She offered us fresh produce, ice cream, and drinks from a cooler in the hut. When we asked for water without gas, she apologized, but offered to run into her house and fill a bottle with tap water for us, free of charge. We accepted.

Her English was barely passable. She knew enough at least to run her fruit and ice cream stand. When she heard us speaking in English to each other, she asked us where we were from. We answered. She asked, “Why here?” I answered, “Because it’s beautiful.” She made a gesture as if to dismiss the flattery. I tried to clarify. “We lived for a year in the Czech Republic, and everyone there told us that Croatia is paradise. We decided to come and see it for ourselves.” She blushed a bit before replying, “I am so pride.” We knew what she meant.

After the three of us downed the liter of water in a gulp, we found a trail heading back down the hillside to the sea, and after a few minutes we appeared at the mouth of a small cove lined with rocky outcroppings. Three or four sailboats rocked gently in the waves. Five or six families were all we could see in scattered encampments around the cove.

After a heavy application of Nubian brand sun block (SPF 6, our first mistake), we dove into the spectacularly clear blue water. A few minutes later, after one of my freshly-purchased water shoes had slipped off, I watched it floating in gentle circles downward. It was still clearly visible 40 or 50 feet down. I cannot describe the perfectly clean and clear phosphorescent turquoise water adequately. You’ll have to look at photos when I post them. Suffice it to say, this was the most beautiful start I could imagine to our twelve-day Croatian adventure.

We alternated for two or three hours between lazily wading in the cove and sunning ourselves on the rocks until we’d roasted ourselves to a light pink color. Not wanting to endanger our future beach plans, we decided it was high time to remove ourselves from the sun. We hiked back up the hillside, and our increasingly-insistent hunger suggested we look for someplace to buy lunch. We were unable to find anything resembling a downtown among the clusters of low and far-flung stone houses in the village. Eventually, we gave up and returned to the Mini Market Žukova. We asked the woman if the village had a restaurant. She shook her head. Then her face lit up and she rushed out from behind her cart, gesturing and excitedly bubbling in broken English.

“I’m asking. There is woman. I come with you.”

“Pardon?” we asked.

She tried to clarify. “There is woman in village. She is our superwoman. I’m asking. I come with you.”

“We don’t understand.”

“I’m asking. Woman. She cook sometimes.”

We began to understand that a woman in the village sometimes cooked for guests, for some sort of fee, we supposed, and that our guide was going to lead us to her house. Intrigued, we followed the fruit stand woman (whose name we never got) around the corner to a house where two young men were repairing the plaster under a large picture window. Two-foot-high figurines of the seven dwarves, hand-painted with house paint, were evenly spaced along the flat roof and half-height walls that surrounded a tiny courtyard in front of the house. A middle-aged blonde woman in a red and white sundress was overseeing the men. The woman who brought us fired off a couple of questions. The blonde woman shot back some answers. One of the young men looked up from his plasterwork to translate. “We have sausage, and some kind of fish. Grilled. Maybe some potato salad or something. Beer or juice. You want?”

Hungry, tired, and thirsty, our skin continuing to grow pinker, we accepted her offer to sit at a picnic table in the shade under a vine-covered trellis. She brought us beer, two kinds of sausage, round loaves of home-made bread, and two plates of grilled vegetables. We downed the beers at once and asked for seconds. She agreed, but then we saw her walk straight away from the table, down the driveway, and down in the street in the direction of the Mini Market Žukova. She returned a few minutes later with three cold bottles in hand. She kept bringing plates of bread and grilled food until we asked her, please, to stop. The Žukova woman returned a while later and asked if we needed a ride back to Stari Grad. She’d be taking her cousin to the ferry port in an hour, she said, and we were welcome to ride along. We accepted.

“Why would you come to this paltry little village on an island off the coast of nowhere special, you silly Americans?” is what she’d wanted to ask as she’d handed us the bottle of tap water, but all she’d been able to formulate in English was “Why here?” I couldn’t really tell her that the beauty of the hillsides and ocean, the Mediterranean climate and terrain so commonplace and uninteresting to her, was an endlessly exotic fairy tale to me, and that being offered a meal at her friend’s one-table ad hoc bed and breakfast was the perfect end to the perfect day. An hour later, we thanked our hostess and paid the reasonable price she wrote on a napkin. The Žukova woman pulled up with her Bosnian cousin in the front seat. The conversation proceeded between her and C. in German, since her German was far better than her English. We asked her how she enjoyed living in Croatia. The Bosnian woman spoke no English or German and remained silent, but the Žukova woman replied that everything was fine. The war had been over for eight years already, and was history. She asked us if we knew that there were many American soldiers (thousands in fact) still stationed there. We hadn’t known. She said that there was no more fighting anymore, that the Americans were only there to keep the peace, but that their job was done and they probably should have gone home two or three years ago. We could easily imagine that to be true.

When we finally got back to our bungalow and changed our clothes, we discovered that we’d long overstayed our window of safety in the sun. M. and I are redder than raw salmon, and we have crisp white outlines where our swimming suit tags had escaped to the exterior of our suits. C., due to more diligent sunscreen application, escaped mostly unscathed. We’ve all been applying lotion to each other for most of the evening, but I fear the worst: We may have to avoid the sun for the next few days. There are old renaissance chateaux to visit, from when the Venetians ruled the area in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and other sights to see from the Habsburg days. We could even track down some old Roman ruins or some fortresses that staved off invading Turks a time or two. But that’s not the point. I’m not particularly interested, at this point in my life, in ancient Croatian history and, honestly, I’m sort of castled-out after the castle bonanza at the end of our Czech adventure. I came for two weeks of beach, swimming, and sun, and my heart will drop if I have to hide in my bungalow in the ninety-degree heat all week. I suppose it serves me right for my solar overconfidence.