Living the Island Life on Braĉ

Stop two on our way down the Croatian coast was Supetar on Brac Island. 

We had originally planned to stay in Split but soon discovered that hostel prices, especially when booked only a few days ahead of time, were ridiculous! We ended up booking a private apartment on the island of Brac, in the town of Supertar for almost a 1/3 of the price of a shared dorm room in the city of Split!

The small port of Supetar as we approached via ferry.

Brac is a small island about an hour from the coast of Split, it has two major towns, one of which is Supetar which is where we stayed – we ended up really liking this little town and were really happy we stayed here.  

Also on the island of Brac is a town called Bol, it is pretty much famous for one thing and that is Zlanti Rat Beach. This beach is featured on countless travel advertisements, postcards etc. and is the most photographed beach in Croatia. We headed there on a pretty dim day, after a whole morning of pouring rain but it was still packed with people!

Some boats off the coast of Zlanti Rat Beach

In the above set of photos (top left) you can see Zlanti Rat Beach - its kinda a triangle shape sticking out into the ocean, of course it's empty in all the postcard pictures so looks very different here! Oh and bottom right, the best inflatable we have ever seen!!

We tried to get all creative by taking photos in the reflection of Michael's sunnies!

The whole town is pretty much one ginormous beach resort and the resort pretty much owned every club, restaurant, bar, café, you name is, in this small town and on Zlanti Rat Beach. After seeing pictures of this beach everywhere it was actually a bit of a letdown to be honest! It is known as a sandy beach and as you can see from the pictures it’s actually pebbly beach (but small pebbles seem to pretty much count as sand in Europe) and it was pretty but it wasn’t as exciting as I had been expecting (I’m not really sure what I was expecting now I think about it..).

It was a pretty cool day by Croatian standards (you can see some pretty threatening rain clouds in some of our pics) so we didn’t get in the water but we spent some time chilling on the ‘sand,’ I must admit that even though the beach was nothing special the water was still a gorgeous blue colour and I would have definitely jumped in if it was warmer.

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We spent our next day in this region of Croatia visiting one of the most beautiful islands I have ever seen in my entire life (including Vanuatu). We got up ridiculously early to catch a ferry from Brac to Split and then another from Split to Vis – there are only three ferry crossings a day so we had to make sure we caught this one! We had heard there were a lot of nice (and sandy?) beaches on this island so we decided to hire bikes and go ‘beach hopping.’ The girl we rented bikes from pointed out some beaches there she said were nice and looked close enough on the map, she didn’t tell us we would be riding up the side of a mountain first! 

Photos taken in the Vis Town and riding towards and up the 'mountain' haha

We rode up this tightly winding hill to the top of a mountain/giant hill, which fortunately gave as a beautiful view of the port of Vis Town and surrounding town – it’s a tiny little town and pretty much everything revolves around the port as it’s the only place to get anything or go anywhere.

Lucky the views were amazing because the hills were not so much fun!

We pressed on and after several long uphill climbs and a few nice downhill slopes we finally arrived at our first beach! Time flew but it took us about 1.5 hours to reach Stoncicia Beach and we were ready to lie down!

View of Stoncica Beach as we were riding towards it - wow!

 Stoncica beach was amazing, beautiful bright blue, clear water and SAND (and by that I mean sand as per Australian standards!) and even better there was only about 10-15 other people on the beach! We spent some time swimming, lying on the beach and taking in the serenity before heading to the next beach.

Luckily it was only about a 20 min bike ride (although up some more hills, again!) to the next beach, with some beautiful coastal views along the way (below).

Some pics of us riding our bikes between beaches on Vis Island.

Milna Beach is probably the most gorgeous beach we have visited in Europe thus far (or at least a match for the beaches in Lagos). 

Perfection!

The water was amazing; light blue and almost completely clear! We could see the SAND (again, real sand) on the bottom through several metres of water – it was beautiful! 

Michael and I chilling in the beautiful water

 This was the kind of beach you imagine when you think of gorgeous tropical islands on the front of travel magazines and postcards! Oh and the best part; only 2-3 other people on the whole beach! 

 We felt like we pretty much had this gorgeous sandy beach all to ourselves, it was heaven! 

We spent a fairly long time just swimming in the beautiful water (perfect temperature, by the way) and relaxing on Milna beach.

  

This has to have been one of the most perfect days we have had in Europe so far, we got to ride bikes around one of the most gorgeous tiny islands, almost completely devoid of other tourists and visit some of the most beautiful unspoilt beaches I have ever gotten to see!

Unfortunately the time came to us to leave Milna Beach (sad times) and we didn’t really have much of an option but to head off as we had to catch the last ferry of the day back to Split. We left a bit of time to appreciate the lovely coastal and sea views on the ride home and grab the latest lunch we have ever had before getting on the ferry and saying goodbye to our favourite Croatian island.

Some pictures of us riding back to Vis Town to catch the ferry.

Here are a few pics of us waiting for the ferry to leave, even the small port of Vis is beautiful – filled with small fishing boats and sailing boats, this place was so uncommercialised and I loved that about it. Oh and I know I have said this on repeat about most of Croatia but the water here is unbelievable beautiful!

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The next day we decided to actually visit Split, seeing as we had originally planned on staying here! We spent some time wandering through the Old Town, which was filled with bright white tiles and small alleyways - the main street of the old town was PACKED with tourists so we spent most of our time wandering around the smaller, less crowded side streets of the Old Town.

Michael found this really cool art store with semi-abstract paintings, I would have loved to buy one but I have no idea how I could possibly have taken it with me (below).

We then spent some time wandering around the port of Split with the possible aim of finding a beach. Well we never really found a beach because they were all so rocky and after being spoilt by gorgeous sandy beaches on Vis it was hard to come to terms with going back to rock covered beaches! 

Nonetheless we along the water and were able to get some nice views of the Old Town of Split from a distance, it really looks quite pretty set on the beautiful Croatian coast.

In the late afternoon we headed back to our little island of Brac and decided to grab some beers and sit by the beach (taking advantage of the lack of drinking laws in Europe) – it was a beautiful warm afternoon for some beers in the sun! Note: my cool grapefruit (I think… could be guava…) flavoured beer!

That evening we decided to have our first dinner out since arriving, we had been taking advantage of our private apartment and cooking lots of homemade dinners. We got a little dressed up (by backpacking standards) and went out for some drinks and a meal. Check out the way they served my glass of wine, pretty generous serving for a $3 glass of red wine, oh and it was delicious!

These are our meals, Michael got a meat platter and I got a seafood platter – both of which we thought were amazing! The town of Supetar certainly delivered!

  

We had an absolutely amazing time staying on Brac Island and would definitely recommend it as an affordable (and still accessible) alternative to Split. I have discovered that I prefer to stay in smaller towns rather than big cities! Still one more stop to go on our travels through Croatia – there are certainly big boots to fill!